The Tuesday 2004-02-03 at 19:53 +0100, Örn Hansen wrote:
On TV I saw that they are already blaming the Worm/MyDoom.A2 on the Linux movement making war on SCO and M$ :-(
I sincerely doubt that... however, U.S. laws state that people who are hacking, can be charged and persecuted as terrorists. I sincerely doubt that Linux community as large is mobilizing against SCO as I sincerely doubt they
No, I didn't mean that to be the truth, just that "newsies" say so. What do they know, I wonder? If I have to judge by we see on movies about hackers and computers...
However, one of the things that can be done is to ascertain that rooted boxes are not allowed to be email relays. And that such boxes be blocked,
Sorry, what is a "rooted box"? Perhaps a cracked one, with a rootkit, isn't that?
when that occurs (called a blacklist). However, this does not seem to be the case in many situations and especially this past month or so. I've been bombarded with email from a rooted email server, tiscali.it ... with hoaxes, that come from a dialin line, at that ISP. And few of these "relays" are running linux ...
Ah. I hate blacklists, because they hit the same way the innocent and the guilty; and there are more innocents than guilty. That's like gassing a entire building because there is a killer living in one of the flats. I know, I'm exaggerating: but I don't think any court on any country (or any democratic one) would impose that kind of punishment on everybody on a range just because somebody that happened to use an IP on that range for illegal uses. Rather, the solution would be to force providers to take real action against those people. At least on my country (Spain), I know providers have long listings correlating the IP at a certain time with the phone number used for the connection (I have seen them): therefore the culprit can be catched if there is the serious intention to do so. I heard the the EEC politicians are talking of taking action against spammers. Lets us hope they do it right. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson