Security Incidents mailing list archives

Re: 8 hours of pinging


From: epadin () WAGWEB COM (Ed Padin)
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 12:11:42 -0500




<soapboxmode=on>

Well your customer is quite lame.

Blocking napster and application blocking in general
are infringements of user's rights.  One ot these days
companies will understand that owning the computers
is not tantamount to owning the users.  Think of the
internet as any other  telephone/comm-device.
Because you own the phone doesn't mean you
can dictate to me what I can and can't say over it.
And everyone has the right to make at least one
phone call... :-)  I left the last place that tried to
filter my communications.... and if your company
does this, you should think about leaving too.

So I repeat, trying to block napster is very lame and will
only accelerate the development of better, and more
dangerous to the RIAA, software... check out the
coverage of gnutella...

You've been warned.

<soapboxmode=off>

<devil's advocate>
Well, the other side of that argument is "Pay for your own bandwidth and you
can do what you damned well please with it.". Napster introduces legal
liabilities, security issues and bandwidth issues. It also fills up the
firewall logs with all the ping messages it generates. If it wasn't for
these issues I doubt that they would care. They don't really watch which
sites people visit. It only came to their attention because the firewall was
bitching about pings and bandwidth (They watch it for capacity planning.).
The jury is also still out on wether people should be trading Led Zeppelin
albums. It goes along the same lines as a company not allowing pirated
software.
</devil's advocate>

I can see your point, tho. I personally think it's better for a company to
make employee bahavior a matter of policy not _enforcement_. It creates a
shitty gestapo-like work environment.

BTW: What's "RIAA" ?

ABTW: Thanks for the info below.


On the other hand with the exploitable remote
buffer overflow, mayble a good napster block
isn't such a bad thing...

With that said... here is the info you need...

snipped


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