Re: application for an employment

["Hans Meier (John Doe)" <security.department () tele2 ch>]

Matthias Güntert am Montag, 20. März 2006 13.45:
> Dear listmembers,
>
> i am seeking for a new job as a Unix/Linux systemadministrator. There
> has been an advertisement at a well known university. So I started to
> prepare my self for the application. While collecting some information
> about the network, using nmap, dig, etc... I was able to read the whole
> namespace from the ip range (255.255.0.0)
>
> My question is should I use some of the information I have found out to
> push my application forward? What do you think how a director would
> react?

Hello all, and sorry for my quite bad english (and not being a lawyer, and not 
being an admin of a university network)

This is one of the most interesting discussions I've ever read on this list.

It shows, in my opinion, beside other things:

[] two main perspectives, a legal, and a technical, which lead to rather 
different conclusions.
[] that (although I'm not sure) it's also a question of "culture"; It seems 
that in the US culture a port scan is seen as a bigger problem than in 
Europe.
[] that it has an impact on the "public internet usage by the masses" [sorry, 
don't know better to say] in the future, if the legal or technical 
perspective triumph. 
  (and since economy and products and property rights tend to get virtual to 
circumvent the limitation of real resources and to guarantee constant 
economic growth, and laws are most suitable as a means of power, the 
former will triumph, I'm sure) 

I have another analogy try (sorry for that :-) :

Putting a box with a public IP on a public net offering public services is 
like presenting products in a Walmart or an Aldi respectively. I'm neither 
obliged to know what I'll buy before visiting the store, nor to only buy 
products that have been advertised. I look at different places, and search, 
to see what's availabe, and touch. This is all legal. 
  I'm also not obliged to only look for one product, say, a day: I'm allowed 
to scan what's available with a quick eye scan. If the store does not want to 
sell a certain product, it does not place it in the store. It may close the 
store (the ability for others to see what's available) for a certain time.
  Illegality starts when stealing/destroying a product or entering the store 
when it's closed.

(Most of) the analogies with the doors and windows miss a main point: My house 
is not a *public* building - and I can't take it completely "offline" like a 
computer, so the public/private context is completely different.

When I was Matthias Günthert, I would present the collected information (in 
Europe) to demonstrate my skills, although it may be a risk. A better 
alternative could be to offer a live network examination and repeat the steps 
already done (without mentioning the preparation and thus appear even more 
capable ;-)

But hey, to minimize risks be mainstream, present certifications, say what 
they want to hear, don't show any individual profile...

Asking an European list would be an idea too...

Hans

Sorry for the lengthy post.

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