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Comment by iotakodali | Hacker News Reader

gonna try it over university network

Make sure to do a write-up when you regain internet access what it was like to be expelled for 'running just a script'.

Now I'm curious. It's not safe to run this at home, on any sort of paid hosting, on a university network, where is it safe to run this program?

If you work for an ISP?

If you ask the University nicely?

On a colocation facility that you own using a net port that you pay for yourself?

As soon as you expose someone downstream to stuff like this you're asking for being disconnected. If you ask your University nicely they'll likely refuse unless you state a goal you wish to achieve.

If using a script to download documents qualifies as hacking then hitting all of the internet with a portscanner is likely going to get you network administrator attention of the entirely wrong kind. And that's because they in turn will get some flak from the outside world.

Yeah our school basically had one big LAN (everything got a publicly routable IPv4 address, but nothing within the university was firewalled from anything else). There were networked printers though in the computer labs, some of these labs being on the first floor of the dorms. If you needed to print slides before class (and professors always posted the slides only like an hour before class), you had to go to the lab, hit print, and wait 15 minutes for the printers to get to your job in the queue and the staff to actually fetch it and lay it out. Definitely added to the time it took to get to class.

Since I was already accessing my dorm computer via Samba in the labs (I know, dumb idea in hindsight, even with a password, but this was 2004), I decided to figure out a way to print directly from my room and then just grab it on the way to class. Long story short I ran a port scan on the computer lab to find the printer IPs and had my network port turned off within minutes (I had the IPs though!). Ended up having to go to some office and explain what I was doing. Got turned back on a few days later.

The upside was that I eventually was able to print from my room as long as I converted whatever it was to postscript first. The downside was that I didn't need to know the printer IPs after all (the university's unix server already had the printers setup... just piped it through ssh to it).

I did something similar when I was researching search technology at my university[0]. Then when coming back from lunch some weeks later I found two gays from the it-department had locked them self into our office to investigating what we where doing. Apparently we had hit a lot of honeypots :)

0: http://www.boitho.com/

Why would you assume they were gay?

Lol. I meant guys :) English is not my first languages ( gays/guys, "let's have a beer/bear" etc don't get caught in most spell checkers... ).

Just for a moment I thought I was reading a plot for a gay porno. LOL

Good thing TCP/IP legalized same-sex connections. NCP was not so open minded.

The old NCP networking protocol required that connect and listen sockets must have different parity gender (one even, the other odd -- I can't remember which was which, or if it mattered -- they just had to be different). The act of trying to connect an even socket to another even socket, or an odd socket to another odd socket, was called "homosocketuality", and it was strictly forbidden by internet protocols, and was called the "Anita Bryant feature".

http://www.saildart.org/IMPSER.DOC[SS,SYS][1]

Illegal gender in RFC, host hhh/iii, link 0

The host is trying to engage us in homosocketuality. Since this is against the laws of God and ARPA, we naturally refuse to consent to it.

http://www.saildart.org/FTP.OLD[S,NET]1[2]

    ; Try to initiate connection

    loginj:
            init log,17
            sixbit /IMP/
            0
            jrst noinit
            setzm conecb
            setom conecb+lsloc
            move ac3,hostno
            movem ac3,conecb+hloc
            setom conecb+wfloc
            movei ac3,40
            movem ac3,conecb+bsloc
            move ac3,consck
            trnn ac3,1
                jrst gayskt            ; only heterosocketuals can win!
             movem ac3,conecb+fsloc
             mtape log,[
                   =15
                    byte (6) 2,24,0,7,7
                         ]          ; Time out CLS, RFNM, RFC, and INPut

    [...]

    gayskt:    outstr [asciz/Homosocketuality is prohibited (the Anita Bryant feature)

    /]

        ife rsexec,<jrst rstart;>exit       1,

(The code above adds the connect and listen socket numbers together, which results in bit 0 being 0 if they are the same gender, then TRNN is "test bits right, no change, skip if non zero", which skips the next instruction (jrst gayskt) if they different sex.)

Hitting a lot of honeypots sounds pretty straight to me. Unless you're female of course.

How about your neighbor's public wifi? (Neighbor could be a few cities over...)

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