[H-GEN] Re: questionable practices

[Christopher Biggs]

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Sandra Milne <silne at optusnet.com.au> moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:

> It was an accident that I didn't pick up until I asked a friend to
> portscan me. I was very surprised though that he could see that I had
> open ports and OptusNet had never sent us an email about it. 

They're looking for WWW, IRC and $FILE_TRADING_PROTOCOL_DU_JOUR
servers, all of which can soak up the entire "upstream" bandwidth of a
cable segment.  There are probably so many windoze boxen with random
ports open due to ignorance (duh, what's dee enn ess?), that alerting
every user to their (relatively benign) open ports is pointless.

> they portscan us for our own 'protection' 

Yeah, like they care if you get owned.  The reason for this (and the
bandwidth caps) is that one warez dude can bring a cable segment to
its knees.   

--cjb



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