Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!psuvax1!ukma!sean
From: sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey)
Newsgroups: comp.admin.policy
Subject: Re: RFC on my "abuse"
Message-ID: <1991Jun25.201915.1434@ms.uky.edu>
Date: 25 Jun 91 20:19:15 GMT
References: <1991Jun25.154257.7452@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1991Jun25.173013.3784@mp.cs.niu.edu>
Organization: The Leaning Tower of Patterson Office @ The Univ. of KY
Lines: 36

rickert@mp.cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert) writes:

|In article <1991Jun25.154257.7452@m.cs.uiuc.edu> jjones@uiuc.edu writes:
|>  While I was getting my MS in CS at Arizona State University, I ran into a
|>bit of trouble with the Engineering Computing facilities people.  Over
|>Memorial Day weekend in 1989, I ran a shell script that went through a list
|>of internet sites ending in ".com" to see if those sites allowed anonymous
|>FTP.  In my shell script, so as to not load the networks over-much, I inserted
|>a sleep 30 between each attempt.  I also deliberately chose a holiday weekend

|  Do you ever walk down the street, and as you do so, walk up to each house
|and test the front door to see if they left it open?
|  Yet, in effect, this is exactly what you did on the net.

Ahem. Bullshit.

What he did was analogous to using a company phone to call up people
and ask if they offer any free software. That's what the "anonymous"
FTP login is for. On most systems, it must be explicitly enabled, and
on no system I have ever heard of does it give free roam of the system
as an unlocked front door would[1].

Anyone getting upset because someone tried anonymous FTP is either
network ignorant (in which case what are they doing on the Internet),
or unreasonably paranoid.

It appears the local sysadmin involved was network ignorant. It makes
me wonder what he was doing administrating Internet systems.

Sean

[1] Anonymous FTP can be setup to have free roam of the system. But
one has to do it explicitly.
-- 
** Sean Casey  <sean@s.ms.uky.edu>
** Recent subject line in comp.sys.handhelds:  Printing BIG GROBS