Xref: utzoo comp.admin.policy:601 comp.archives.admin:142 Newsgroups: comp.admin.policy,comp.archives.admin Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!ox.com!msen.com!emv From: emv@msen.com (Ed Vielmetti) Subject: Re: RFC on my "abuse" In-Reply-To: jjones@cs.uiuc.edu's message of Tue, 25 Jun 1991 15:42:57 GMT Message-ID: Sender: usenet@ox.com (Usenet News Administrator) Organization: MSEN, Inc. Ann Arbor MI References: <1991Jun25.154257.7452@m.cs.uiuc.edu> Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1991 22:08:54 GMT > script to find anonymous FTP sites in 1989 got jjones@cs.uiuc.edu in > trouble; it FTP'd to a list of internet sites ending in ".com" to > see if those sites allowed anonymous FTP. As I remember, the state of the art in 1989 of finding anonymous FTP sites was pretty bad. There was no "archie", comp.archives was not running up to speed, and what was left was a couple of attempts at compiling an anonymous FTP site list (doomed to failure because there was no effective verification). x.500 stuff was just not there (not that they're much of any use now). Brute force was an appropriate technology, and I'd almost argue that it's not completely inappropriate now, I'd say that if you ran a script now that walked down the nameservers for *.com and looked for A and CNAME records for sites like "ftp.mighty.com", you'd be doing a reasonable bit of network research. You'd catch cisco, solbourne, tcs, apple, vitalink, and cayman, that I'm aware of. There might be others. You wouldn't actually have to do any FTP'ing at all, just name server traffic. (in fact, banging around a little bit, I find an "ftp.mips.com" which has reasonable stuff, so I think you'd find a lot of these.) "abuse" means you didn't write a proposal and get grant money, otherwise it's "research". -- Edward Vielmetti, MSEN Inc. moderator, comp.archives emv@msen.com "often those with the power to appoint will be on one side of a controversial issue and find it convenient to use their opponent's momentary stridency as a pretext to squelch them"