I've never understood why port-scanning upset people anyway. Could someone please explain that to me?
It's like somebody walking around your house and checking to see if all the doors and windows are locked.
Slashdot is Port Scanning Its Users
31–40 of 45 posts
Re: Slashdot is Port Scanning Its Users
#32I've never understood why port-scanning upset people anyway. Could someone please explain that to me?
"Goober with firewall".
Some users get a windows software firewall product. Those products have to persuade users that the money was well spent, so they log everything and sometimes alert too much. "WE PROTECTED YOU FROM 9,042 HOSTILE ATTEMPTS" sounds better than "it's just Internet noise. Ignore it."
Re: Slashdot is Port Scanning Its Users
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you name another site that uses Slash?
Soylent News! Really, Slashcode is just unbelievably horrible. I ran it myself. It's stupidly fragile, you can break it by altering things in the interface and it stores its weblogs in the MySQL database. I eventually moved everything to WordPress and stopped wanting to STAB MYSELF IN THE FACE REPEATEDLY whenever I wanted to make a post. Slashcode is not my favourite CMS.
>stores its weblogs in the MySQL database
Can you explain this to me? this seems like exactly what wordpress does..?
Re: Slashdot is Port Scanning Its Users
#34This tactic has probably blocked a million bot posts over the years, so I guess... Sorry... But not really sorry?
I don't mind portscanning per say if its clear you're doing it but a website should never trip a corporate firewall or IDS. We're going to re-rig this code to check the inbound IP against a local DNSBL or something similar and not something that will cause an IDS to shit itself. Generally, if I access a site on a port, I expect return traffic to come back only on that port (excluding protocols like FTP which are explicately multi-port). We officially support tor (and have our own hidden service) and are looking at connecting posts through SpamAssassin to automoderate crap down to -1 (this feature still fairly far out)
What got me upset was the fact that I respect users privacy, and to find out about this behaviour from a bug report notification pissed me off. In /code's defence, at that point, it was basically /., /.JP and Burrapuento as the last three slash sites on the internet so a lot of slashdot specific functionality has creped in over the years before the code drops stopped in 2009, with the documentation for independent sites being a bit stale.
EDIT: I've written a follow up on my SN journal: http://soylentnews.org/~NCommander/journal/277
Re: Slashdot is Port Scanning Its Users
#35Re: Slashdot is Port Scanning Its Users
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you name another site that uses Slash?
Soylent News! Really, Slashcode is just unbelievably horrible. I ran it myself. It's stupidly fragile, you can break it by altering things in the interface and it stores its weblogs in the MySQL database. I eventually moved everything to WordPress and stopped wanting to STAB MYSELF IN THE FACE REPEATEDLY whenever I wanted to make a post. Slashcode is not my favourite CMS.
backslash (the admin interface) is fragile, during beta testing, we got the site stuck in an infinite loop because the UI for topic creation is not the greatest. I'm not sure I get the 'stores weblogs in mysql' bit as wordpress by default does the same thing.
We've been discussing migrating over to PostgreSQL and rearchitecting the database to run on stored proceedures and views; almost all the DB calls are already abstracted in MySQL.pm, so this is relatively straight forward (if a bit tedious).
Re: Slashdot is Port Scanning Its Users
#37Why?
That question was asked now ~10 years back. The answer was: to check if the submitter is using an random open proxy server from the net to bypass their IP filter.
From the code
# If we don't have an IP address, it can't be an open proxy.
my $ports = $constants->{comments_portscan_ports} || '80 8080 8000 3128';Re: Slashdot is Port Scanning Its Users
#38I'm not sure what Slashdot actually is anymore. The titles of the entries appear interesting at first, but when you read the associated articles, any substantive content seems to vanish into thin air. I'm still interested, it's just not that interesting.
And this is different from much of the socially viral Web how? I agree that Slashdot's lost its way and cachet, but substance is hardly prominent across much of the Internet today.
Agreed; nowadays anywhere you go, there's some snarky dude saying 'hardly'.
Re: Slashdot is Port Scanning Its Users
#39Why? That question was asked now ~10 years back. The answer was: to check if the submitter is using an random open proxy server from the net to bypass their IP filter. From the code # If we don't have an IP address, it can't be an open proxy. And scanning commonly known proxy server ports. my $ports = $constants->{comments_portscan_ports} || '80 8080 8000 3128';
Actually, the "don't have IP address" is a sanity check if this code fired from slashd; if someone coming in from the web interface, the GATEWAY_INTERFACE var is always set by mod_perl.
Re: Slashdot is Port Scanning Its Users
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Soylent News! Really, Slashcode is just unbelievably horrible. I ran it myself. It's stupidly fragile, you can break it by altering things in the interface and it stores its weblogs in the MySQL database. I eventually moved everything to WordPress and stopped wanting to STAB MYSELF IN THE FACE REPEATEDLY whenever I wanted to make a post. Slashcode is not my favourite CMS.
>stores its weblogs in the MySQL database Can you explain this to me? this seems like exactly what wordpress does..?
I think he meant "a log of accesses to the website" rather than "a blog." Those are often persisted on disk because they tend to get rather voluminous and the questions one wants to ask of them rarely benefit from SQL.