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I remember back in the 90s, people would hunt for FTP servers that allowed anonymous writes. Companies that didn't know how to secure servers would suddenly be hosting a ton-o-warez.
I remember back in the 90s, people would hunt for FTP servers that allowed anonymous writes. Companies that didn't know how to secure servers would suddenly be hosting a ton-o-warez.
I wonder how many of those are just mirrors of Linux distros and other open-source software, how many have more interesting things (including software), and how many of those were deliberately configured to be open for sharing. There is the somewhat-well-known filesearch.ru if you want to look for things on this non-HTTP part of the Internet. (If I remember correctly, Google used to index FTPs too and you'd get plent…
At some point I got hold of Scott Yanoff's list of interesting Internet services (capitalizing Internet was still justifiable at the time) and learned about the Weather Underground, Archie, HPCWire, and this new thing called the "World Wide Web" — I started telnetting to a server at the University of Kansas where I could use Lynx, and it seemed pretty clear that this was going to be a big deal, because of how enormously much easier it was than downloading text files over FTP.
So not only have I wondered how many open FTP servers there are, my exploration of the internet pretty much started with a list of them.
Nowadays I occasionally look for FTP servers because they tend to be less of a pain in the ass for downloading stuff than HTTP servers — you can usually get a full list of what they have, and they never interrupt you with CAPTCHAs. It's kind of like a real-world "shibboleet" — I guess sometimes assholes push mandates for CAPTCHAs and whatnot on a company's technical folk, but they leave FTP open because the assholes don't know about it.
If you're wondering how many open HTTP servers there are, Netcraft does a pretty good monthly survey.
Are there any legal implications for doing this? Was going to do something similar with Redis and MongoDB.
This is not the same for something like redis or mongo. You could try and prove otherwise one day to a judge but that would be your battle and I don't suggest it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Search Type: Sub String Exact Regular Expression Google has an advantage in terms of index size, but definitely lose in terms of precision. The way it munges queries is a bit unsettling at times, and even the "exact" option doesn't seem to always work the way it should.
Have you tried verbatim mode? (Thanks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12046056 )
Are there any legal implications for doing this? Was going to do something similar with Redis and MongoDB.
I remember back in the 90s, people would hunt for FTP servers that allowed anonymous writes. Companies that didn't know how to secure servers would suddenly be hosting a ton-o-warez.
Are there any legal implications for doing this? Was going to do something similar with Redis and MongoDB.
https://blog.shodan.io/its-still-the-data-stupid/
Shodan crawls for most nosql/ queueing software including mongodb and redistribution.
And related to OP: we also crawl for FTP and attempt anonymous as well as a few other things to better understand FTP deployments on the Internet.