CDR: Re: Fwd: First Site
ellie900@usa.com writes:
THE NEW LINK FOR OUR SITE. SORRY FOR ANY TROUBLE YOU MAY HAVE HAD WITH THE OLD LINK. THIS ONE HAS ALL THE CORRECTIONS
One boggles when some idiot who spams refers to a URL as a "line," and then can't even give a valid URL. What did they do, convert the IP to a single value and then translate it to decimal? Why? It's obviously to dodge complaints. I have to wonder about anybody who would write a browser which accepts something like that in the first place.
On Wed, 15 Nov 2000, David Marshall wrote:
ellie900@usa.com writes:
THE NEW LINK FOR OUR SITE. SORRY FOR ANY TROUBLE YOU MAY HAVE HAD WITH THE OLD LINK. THIS ONE HAS ALL THE CORRECTIONS
One boggles when some idiot who spams refers to a URL as a "line," and then can't even give a valid URL. What did they do, convert the IP to a single value and then translate it to decimal? Why? It's obviously to dodge complaints. I have to wonder about anybody who would write a browser which accepts something like that in the first place.
The browser has to accept it. The number is valid. you would have to reprogram the stack to block resolution - or alternatively block it at the browser - and I'm not even sure that is possible at this point. The decimal format is part of the way the internet works. Regards joe -- Joe Baptista http://www.dot.god/ dot.GOD Hostmaster +1 (805) 753-8697
At 11:20 PM 11/15/00 -0500, David Marshall wrote:
ellie900@usa.com writes:
THE NEW LINK FOR OUR SITE. SORRY FOR ANY TROUBLE YOU MAY HAVE HAD WITH THE OLD LINK. THIS ONE HAS ALL THE CORRECTIONS
One boggles when some idiot who spams refers to a URL as a "line," and then can't even give a valid URL. What did they do, convert the IP to a single value and then translate it to decimal? Why? It's obviously to dodge complaints. I have to wonder about anybody who would write a browser which accepts something like that in the first place.
Yes, they referred to it a as a "link", and it works. Haven't you seen this crap before? Many spammers use it for just the reason you suggest, dodging complaints, because it's too annoying to look up "3638141293" in whois or write to "abuse" there, unlike looking up stupid.user.bigisp.net. Netscape accepts it just fine; I assume Internet Exploiter does too, even though I've never seen it used except by spammers. Joe Baptista points out that Unix traceroute accepts it:
# traceroute 3638141293 traceroute to 3638141293 (216.217.161.109), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets which I found new and interesting news. So I checked and Win98's MS-DOS ping and tracert both also support it, and with tracert, you get name lookup as well.
I disagree with Joe's comment that "The decimal format is part of the way the internet works." It's not. It's part of the way the dns name resolver libraries used by several popular operating systems or application packages work. The Internet works on DNS name resolution and on IP addresses that are 32-bit binary numbers, and while the standards say you're *supposed* to display those as dotted-quad decimal for human readability, they probably don't exactly *require* you not to also accept other formats, though hex would be much less rude than decimal :-) I found the following chunk of traceroute interesting:
7 wbb1-pos2-0.pop1.ut.home.net (24.7.75.142) 72.083 ms 69.725 ms 59.08 ms 8 10.253.92.34 (10.253.92.34) 63.26 ms 65.591 ms 86.966 ms 9 216.217.161.109 (216.217.161.109) 62.396 ms 58.283 ms 60.437 ms
Looks like either the spammer's got a machine that's using multiple addresses, one of them a non-routable 10.x address, which makes checking on it hard, or else it's a NAT box, or else @Home's playing cute tricks to reduce crackers, using a 10.x network internally so they and their customers can access their head end routers but people from the real world can't. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
participants (3)
-
Bill Stewart -
David Marshall -
Joe Baptista