I think Juno is ox-eyed, at least in the Tempest, but allwords is giving me "with big round eyes like an ox" and I can't quite see why having a memorable torso makes one ox-eyed, unless it's a much ruder joke than I'm used to from Robertson Davies.

Help?

You should see how many different monarchs are credited with the remark. This story exists in about a zillion versions. Personally, I have my doubts about the one where Queen Anne makes the famous remark at a press conference after she's viewed the new St. Mark's Cathedral. ...

I'll go look it up, she said, like a kid going after a cookie.

( ... )

I'm back. There's evidence for both "pompous" and "amusing". Perhaps Cecil Adams has had a go at this one.

If I were trying to DDoS someone, I'd consider that a feature.

The IP address they were aimed at isn92t even there anymore, but since they92re too dumb to realize it, they just go on attacking.

Very dumb, or very clever. What if the IP address they're attacking isn't the one they want to drop?

If I wanted to DDoS a given website off the air, attacking a different site on the same machine would work -- and might confuse those trying to find me. "Joe Jobs," where you make spam look like it's coming from someone you want to cause problems for, have been known for years.

This could be the Denial of service version. I'm a trekkie, and I want this trekker site off the net, so I DDoS a trekkie site on the machine. Now everyone assumes that the trekkers *must* be responsible, since they're attacking trekkies.

Of course, the bad guys could have just turned the DDoS robots on and walked away -- in which case, like the mindless robots they are, they'll keep attacking until those machines are taken offline and fixed.

You could call this dumb -- but if they're just being vandals, what do they care? They're still causing problems. They're still winning, in thier eyes. And everytime someone makes a mistake in a firewall config, the hmdns.com netblocks fall down again.

---L.

It's not that simple. I read living authors and dead authors. I've read several works by Poul Anderson, novels and short stories. I haven't read that particular story, though, at least not that I recall. There just isn't time to read everything. There isn't time to read all the good stuff. There's not time to read all the famous good stuff, even. Not if you have a full time job doing something besides reading, anyway.

I suspect DDOS attacks are going to become as much a fact of life as comment spam.

From: Connie Davis

To: ml@jgreely.com

Subject: nielsenhayden.com

On Tue Oct 21, 2003 at 06:27:51 PM EDT we were unable to reach your website:

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/002579.html

due to the following reason: Host Not Found

As of Wed Oct 22, 2003 at 01:16:04 PM EDT we were able to access your website again.

...

The mail really did come from internetseer.com. It goes on to advertise their site-monitoring service, and both the email and web links contain little cookies that validate my email address. Obviously, I won't be taking them up on their offers.

On the plus side, maybe in three months Connie will start getting mail from her own company about owning this page.

-j

Cheers,
Tom

For whatever it's worth as useless evidence, after the Connie Davis Complimentary Close, the e-mail ended up with:

"Your email address was found during a
prior visit to your website on
03-25-2003. The error listed above was verified from both of our
indexing servers in Philadelphia, Pa. and Los Angeles, Ca. This error could
have been caused by any number of events, including connectivity problems on
our part and/or connectivity problems in the Internet as we tried to reach
your site. This error should not be construed as a guaranteed problem on the
part of your website or hosting company since there are never any guaranteed
connection routes on the Internet."

It then listed a purported opt-out link before sticking on my e-mail addy in a format that Agent rendered as:

##hculver@compuserve.com## SRC=61

Curiouser and curiouser, what?

Harriet
(writing from a secret location
not two blocks from Tor offices)

I, too, didn't understand "amusing, awful, and artificial", but then I'm an uncultured nerd who likes hanging around people who know more than I do, so I'm used to that.

Erik, it had occurred to me that they could be aiming their attack at a site near the one that was their real target. We won't know until they've been tracked down, taken off line, exhaustively analyzed, thrashed, dipped in rancid yak fat, thrashed again, and condemned to work in a sewage treatment plant in the middle of the Cuyahoga river.

Just for starters.

LanguageHat, I'd have done that if it weren't part of a one-liner that linked to something else. I might have considered making the joke part of the it a link to an appropriate site, if that site were somehow related to the principal link. However, this one wasn't.

Truthfully, the main reason I handled it the way I did was that it didn't occur to me to wonder whether enough people would know that story.

And there, the rub. Most DDoS's are done by "zombies" installed on insecure computers, and controlled by various means. IRC channels are one popular one.

Here's the problem. What's your primary evidence for who did this? The zombie computers. What can you *not* trust as evidence? The zombie computers, which, after all, have been comprimised. Who know what has been written to that disk?

The only real way to get time is to try and trace the control channel. Alas, on the internet, not only do they not know you are a dog -- they're not even sure where the dog is. Crack another machine, make the IRC connection from there, disconnect from the IRC network, wipe the logs. When you want to retarget, crack a different machine, repeat.

Every time you have an evidence point, you have, by definition, corrupted evidence. If the bad guy can connect to the computer and wipe the logs, so can many other people. You have to real-time the comms to show enough evidence, and if there's four or five levels of misdirection, that becomes practically impossible.

I didn't realize Teresa's intended meaning until after I clicked on the link, at which point the impressiveness of the site caused me to remember the old meanings of those words, which I knew through the Christopher Wren story, though that story itself did not come to mind. So I did figure out what she meant.

---L.