Plethora of strange cracker newbie questions

kosh kosh at aesaeion.com
Thu Aug 23 19:10:09 EDT 2001


Peter Hansen wrote:

> Is it just me, or does it look like there's a new world-wide
> organization of Python newbie crackers all asking questions
> here with an eye towards creating some Python script bent
> on world domination or at least other nefarious deeds?
> 
I have to admit that does bother me. However since some of these
things can easily be used for good or bad I would be inclined to help
those that could easily be used for good and just ignore the ones
to which I can see no good use.

> Recently we've had a spate of newbies who "need" to send email
> (bulk mailer slime?), ping stuff (target discovery), interact
> with IRC servers (anyone not read http://grc.com/dos/intro.htm
> yet?), and several others I've already forgotten, including
> some which as I recall would be useful in building elements
> of a virus.

The irc one I can think of some good uses for. I had a program at one time 
that would watch stuff on an irc server then alert me to things of interest.
pinging can be very useful since you can write a script to make sure your 
various computers are up. If one goes down you can spawn off a task to 
notify you. However the others are far less useful. 

> 
> Whatever happened to the good old newbies who asked about
> how to create a file so they could track their video tape
> collections on their computers?  Why are they jumping
> straight to low-level script-kiddie stuff which few of
> us even get a chance to do?
>
It sure does seem we have been attracting a lot of kiddies recently. I hope 
they go away or grow up. Overall script kiddies annoy me to no end.
 
> Not that I don't like newbies or anything, but maybe it
> wouldn't be wise to be quite so blindly helpful as most
> c.l.py inhabitants have been in the past.  Maybe some
> hesitation and just dumping working source at them would
> be advisable.
> 
> Am I just overly sensitive?
> 

Some of your observations I agree with others I see in a different light 
because of other work I have done.



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