--"Car 54 Where Are You?"
Posted on 01/22/2005 6:47:13 AM PST by Gigantor
But their server is looking for something else, too. I have my Zone Alarm set to "stealth mode - Your computer is hidden and protected from hackers. Sharing is not allowed."
That feature must be disabled for me to view the pictures.
I wonder why the website (www.rfny.us) demands that it be able to "see inside" my computer before it will let me view the photos.
(The owner of the rfny.us website is one "Hank Hayes", who, coincidentally, looks a lot like Gigantor. See www.hankhayes.com.)
Can anybody help explain this?
There's no way I'm dropping my firewall. I have enough problems. I don't need to go looking for them.
--"Car 54 Where Are You?"
I've got nothing to hide, however, I'm also not interested in someone putting spy programs in my computer to watch everything I do on the net. In my books, that'd be the bottom line of disabling a firewall along with Norton.
Yeah, I noticed that...but it's Sunday, traditionally a slow day.
But they're not, apparently. Those of us running firewalls are denied.
So that tells me that FR must forward the IP addresses of the requester to rfny.us, and those of us who have our outgoing IP addresses blocked by our firewalls are disapproved.
John, is "IP forwarding" enabled on the FR servers, and if so, why?
Does anybody have any idea if I know what the heck I am talking about, 'cause I sure don't.
Firewalls can do strange things. Sometimes I experience what you describe but I use Norton. If I really feel it necessary to view the image, I'll quickly disable the firewall, download the page and re-enable the firewall.
That's what I did, but I still feel the need to understand.
We've got some rather naive folks....w/out thinking about the security issues...many disabled their protection to look at the pics...now they've got egg on their faces...so to speak. During toons days we had lots of spies at FR...from his administration...my bet, we still do with even better tools.
In message #89 I posted direct links to the pictures on a different server than the one that got overloaded - were you able to see them that way?
I wish I could have been there! It looks like you had a blast!
The links in post #89 work for me - but the others don't. Thanks for reposting! Great pix.
I have Linux and I can see some of what's going on here, since my firewall logs incoming requests.
Whatever server is hosting those pictures (69.61.9.24) is requesting a connection to any machine requesting the pictures, and trying to open a port in the 328xx range (32807, 32816, etc. etc.).
I've seen this before - I don't recall seeing it with Windoze, but it's happened more frequently with Linux. Usually, I just bag it and don't look at the site, but this time I opened access to the 69.61.9.24 server to look at a couple of them (guess which ones...), and then turned it off again (the Linux firewall allows you to enable and disable any service to and from any port for any specific machine to which you're "talking").
I *think* (haven't thoroughly infestigated it; I have many more important computer issues to get paranoid about at the moment) that in most cases what it is, is the machine to which you're trying to connect is trying to do a reverse DNS lookup on your machine. Most sites don't do that, but some (probably an increasing number) do - what they're trying to do is to force your machine to identify itself in case you're trying to send "Spam" into their server, before they'll let you look at the babe in the gold dress. However, if you have services running on your machine which talk on the port to which their machine manages to connect, it *could* be a penetration attempt.
Because this is just a photo hosting site, and because Linux is far less likely to be the subject of a successful probe by hackers, (*most* of the exploits out there target Gatesware), and because I can turn on access on a port-by-port basis, and because I shut the access of as soon as I got a look at the babe in the gold dress (Nice bod but too much makeup for my barbarian tastes) (sorry, but you all have REALLY asked for it), I was willing to drop my ah... "Guard" in this case.
People with Windoze firewalls might experience various things, depending on their firewall (and I DON'T know how Gatesware plays with the third-party firewalls, so all I can do is guess, but...). If you've got your browser set up to act as a server, it might be doing the reverse DNS on request and sending out your Social Security Number and bank account and voting record, without your even knowing it (I hope I'm exaggerating). Or, your browser/firewall might be denying the reverse DNS (or whatever) request, so you end up having to take down your firewall in order to ogle the cute babe in the gold dress. I hate even speculating about Windoze; it's junk.
I'm not a computer expert, I'm just a paranoid redneck thug. My eventual intention is to figure out how to set up a server on my Linux system to "spoof" the reverse DNS lookups and any other service requests and, rather than just denying them, feed them a pack of lies in order to infuriate and frustrate whatever sniveling leftist compugeek on the other end who thinks he's cute...
Perhaps your statement explains the mystery, IF it is accurate - how do you know that the server ONLY ACCEPTS requests from FreeRepublic. If that IS correct, then this is the answer:
I played around with my Norton Internet Security Settings and got the following results:
If you have a different theory - explain, please.
For the love of God and image downloading, do these fiends have no mercy?
All the links are looking good bro. You remind me of James Bond... tuxedo, surrounded by beautiful willing women, savoring sumptuous cuisine, quaffing martinis shaken ... except I think he smoked "El Productos".
Oh, boy. Here we go again.
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