Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!unmvax!ncar!ames!amdcad!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!aber-cs!pcg From: pcg@aber-cs.UUCP (Piercarlo Grandi) Newsgroups: news.sysadmin Subject: Re: news.sysadmin Summary: There Ought To Be A Law! Keywords: Security, Fluorides, Bug Free News Message-ID: <329@aber-cs.UUCP> Date: 5 Dec 88 22:04:32 GMT References: <501@alice.marlow.uucp> Reply-To: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) Distribution: eunet,world Organization: CS Dept., University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK Lines: 107 X-Disclaimer: Any statement is purely personal. In article <501@alice.marlow.uucp> fox@marlow.uucp (Paul Fox) writes: The problem is that occasionally the 'powers that be' somewhere out in net land pick up my 'sys' file and send me mail messages telling me I have invalid newsgroups, etc, etc. Other powers-that-be (or maybe the very same ones!) also mix obscure, nasty fluorides with your drinking water! THEY are trying to compromise the purity of your fluids, as well as your machine's News! Contact Dr. Strangelove for more details (unfortunately I cannot give you his address, it is still classified...) on how to stop THEM! (nuke them until they glow, then ...) They are either requesting a file, I didnt explicitly give them permission to access (tell me how I can stop it), or they are executing a shell script on my system I have not given them permission to. Either way it is WRONG. Even worse than that! they are sending you dozens of megabytes of files that swamp your machine every week! Control messages appear mysteriously! curse all the damn UUCP users, whenever they send you a mail message, uuxqt is executed, files get created, inodes get consumed (or disappear entirely) on YOUR machine! LET'S STOP THOSE VERMIN!!! My system is my business, not anybody elses. With all this netland talk of virus's, worms, bacteria, etc, etc people are doing things to my system I do not understand or have time to look into. If one does not understand something he is doing, it is either because he is quite dumb or knows he is lucky. I wish I had as much luck as you know to have. I envy you for your luck, that surely is as great and well founded as your confidence that you don't understand how the News system and software works. The reason I mention this is that one of the 'news' control messages causes my news system to hang. It causes 'rnews' to hang whilst news is being unbatched. The eventual sypmtom is that uuxqt runs later on and keeps spawning rnews until we run out of processes/swap space. This really p**ses me off. It would p**s me off as well! If I were not dumb and ignorant as I am, and I were in your place, I would look at the sources and fix the problem, instead of wasting my time and that of many network people by posting this article. Too bad I am doing it! It p**ses me off because people do things to my system when I havent explicitly let them I thouroughly agree! So much so that I would suggest that There Ought To Be A Law that makes sending electronic mail or news articles of any contents (not just disgusting, surely Anti-American news syncronization messages) to a system, without having previously requested by electronic mail the permission of that system's administrator, be a criminal offense. and it p**ses me off because the news software is not bug free. I understand you fully. You have been conned with one of the very few remaining pieces of buggy software around, peddled by a very small but obnoxious irresponsible minority of low caste programmers. This is unfortunate, as they hurt the reputation of the majority of reliable suppliers, that have been producing bug free software for many years now, just like you have been doing for sure. I know that advertising is frowned upon here, but I cannot resist mentioning that I have for sale, at very interesting prices, a slew of guaranteed bug-free software packages, among them a full fledged program verifier/prover as well as a distributed real time battle management system for ICBM interdiction, and a very interesting property in New York, a prime investment opportunity, a bridge with a lot of guaranteed traffic, in excellent state. If you are interested, contact my attorneys and agents, Stanley, Ollie, Send & Mail, 280 Sun3set Boulevard, Hollywood, CA, for details. I hope C-news or News 3.0 is MUCH MUCH better. Well, I know that but for your extremely busy schedule, full of much more important tasks, you would have already managed to improve a lot the News package. Too bad that those that sold you B-News swindled you of A LOT OF MONEY for an obviously inferior product. Sue them unwashed hackers! Call the Software Fraud Squad! Now for the serious part: even if fox@marlow.co.uk and myself have not liberally sprinkled with :-) our postings, they are not to be taken seriously. fox@marlow.co.uk clearly posted a caricature of the worries of a paranoid system administrator, one scared to death in his ignorance and inflated ego by an innocent triggering of the checkgroups script on his machine by a checkgroups synchronization message from the net, and so dumb not to understand that mail can be sent by daemons running locally, instead of humans from remote sites. Even if the parodistic nature of the posting is clearly revealed by some obviously unrealistic exaggerations (nobody would believe that any real system administrator out there is so dumb and irresponsible to expect a (complex) package like News to be bug-free, and then complain that it isn't; especially if he runs UUCP), the caricature is frightenengly like, only just a bit exxxxagerated, many people out there in the net. I hope that the original posting, and my own, (less subtle) parody of a sympathetic reply, have amused you, and made the less alert, more readily scared sysadmin think that it is time to RTFM, be it News's or whatever... -- Piercarlo "Peter" Grandi INET: pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk Sw.Eng. Group, Dept. of Computer Science UUCP: ...!mcvax!ukc!aber-cs!pcg UCW, Penglais, Aberystwyth, WALES SY23 3BZ (UK)