From: Jeff Barr (jeff@vertexdev.com)
Date: Mon Nov 27 2000 - 10:26:36 PST
Wow, we think alike! The paranoid part of me was thinking
that they were trying to do some "discovery" by trying some
likely document names.
Then I found that they tried to retrieve "lineo-IPO.html"
which exists in exactly one place. Oddly (just to make it
more of a paranoid delusion :-), my friend Bryan Sparks
is the CEO of Lineo, and he and I had talked on the phone
just days prior to this. Perhaps they are tapping my
phone :-) :-)
Jeff;
-----Original Message-----
From: Kragen Sitaker [mailto:kragen@pobox.com]
Sent: Monday, November 27, 2000 10:14 AM
To: fork@kragen.dnaco.net
Subject: Re: Something's amiss at AltaVista...
Jeff Barr writes:
> It seems as if they are requesting documents from my site
> that are valid on other sites. I say sites because the variety
> of file names that it is looking for are too diverse for me
> to believe that they are all from the same site.
Very interesting.
Suppose you want to write a computer program to guess somebody's
password. They won't tell you the password, so you have to guess at
it. If you have a long list of passwords other people have used,
sorted by frequency, guessing the top few of those seems like a
reasonable first cut.
Suppose you want to write a computer program to find documents on
someone's web site. Some of the documents may not be linked, so you
have to guess at valid localparts of URLs. If you have a long list of
localparts other sites have used, sorted by frequency, guessing the top
few of those seems like a reasonable first cut.
Or maybe it's just a bug.
--
<kragen@pobox.com> Kragen Sitaker <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Perilous to all of us are the devices of an art deeper than we possess
ourselves.
-- Gandalf the White [J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Two Towers", Bk 3, Ch. XI]
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