Re: City apologizes for ORBZ shutdown....

[Scott Francis]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2002 at 07:04:36AM -0800, mdonahue@WATG.com said:
> 
> *sigh*
> http://www.internetnews.com/isp-news/article/0,,8_996341,00.html

from the article ...
----
"Our investigation and conversations with Mr. Gulliver's attorney have led us
to believe that there was no criminal intent to cause the City harm," she
[assistant to the city manager Michelle Reen] said. "However, there was no way
for us to know when we received the hit that this was not intended as a
malicious prank." 

Battle Creek's information systems expert and a local detective were responsible
for convincing a judge to issue a search warrant and seek to seize Gulliver's
ORBZ documentation.
----

I can believe this kind of clueless, heavy-handed behavior from law
enforcement, but apparently their information systems 'expert' could stand a
course or two on common Internet practices. Like spam filtering, and relay
databases - anybody that can't differentiate between a probe from a known
open relay tester, and a portscan, needs to be sent back to school. Contrary
to the city manager's assistant, there certainly _is_ a way they could have
known whether the 'hit' was malicious or not. They could merely have _asked_,
instead of starting out with a court order.

I echo Mike - *sigh*

-- 
Scott Francis                   darkuncle@ [home:] d a r k u n c l e . n e t
Systems/Network Manager          sfrancis@ [work:]         t o n o s . c o m
GPG public key 0xCB33CCA7              illum oportet crescere me autem minui

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