“Open Projects provides interactive facilities for coordination
and support to groups and projects involved with open source. We
run between 1,500 and 2,000 clients and are home to such projects
as Debian GNU/Linux and Enlightenment. We’ve had our share of
difficulties recently, but we’re continuing on.”
“The past few weeks have been quite an experience. Last week one
of our hubs on Open Projects started going up and down like a yoyo.
I’d seen that behavior in this normally very reliable server in
recent weeks and not thought much of it, since the company in
question was in the process of moving its facilities and
reliability issues do sometimes creep in during such moves. But we
soon obtained a little bit more insight into the problem. After
watching the server perform a loop-de-loop, I received a /MSG from
a rather peremptory and anonymous skript kiddie informing me that
if I didn’t permanently remove the sponsor’s server from the
network, he would kill my home ADSL line and take down Open
Projects until he got his way. It seems he feels the sponsor owes
him money. I’m afraid I wasn’t very polite in my response. Feeling
that one can hardly allow psychotic delinquents to dictate network
policy, I explained to him that while he might very well be able to
take down our network, he was not going to set policy, and
specifically I would not entertain the notion of removing our
sponsor’s machine.”
“The last week has been interesting. Apparently this petulant
child has something over 45Mbps to play with, and he’s moderately
competent with SYN attacks and so on. In various incidents
throughout the week he packeted ISP’s and universities and small
companies to death to demonstrate his, uh, prowess with borrowed
equipment. Currently he has proclaimed that he’ll be taking down
our network once a day for an hour until his wishes are granted.
All I can say is that he’s going to be doing it for a long time if
that’s the case; the heat death of the universe isn’t due to arrive
for some time.”