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The Internet Your Rights Online

Decepticons Are NOT Attacking the .US Registry 39

Posted by michael from the competence-not-required dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes "According to this story in the Washington Post, NeuLevel, the operator of DotUS and DotBiz, has issued a clarification that the Decepticon transformers were *not* attacking their webservers, despite their previous claims to the contrary." It's good to know that .us is in such good hands.
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Decepticons Are NOT Attacking the .US Registry More

Decepticons Are NOT Attacking the .US Registry

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  • Hell, last I checked, Mindspring [mindspring.com]'s DNS servers were Itchy and Scratchy.

    • Re:Transformers are unprofessional? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hagardtroll ( 562208 ) on Friday May 10, 2002 @03:35PM (#3498707) Journal
      Its not unusual for me to put strange coded messages in my code I am testing or debugging. I don't think its 'Unprofessional' just a mistake that it made it out onto a production machine.

      How else can you entertain yourself while sitting in a 6x8 foot cubicle 8 hours a day.

      All Decepticons come to the aid of the prowler!

      • All Decepticons come to the aid of the prowler!


        Actually, there was an Autobot named Prowl (A policecar), which is the Prowl that the message was talking about, I believe.

        Sorry to nitpick, but the Transformers nut in me had to respond.
      • I hope nobody gets the axe or a major reprimand just because they used a funny message (intended for internal use only) and then some yahoo is quoted in the article as saying it's "unprofessional" to do this kind of thing.

        Besides IT, funny error messages like this seem to be pretty popular with TV stations, and even some relatively large networks when they're having A/V problems (pictures of broken Televisions or someone asleep at the production booth, etc.). And those things are actually meant to be broadcast to the public.

        I can understand the special concern regarding computer networks...but "unprofessional" - lighten up, buddy - even government and military systems often use a bit of humor with their systems.

    • Yup

      Domain servers in listed order: ITCHY.MINDSPRING.NET - 207.69.200.210
      SCRATCHY.MINDSPRING.NET - 207.69.200.211
      BURDELL.CC.GATECH.EDU - 130.207.3.207

  • Transformer video game?? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by eugene ts wong ( 231154 ) on Friday May 10, 2002 @03:28PM (#3498660) Homepage Journal
    Gary Osbourne, a computer programmer in Vancouver, Canada who stumbled upon the misconfigured site
    Wednesday, posted a message at the ICANNwatch.org site about the incident, noting that Prowl and the
    Decepticons are characters from the "Transformers" computer games and line of Hasbro toys.
    I'm sure that a lot of people are aware of the video game, but more of them should be aware of the comic and show. It would be like saying, "...Prowl and the Decepticons are pictures on a t-shirt that this guy in my city wears". It just seems so out of perspective. No mention of the tv show?? No mention of the comic???

    Not trying to rant or troll or anything. It just makes me kind of laugh. That's all.

  • I've been there. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by snubber1 ( 56537 ) on Friday May 10, 2002 @03:42PM (#3498766)
    I had the *exact* same thing happen to me. I am the web developer for subaruparts.com [subaruparts.com]. I have one function to connect to the database that is used universally throughout the site that happens to generate a particualar error message when the database cannot be found. When the database server goes offline most pages will say something like "Mr. Database was killed by Colonel Mustard in the Study with the Knife." It randomly picks the items in clue when generating the message. I thought it was funny at the time.

    Well, Last week some meat-headed security camera techs managed to unplug my database THREE times (twice by network, once by power) while installing some equipment. All the visitors saw the message and thought we had been haxx0red. I had to go visit a bunch of car boards and explain that we hadn't been breeched.
  • it must've been that wench Circuit Breaker.

    Even Prowl can be wrong, sometimes.

  • Uh (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by Phexro ( 9814 )
    What, exactly, does this have to do with My Rights Online? Ooh, a registrar screwed up. People make mistakes. What a shock.

    Just to put things into perspective, the editors here can't work out correct spelling and grammar, got their production site hacked [slashdot.org] by (gasp!) by making a test server accessible to the general 'net public. And that's not even dipping into the other problems here, such as (meta-)moderation abuse, bitchslaps, editor moderations, etc. Michael, you have absolutely no right to say what you said.

    And what an ironic twist that this article was posted "from the competence-not-required dept." Thanks for making that clear.

    Yeah, go ahead and mod me down now.

  • What's wrong with a sense of humor? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by EvlG ( 24576 ) on Friday May 10, 2002 @04:35PM (#3499169)
    From the article:

    Even if this was just an in-house configuration error, that's still very unprofessional. It's just pretty lame.


    Why can't businesses retain a sense of humor and have a little harmless fun? Especially in this economy, when everyone deserves a break?
  • Sometimes the replies write themselves:

    They're too busy moderating on Slashdot.

    Then fire their lazy asses!

    But they ARE attacking a pizza in the server room.

    Insert your line here:

    • Insert your line here:

      But we've put the Autobots on alert, just in case.

      Too bad, it'd be funny seeing Ashcorft announce the FBI's new 10 most wanted: "Megatron, Galvatron, Shockwave ... These giant robot electronic terroists may be in disguise."

      They're 'busy' looking at car magazine porn.

      Actually it was the Gundams - it's hard keeping those giant Japanese robot series straight...

      In fact, since the cancellation of their show, the Decepticons have straightened out their erronous ways and found gainful employment at MicroSoft Public Relations.

  • isn't .us grand? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 ) on Friday May 10, 2002 @06:00PM (#3499608) Journal

    Some NeuLevel customers who viewed the notice concluded that the company's sites had been vandalized by attackers.

    But as it turns out it was just a publicity stunt to try to get people to care about the .us registry. "Hey, we got on slashdot, that's an accomplishment" beamed a reputable NeuLevel employee who wished to remain anonymous.

  • Perhaps their sites WERE hacked, but because the defacement page wasnt an obvious "j0u g0t 0wn3d bY mR l4m3" type site, theyre trying to deny it was hacked and claim it was all just an accident.
    Afterall, what are the chances of a production webserver for multiple domains being replaced by accident? swapping the servers over would take a certain amount of work, with the particular goal in mind...
    And if the swapping over was truly a quick accident, then surely it would have been swapped back very quickly too, instead of the several hours of downtime they seem to have experienced after the event, this seems like time spent cleaning up cracking-related mess.
  • AllYourBaseAreBelongTo.Decepticons

    -
  • "Even if this was just an in-house configuration error, that's still very unprofessional. It's just pretty lame," said Osbourne, who reported that NeuLevel's sites were unreachable for several hours as the company apparently worked to correct the problem.

    That's really just a 'sound bite', the original quote was (in the voice of Comic Book Guy):

    "Even if this was just an in-house configuration error, that's still very unprofessional. It's just pretty lame. I mean, anybody who's anybody would use 'Hulk' for their main server and 'The_Flash' for their web server, denoting both power, and unrivaled quickness."

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