Arr, Matey!
Gossip

One of our readers, let's call him Dan, pointed us to iscan.ucsd.edu, a rather strange page that shows up within the UCSD domain and contains nothing more than a Jolly Roger and the text, "Your actions are being monitored." It seems that this page and a sister-site, regscan.ucsd.edu, have been pinging computers and scanning them on port 137 several hundred times a day.

So what the hell does this all mean? While it would be totally fucking awesome if a rogue band of bloodthirsty yet tech-savyy pirates were scanning our computers in preparation for their unstoppable onslaught, the simplest answer is that ResNet is scanning for unpatched machines, or as they're known by most sysadmins, dirty virus-ridden whores. The Jolly Roger is probably just a surprise for anybody who notices the port scans, which is actually kind of a neat little touch when you think about it.

UPDATE: A sharp-eyed reader has informed us that it's not a Jolly Roger at iscan.ucsd.edu, but rather the flag of Calico Jack
Rackham. Thanks for the correction, friend. We salute you.

Aleph Solo, Oct 12 2004, 01:14 AM

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