Re: SurfWatch

From:	IN%"jsw@netscape.com"  "Jeff Weinstein"  9-MAR-1996 04:41:47.02

>  I predict that 6 months after the first internet rating system is widely
>deployed, the largest use of search engines such as altavista will be to
>look for pages with the most "naughty" ratings.  Perhaps such services will
>allow text searches for free, but charge for searches based on the rating
>tag...

	Unfortunately, AltaVista doesn't index based on comments field (in
which category the SafeSurf ratings fall). Opentext, given that one supposedly
can search for links to a page, may be able to do it on the other hand.
Putting together a web spider that would search for such could be a profitable
undertaking. I did some checking on AltaVista and found one service by the
name of "Naughty Lynx" which automatically checks all of its links every hour
or so - one problem with "adult-oriented" sites is that they disappear a lot.
Some such feature would probably be necessary. Seems to be a good potential
use of the DigiCash system, since one doesn't need merchant anonymnity that
much until someone comes up with anonymous-location web pages; the Naughty
Lynx system appears to support itself via advertising). Combining this with a
web proxy would also be good.
	-Allen

E. Allen Smith said,

> ... until someone comes up with anonymous-location web pages...

Has anyone ever considered setting up anonymous web sites on top of
usenet?  People could post pages anonymously to usenet, and the web sites
could grab them and put them up automatically.  The pages could expire
just like usenet.  And just as there are many nntp servers that contain
more or less the same informaton, there could be many of these anonweb
servers with essentially the same information.

Right now a news administrator isn't held responsible of there's some
"bad" information in his news spool -- copyright violations, obscenity,
etc.  If the link between physically hosting a web page and being
responsible for its contents could somehow be broken, then anonymous web
pages would be possible.  If an anonweb server was just a robot that 
reads usenet, maybe anonweb operators could slide in under the usenet 
tradition.

The distributed nature of the usenet model would also solve another
problem with anonymous web pages, namely that it costs money to serve
them, and there's no way to tell how popular an anonymous web page will be
until you put it out there.  Individual ISPs would host anonweb servers
for the benefit of their customers (web page readers) rather than the
anonymous publishers.  If someone puts up an anonweb page that gets
100,000 hits a day, an ISP with 2,000 customers will only have to shoulder
a small part of that burden.

--
alex

>>>>> Alex Strasheim <cp@proust.suba.com> writes:

  > Has anyone ever considered setting up anonymous web sites on top
  > of usenet?  People could post pages anonymously to usenet, and the
  > web sites could grab them and put them up automatically.

I see two problems right off the top:

1. Given the number of images, sound files, and movies that the most
   popular web pages will invariably have, the load incurred by
   propagating the associated files all over the net would be
   tremendous;

2. If CDA begins to be seriously enforced, Usenet will suffer as much
   as the Web: as soon as ISPs have reason to believe that such and
   such a newsgroup is carrying unlawful material, they'll have to
   stop spooling those groups.  The material will move into off-topic
   groups, ISPs will get tipped off, and they'll have to shut those
   off too.  I can imagine a whole army of busybodies scanning the
   comp.* hierarchy for pictures of tits...

-- 
Roger Williams            PGP key available from PGP public keyservers
Coelacanth Engineering        consulting & turnkey product development
Middleborough, MA           wireless * DSP-based instrumentation * ATE
tel +1 508 947-8049 * fax +1 508 947-9118 * http://www.coelacanth.com/

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On Sat, 9 Mar 1996, Dan Cross wrote:
 
> This is an interesting idea, though I think a really really insecure one.
> What's keeping someone from posting ``trojan web pages'' and then waiting
> for the pages to be soaked up by servers?  Something that says ``click
> <here> to see the /etc/passwd file for this site!'' which runs some funky
> CGI thing to cat /etc/passwd or, ``Enter your credit card number to buy
> super wiz-bang gadget!'' or the like is a really scary, but very real,
> possibility if great care is not taken in setting this kind of thing up.
> News servers, on the other hand, don't suffer from this problem because
> the data which they contain is much more passive in nature (at least, while
> in the spool..) than HTML.

The obvious fix would just be to disallow the use of CGI scripts in anonymous
web pages.  In order for a file to be designated a CGI script, the must
be explicitly specified as such in the httpd configuration.  The web is
every bit as passive as Usenet.  The only difference is you can't make a
program that will execute on the NNTP server everytime it is retrieved (which
would be the Usenet equivalent of CGI).

- --Mark

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
markm@voicenet.com              | finger -l for PGP key 0xf9b22ba5
http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/ | bd24d08e3cbb53472054fa56002258d5
"The concept of normalcy is just a conspiracy of the majority" -me

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On Sun, 10 Mar 1996, Mark M. wrote:

> On Sat, 9 Mar 1996, Dan Cross wrote:
>  
> > This is an interesting idea, though I think a really really insecure one.
> > What's keeping someone from posting ``trojan web pages'' and then waiting
> > for the pages to be soaked up by servers?  Something that says ``click
> > <here> to see the /etc/passwd file for this site!'' which runs some funky
> > CGI thing to cat /etc/passwd or, ``Enter your credit card number to buy
> > super wiz-bang gadget!'' or the like is a really scary, but very real,
> > possibility if great care is not taken in setting this kind of thing up.
> > News servers, on the other hand, don't suffer from this problem because
> > the data which they contain is much more passive in nature (at least, while
> > in the spool..) than HTML.
> 
> The obvious fix would just be to disallow the use of CGI scripts in anonymous
> web pages.  In order for a file to be designated a CGI script, the must
> be explicitly specified as such in the httpd configuration.  The web is
> every bit as passive as Usenet.  The only difference is you can't make a
> program that will execute on the NNTP server everytime it is retrieved (which
> would be the Usenet equivalent of CGI).

Doesn't solve the problem completely, or even the individual example 
given above.

>From your public html directory, try 'ln -s /etc/passwd passwords.txt'.

Then add a link to your homepage.... 
Jon
----------
Jon Lasser (410)494-3072                         - Obscenity  is a crutch  for
jlasser@rwd.goucher.edu                            inarticulate motherfuckers.
http://www.goucher.edu/~jlasser/
Finger for PGP key (1024/EC001E4D)               - Fuck the CDA.

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On Tue, 12 Mar 1996, Bruce Zambini wrote:

> On Sun, 10 Mar 1996, Mark M. wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 9 Mar 1996, Dan Cross wrote:
> >  
> > > This is an interesting idea, though I think a really really insecure one.
> > > What's keeping someone from posting ``trojan web pages'' and then waiting
> > > for the pages to be soaked up by servers?  Something that says ``click
> > > <here> to see the /etc/passwd file for this site!'' which runs some funky
> > > CGI thing to cat /etc/passwd or, ``Enter your credit card number to buy
> > > super wiz-bang gadget!'' or the like is a really scary, but very real,
> > > possibility if great care is not taken in setting this kind of thing up.
> > > News servers, on the other hand, don't suffer from this problem because
> > > the data which they contain is much more passive in nature (at least, while
> > > in the spool..) than HTML.
> > 
> > The obvious fix would just be to disallow the use of CGI scripts in anonymous
> > web pages.  In order for a file to be designated a CGI script, the must
> > be explicitly specified as such in the httpd configuration.  The web is
> > every bit as passive as Usenet.  The only difference is you can't make a
> > program that will execute on the NNTP server everytime it is retrieved (which
> > would be the Usenet equivalent of CGI).
> 
> Doesn't solve the problem completely, or even the individual example 
> given above.
> 
> >From your public html directory, try 'ln -s /etc/passwd passwords.txt'.
> 
> Then add a link to your homepage.... 

In order to add a symbolic link on a file system, you have to have shell
access to that system.  The whole point of this anonymous web pages thread
is that web pages could be distributed among different servers which could
store the pages on the filesystem and make access available through the
web.  An attacker could not put a link to the password file simply through
anonymous web pages.  Besides, password file should be shadowed anyway, and
httpd should never be run as root.

- --Mark

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
markm@voicenet.com              | finger -l for PGP key 0xf9b22ba5
http://www.voicenet.com/~markm/ | bd24d08e3cbb53472054fa56002258d5
"The concept of normalcy is just a conspiracy of the majority" -me


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On Tue, 12 Mar 1996 00:35:38 -0500 (EST) jlasser@rwd.goucher.edu (Bruce Zambini) 
wrote:

>On Sun, 10 Mar 1996, Mark M. wrote:
>>From your public html directory, try 'ln -s /etc/passwd passwords.txt'.
>
>Then add a link to your homepage.... 

Er, I believe CERN, NCSA, and N*tscape all disallow following symbolic links by 
default for precisely this reason. There is a follow-symlinks-for-owner-only 
option that we recently turned on.

-rich
 Institute for Ernst Zundel Revisionism
 http://www.c2.org/~rich/Press/Swedish/

cp@proust.suba.com (Alex Strasheim) writes:
>Has anyone ever considered setting up anonymous web sites on top of usenet?

I proposed this a couple of months ago, there should be a bit of
discussion left over in the archives. My idea was to have an account
keyed to a password - if you emailed the server with the right
password, it would take the text of your email and put it in the
specified URL. Then you can use remailers to preserve anonymity with
the server. It's sort of like the alias.c2.org accounts.

It seems like a workable, not-too-difficult idea. Not much interest in
it, though. Sameer pointed out that a full c2.org account, if used
properly, allows anonymous web pages.

>Right now a news administrator isn't held responsible of there's some
>"bad" information in his news spool -- copyright violations, obscenity,
>etc.  If the link between physically hosting a web page and being
>responsible for its contents could somehow be broken, then anonymous web
>pages would be possible.

In trying to shape the policy at various places where I've installed
web servers, I urge them to think of allowing users to post web pages
to be the same as allowing them to send email or post to Usenet.
They're all (potentially) media with lots of exposure and instiutional
identification, so why treat them differently? The argument seems to
work, and users are allowed to have their own web pages.

The problem, of course, is that people do tend to associate the
opinions in web pages to the company that owns the web server more
than they do with Usenet posts or email. Furthermore, WWW is a
permanent medium, where as email and Usenet are commonly perceived to
be transitory (this is changing).

I decided that if I were to set up an anonymous web server, I as
administrator would have to retain absolute control of what is on the
server, just to protect whomever my ISP is. The aim would be to weed
out any and all potentially illegal text: draconian, but probably
necessary to keep the remailer safe. I'd also filter out all CGI and
images over some small (icon) size. These days, I'd prevent Java and
JavaScript, too.


I'm interested in discussing implementation issues in more detail with
someone if they think this would be a fun project. I might yet get to
it myself in the next few months.