I'm just sitting here listening to sreaming audio
coming down my dsl line and thinking about smtp on various
ports, interfering IPS's like sympatico (too bad they're
not, eh?), and carnivore/echelon, etc. And I've got a smtp
server set up on my dsl line, along with a web server -- and
let's say the fedz wanted to monitor me (can't imagine why,
but let's say they do) so they set up a carnivore box
upstream.
Now, with all this streaming realplayer and mp3 stuff
gobbling so much bandwidth at least during most of my waking
hours, plus the web traffic -- what is their mechanism for
sorting thru all this? I would assume that they'd do it by
port, but if I was communicating with another email server
on a different port, possibly intermittently on the same
port as the streaming audio, what then? And if it was
encrypted besides? And even not -- it's pretty easy to do a
cron script that pulsed sendmail periodically, varying the
ports.
Seems to me that they're faced with a pretty daunting
task, to monitor all this.
Also, for Robert's particular problem, if you are running
your own smtp server on your dsl or cable (or even dialup,
for that matter) and have an isp who doesn't want you to do
that -- for instance, the ISP will scan your line all the
time looking for verboten servers -- so you need a firewall
that watches for scans and then puts the IP of the scanner
into a blocked file, so anything coming from them in the
future can't see your web or smtp server. And it also would
be pretty trivial to open and close ports periodically with
ipchains or iptables to allow traffic on a timetable only
known to you and your friends, so for most of the time it
would look closed.
--
Harmon Seaver, MLIS
CyberShamanix
Work 920-203-9633 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Home 920-233-5820 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
