With today’s historic WikiLeaks release (which has been undergoing a DDOS of unknown origin; so here’s the NYT coverage), I couldn’t help but think of the closing of The Hacker’s Manifesto:

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.

I support today’s release. Democracy was never intended to be conducted behind closed doors. A government is responsible to its people – not the other way around – and both would do well to remember that: history shows that governments are expendible, but the citizenry is not.

The following is nmap output over Megabus-provided wifi (en route to Boston) showing the proxied ports.

Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2010-11-02 19:39 EDT
Interesting ports on dagny.detechnis.com (173.255.227.97):
Not shown: 987 filtered ports
PORT     STATE  SERVICE
53/tcp   open   domain
80/tcp   closed http
110/tcp  closed pop3
143/tcp  closed imap
443/tcp  closed https
465/tcp  closed smtps
587/tcp  closed submission
993/tcp  closed imaps
995/tcp  closed pop3s
1863/tcp closed msnp
5190/tcp closed aol
5222/tcp closed unknown
8080/tcp closed http-proxy

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 30.28 seconds

What’s sort of annoying is that:

1. Port 22 (ssh) is blocked.
2. ICMP Time Exceeded messages are blocked (not shown), making tracepath unusable.

I will be attending the Linux Plumbers Conference and the Beer Advocate Belgian BeerFest in the coming days. More on those as they happen.