Does your D-link product need to be on ??

Borked Pseudo Mailed wrote:
"Dave (from the UK)" wrote:


You may be aware from the BBC article

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4906138.stm .

or elsewhere that there is a serious flaw on many D-link products which
get the time from the Internet using time servers. Whilst many time
servers are open for anyone to use, D-link products are using those
which are not.

The time servers being abused are owned by individuals, the military,
the US Government, some academic institutions and commercial companies.

One owner of a Dutch time server at least is incurring very large costs
due to this and even more costs in paying a consultant to find the problem.

http://people.freebsd.org/~phk/dlink/

To my knowledge no owners have asked for users to switch off their
D-link products, but given they are abusing the time servers, it would
be sensible to keep them switched off when not absolutely necessary.



Better yet, how about making the time server the thing uses configurable so that users can simply set them to use a public server... or even provide a list of acceptable servers to use.


D-link need to do that although the Danish time server will still be
affected, as only a small percentage will update firmware.

Turn it off? You MUST be joking! My operation is active 24/7/365 Turning it off costs money and the board of directors tends to frown on things that cost money without producing a larger profit. Turning off a D-Link product is one example of such.

What if the owner/admin of a time-server asked you to stop accessing
their server? Would the directors say "Tuff, we are going to leave our
D-link product(s) running, accessing your time-server, against your
published wishes and do nothing about it?"

There might well be legal implications for doing that. I suspect that
could come under laws about mis-use of computers if you are connecting
to computers you have no right to do so, and ignore requests to cease.
People pay for bandwidth, so your actions are costing them money.


--
Dave K MCSE.

MCSE = Minefield Consultant and Solitaire Expert.

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