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  From: Alan Kennington <akenning@dog.topology.org>
  To  : Dan Shearer <dan@linuxcare.com>
  Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 10:38:42 +091800

Re: why netbios-ns?

On Mon, Apr 17, 2000 at 09:59:47AM +0930, Dan Shearer wrote:
> 
> IE attempts to do authentication via port 137 (utterly outside any W3
> standard) thus giving would-be crackers yet another route into
> personal machines. I'm sure that experimenting would soon find a right
> sort of malformed packet that would do bad things to M$ machines.

Hmmm. Then I ask myself why only a tiny minority (about 5%)
of browsers visiting my site use this netbios "authentication".
And I also ask myself why I only started seeing this a few weeks ago.
(Maybe I didn't firewall the port before then....).
The low percentage makes me think that it must be part of
the new wind2k OS. [See PS below.]

On a related point, I've been using PHP3 to record the browser 
name for all the browsers that visit my site. I don't get a single
explicit IE browser. I do get things like this though:

    Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)

I thought Mozilla [see PPS below] was supposed to be netscape,
and yet the IE browsers all apparently say "Mozilla"
Very strange. Does this mean that IE is pretending to be Netscape?

My list of browsers visiting my site is at
http://topology.org/wwwdbrowsers1.txt

Cheers,
Alan Kennington.

================================================================
PS. I use abbreviations like wind2k instead of win2k because
the word window is derived from some old English compound word
"wind hole", because before the invention of glass, people used
to make a hole in the wall to let out evil vapours.
So I prefer to break the word wind-ow at its natural break-point.
Obviously the MS marketing people thought that the word element
"wind" had "marketing limitations". That's what they said about
rape seed until they found the name "canola", which is short for
"Canadian oil" because it was genetically bred in Canada.
It's interesting to note that "windows 2000" in old English would
have been "wind-holes 2000".

PPS. In Spanish, "mozilla" means little girl. I think it's a colloquial
hispanoamerican term.

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