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 It has come to our attention that a certain number of individuals [Trolls ] have been defaming the author of sharkpost, Sharkpost, and this site. Making malicious and baseless claims about one of the most sickening things we've ever encountered.
It first began with one person calling himself the "Usenet Freedom Fighters", accusing the author of possible Malware injection into Sharkpost. While the person was unable to provide evidence of his claims, he stood firmly in repeating the same baseless lie year after year after year. This type of propaganda is commonly known as "The Big Lie ".
The primary rules of the Big Lie are: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a
fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your
enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame;
concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that
goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and
if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe
it
We'll don't hide anything at Sharkpost -- so we show you the ridiculous claim by the "UFF".
Some people have believed that the program is "safe" to use
because their firewall prevents it from accessing anything other than
their news-provider. This belief is in error because the program has no
need to access anything on the Internet EXCEPT their news provider, in
order to do it's "dirty work." How?
Read on for one method.
All UseNet messages have MIDs (Message Identification codes,) where
each message as supposed to have an unique MID. A typical MID looks
like this:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
30- or so -
letters/numbers before the @-sign. What comes after the @-sign is of no
interest to us. The method of encoding what comes BEFORE the @-sign is.
Typically that is a random sequence, intended to have a high
probability that it is unique. The person who distributes "Sharkpost"
aka "Narcpost or Narkpost," as demonstrated his ability to code the
MID-generator, by hacking the MID-generator in Forté Agent. Here is a
typical MID of his:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
The "3f" is a signature of his- all his MIDs will begin with that. It
is hexadecimal, and is the ASCII code for the question-mark ('?')- 2004
is the year, 03 is the month, 06 is the day, 234147z is the time (the
"z" or "Z" is for zulu, which is the international designation for
Greenwich time.) The balance of the MID may be random, but isn't
relevant. All that is relevant is that he has demonstrated the ability
to hack/code a MID-generator that accesses system resources (the
date/time.) Remember all that as you read on.
A posting program must have two things: It must have disc-drive/local network access, and it must have Internet access in order to function at all. A coder can easily write a function that gathers personally identifying information, including the current IP, and store that information in a table in memory. The MID generator of that program could easily take the information from that table-
for purposes of discussion only, let us say ten (10) bytes at a time - and "fold" that information into an encrypted MID using an MD-5 or SHA-1 hash algorithm, (for example) along with the date/time (to make each MID unique;) using all the information in the table sequentially and recycling the table for large posts.
A typical binary file is posted in several segments with each segment having an unique MID. A single binary file containing 12 segments could thus pass 120 characters of personally-identifying information to anyone having the program to decode its MIDs. There is no software on earth that could be used to detect or prevent such an action. No virus scanner, no firewall, nothing.
I am not proposing that this _is_ being done in Sharkpost, I am simply saying that it _can_ be done.
So if you understood what the author of that was claiming - he claims that Sharkpost, which he refers to as "Narcpost", might be sending private information on users through the Message-ID. He states clearly that _isn't_ being done but suggests it can be done, however he still refers to the program as a "narc" tool based on a claim of "might" be done.
An independent investigation on whether Sharkpost was sending information through the Message-ID was done on a local News Server with only one group. After sending messages, the investigator checked the server logs for errors which would occur if the program attempted to contact any other group or service. No errors were found.
You can easily check yourself by setting up your own (quarantined) news server (Linux or Free/Net/OpenBSD + INN for example) and posting to it with Sharkpost.
The next malicious claim is that this site is a front for pedophile activities, and Sharkpost is the tool of choice for spreading child pornography. While this claim is the most ridicilous, it is also the most harmful. As Google now records Usenet groups to the web forums these messages from this malicous troll are unable to be removed.
Usually we do not comment on what trolls do in Usenet however this type
of malicious attack against the site, the author, and the program has
made us decide to take a stand against it. It is slander and it is
Illegal and we wanted you to know.
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