On Thu, 4 Jun 2009, Judith in France wrote
On Jun 4, 11:57*am, Sacha wrote:
On 2009-06-04 10:54:12 +0100, Martin said:



On Thu, 4 Jun 2009 10:41:51 +0100, "RG" wrote:

No-one accused you of hacking anything. We took at face value your claim
that your friend was hacking into peoples' computers.

Now that you have admitted your story was a pack of lies, I will not take
the matter further.
However I cannot speak for others, and if someone else has called in the
police it will be *you* who is guilty of wasting police time for making up
the story.

I sincerely hope that you have learned a lesson about your
behaviour on this
and other newsgroups.
This thread will remain on Google, Yahoo, etc for future reference.

and all those *"forums" that hack stuff from urg and pretend it is
all part of
their forum.

The point surely is that nobody now knows whether this is another of
Crowe's lies? *He told us he had been present when someone had hacked
into an urgler's computer and that he intended to find out how that is
done.
He's changing his story to pretend it's all some urban myth. *How do we
know he's not lying to cover his back having been threatened with the
police? *Why would a man who says now he barely knows how to turn on
his computer, think that this group which is full of *very*
computer-savvy people needs any kind of lesson in computer security
from him? *Even his over-stuffed ego can't render him that stupid,
surely?
I do not believe this about-face. *One way or the other Crowe is lying
or has lied and is playing his usual hand of "I did it it for your own
good" or "you should read what I really wrote" etc. *We've seen this
sort of thing from him dozens of times but this time, his desire to
boast has got him into hot water.
IMO, he did exactly what he said in the first place and now is
pretending it's all some urban myth, using one of his favourite
bugbears to do so, because a member of urg is consulting the police
about it. * What kind of nutcase puts out a claim like that and then
tells another that he hopes it's been a lesson to him on his computer's
security?! *I think he's guilty as hell and that finally, his
vainglorious boasting has turned on him and has potentially put him up
to his neck in real trouble.

--
--
Sachawww.hillhousenursery.com
Shrubs & perennials. Tender & exotics.
South Devon

I am not computer savvy, it would be pointless pretending I was, I
would be sussed out in a second. However, I got my husband to read
this thread; he says we are behind a firewall and we are safe but he
has taken the post seriously and is to get advice on it from some real
savvy computer people, I'll let you know the outcome as this is quite
worrying. We have a lot of financial matters on our computers; the
thought of someone being able to ... well. I have no doubt the claims
made earlier will be pursued by someone as this is quite dangerous if
it is true.


If it's true. The stuff about getting into someone else's computer -
it's possible, of course, computers get hacked all the time, but it
takes a lot of time and effort and usually some kind of back-door trojan
to open the door. If you look at a firewall log you can see innumerable
fly-by attempts to look in, but most of these are automatic and even the
bog-standard Windows firewall will block most of them. If you're in a
network behind a router you should be OK unless you've accidentally
downloaded a trojan, which is why it's good sense to run something like
Spybot Search and Destroy every so often to clear out anything remotely
smelly.

But monitoring a newsgroup in the way he describes is not possible.
What's more likely is that he's just looked at the headers, where
there's a list of all those who have actually responded to a thread.
But even there, anyone who posts through gardenbanter or googlegroups or
even news.individual.net, will only be identified by the posting
organisation. *Email* message headers usually include IP information
that can be traced back to the sender (if the headers haven't been
doctored, as they are in most spam), but usenet posts have message-ids
that are so encrypted that it would take the security department of the
ISP involved to trace the sender.

In any case, I can't take anyone seriously who can't even manage to
reply above the sig separator.

--
Kate B

PS 'elvira' is spamtrapped - please reply to 'elviraspam' at cockaigne dot org dot uk if you
want to reply personally