[Gllug] UK hit by major ADSL outage

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Wed, 2001-11-21 at 12:47, Richard Cohen wrote:

> On Wed, 21 Nov 2001, Rev Simon Rumble wrote:
> As I understand it, I have a line which is an entirely generic BT ADSL line.
> When I 'login', I request a connection to a Freeserve server from the other
> end of my virtual serial cable, and that is then my Internet connection.  If
> I just brought up the 'line' and started PPP on it, the BT ADSL factilies
> wouldn't know where to connect my virtual serial line to.  In other words, I
> could probably go round to my friends place and put my Freeserve account
> details into his Easynet ADSL setup and have a Freeserve connection come up,
> with my IP address and all.  I don't think there's much intelligence based
> on the source of the 'line'.

You could indeed. I did it for about 6 months. Unintentionally, and due
to a collective administrative pooch-screw on the part of 2 ISP's, but
nevertheless, I was using an Easynet service, over a Demon provisioned
line. That said, I think that have now put things in place to prevent
cross ISP connections.

> They could probably do without passwords, but once they're doing usernames,
> they might as well do passwords.  It stops people pretending to be other
> people, if nothing else, so if the ISP needs to come after you for anything
> (spam, etc.), they know who you are with at last *some* confidence.

Probably, but then your username would be a "password" of sorts...

Mike.


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