🚀 go-pugleaf

> script to find anonymous FTP sites in 1989 got jjones@cs.uiuc.edu in
> trouble; it FTP'd to a list of internet sites ending in ".com" to
> see if those sites allowed anonymous FTP.

As I remember, the state of the art in 1989 of finding anonymous FTP
sites was pretty bad.  There was no "archie", comp.archives was not
running up to speed, and what was left was a couple of attempts at
compiling an anonymous FTP site list (doomed to failure because there
was no effective verification).  x.500 stuff was just not there (not
that they're much of any use now).  Brute force was an appropriate
technology, and I'd almost argue that it's not completely
inappropriate now,

I'd say that if you ran a script now that walked down the nameservers
for *.com and looked for A and CNAME records for sites like
"ftp.mighty.com", you'd be doing a reasonable bit of network research.
You'd catch cisco, solbourne, tcs, apple, vitalink, and cayman, that
I'm aware of.  There might be others.  You wouldn't actually have to
do any FTP'ing at all, just name server traffic.  (in fact, banging
around a little bit, I find an "ftp.mips.com" which has reasonable
stuff, so I think you'd find a lot of these.)

"abuse" means you didn't write a proposal and get grant money,
otherwise it's "research".

-- 
Edward Vielmetti, MSEN Inc. 	moderator, comp.archives 	emv@msen.com

"often those with the power to appoint will be on one side of a
controversial issue and find it convenient to use their opponent's
momentary stridency as a pretext to squelch them"