I'm sending this to you at about 2:30AM, since I just got home from being out. I work so much, I rarely have time to be on IRC. Which brings me to my letter (which FYI, I'm typing real-time; I did not type this prior to right now).

It's recently been brought to my attention that there's someone on IRC (EFNet) who's attempting to impersonate me. It was bound to happen sooner or later. It doesn't surprise me.

For those of you who aren't "network aware," some DNS (Domain Name Servers: things used to convert a site to a number. You know, parodius.com = 206.190.135.249, etc.) servers have a security bug in them, allowing someone with the correct software to "fake" hosts on the 'net.

This process is known as "DNS spoofing." The process is simple, and so is the solution (which not many system administrators seem to be capable of fixing, due to pure laziness).

Before DNS spoofing, we had spoofing which allowed someone to show up on IRC from a particular host. Say you did a /WHOIS on the nickname "FooBar", and his user@host showed up as "root@netscape.com". This was possible long ago, but the problem with it was, if you'd /CTCP VERSION these people, they wouldn't come back with a response. You'd then know they were a fake.

DNS spoofing completely destroys this method of verification, since due to the bug in DNS servers, IRC servers will actually connect to your real IP number, under the assumption that you *ARE* the domain spoofed. In English: You'll be able to /CTCP VERSION, /PING, and communicate with someone who's DNS spoofing as if they were real. At-least it LOOKS like they're real.

Back to my point (EGO) since this involves me (/EGO).

Apparently someone is showing up on the EFNet as "YOSHi". That is, Yoshi with the letter "oh". They use DNS spoofing to place their user@host as "yoshi@parodius.com". They even bother to set their IRCNAME to "http://yoshi.parodius.com/".

This person (or persons) have/has been joining the #emu channel and requesting ops, causing trouble, and taking it over.

Everyone knows my nickname is spelt with a zero, not the letter "oh". I used the /NICK "Yoshi" in nearly a year, and even then it wasn't spelt using upper-case letters and the like.

Secondly, I never join #emu. I want nothing to do with the channel. Everyone, and anyone, knows this.

Thirdly, and most importantly, why. Why would someone do this? Boredom is my guess. Envy is another. If you really think about it, however, am I really to be envied? Not really. I'm not a celebrity. I don't want to be. I'm just me.

Rumour has it, the EFNet channel #h2h has something to do with the multitude of incidents. Now, I'm not pointing any fingers. I don't know this for sure. Just rumours. I wouldn't be surprised if they were true however, since the inhabitants call themselves "Hack2Hack" -- where I come from, hacking was done for self-educational purposes, not for amusement or for a quick laugh. There's *ABSOLUTELY NOTHING* intellectually impressive about DNS spoofing. It takes no skill. It takes no intelligence. It's plain lame. It's not hacking -- it's just stupid, and harms DNS servers.

By now, I'm sure some of you are wondering just how to figure out who's spoofed and who's not. Try using /STATS L. You'll figure it out. Just remember, the real IP of parodius.com is 206.190.135.249.

I don't know if this article is going to increase the number of occurances or if this is really going to "hit home" on the culprit(s). I hope it does, as my hope is that they realize every time they DNS spoof, they just make themselves look even less talented.

In today's society, little kids always want someone to look up to. Remember the slogan, "I Wanna Be Like Mike." It sure paid off, because children of all ages today seem to still believe in so-called mentors. Mentors are good people, usually. But in American society today, kids look up to negative people: black "gangstahs" out of Compton, Mike Tyson, Rush Limbaugh, Garth Brooks ( :-) ). There's really nothing positive in these people. The "in" thing is to "be bad," to be different. If you really want to make a difference, be yourself. By trying to be different, you create the stereotype.

Sure, I have my mentors, but they have nothing to do with baggy pants, biting ears, political lies, nor Wheaties.

(Thanks to Mike R. (you know who you are) for the tidbits of info that the incidents were occurring at all. I owe ya.)

Related Links

Yoshi Leaves article

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