cursed pirated DCC software

Someone apparently in Europe is distributing some sort of ancient and
custom-broken version of the DCC client code.  It likes to poke at a
DCC server that has not been answering anonymous clients for years.

I have tried for months to discover the perpetrators.  The perverted
code seems to be common on dial-up lines or other dynamically assigned
IP addresses in Europe with some users in Northern Africa and South
America.  My most recent tactic was been to ask ISPs that own the
address blocks in question.  I thought I was making progress in France
when an ISP responded to an early version of the form letter I've been
sending by asking for log entries showing good timestamps.  Nothing
came of that until today when they responded with nosnense about not
finding its IP addresses "in the heading of the original mal" as if I
were complaining about spam.  It went on to instruct me me on how to
figure out IP addresses, use http://www.nic.fr/cgi-bin/whois,
http://www.geektools.com/, and their lame web form.

Unless someone thinks it is a bad idea, I will changed tactics to
blacklist the address blocks of such ISPs for the public DCC servers.
I will send a couple of reports over a couple weeks, and then add to
the blacklist.  Perhaps when those or other end users find little or
no joy from current public DCC servers, they will complain to their
ISPs or the perpetrator of the broken code and someone will fix the
broken code, recall it, or at least accept responsibility for it.

See 
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/dcc/client-blacklist


Vernon Schryver    vjs@rhyolite.com