As the original poster, and the author of a dozen or more Nmap scripts, I agree 100%. If you look at the tool itself, you'll see that everything is fairly separate and independent, even if they share a common codebase -- between the scripting and the "bonus" tools, the core is still fairly tight.

My comment at the end about the bloat + Emacs was intended 100% as humour, not actual commentary. I'm hoping nobody took it as a legitimate stab at Nmap, because it wasn't.

That's correct. I added a 'safe' parameter last night, since the Connficker check is safe, and have been advocating its use in all my posts (you'll see "script-args=safe=1" in everything). Watch out for that.

And for what it's worth, even if 'safe' is missing, it's only going to crash stuff that isn't patched for MS08-067.

Glad to hear it! When I wrote the ms08-067 script, I was surprised to see it posted around the Internet -- I wrote it as a demo of what Nmap can do, not as a production-grade scanner, and I guess it ended up being more useful than the other scripts that I've put *far* more work into :)

Hey guys,

I'm the author of that script, and that's exactly right. I posted a full explanation on my blog.

Google and the like don't care what your source IP is, just that you have the proper cookie. Something else is causing your problem.

(If you want proof, drag a laptop to your friends' houses, and you'll still be logged in)

Based on the context, even if somebody doesn't know the word, it should still be perfectly cromulent.

Can you be more specific? I've played that game a significant amount, and beat a handful of the campaigns, but I've never had any issues that make the game out to be less than professional.

As a disclaimer, I've never played online, so I don't know how their multiplayer gaming is set up.

What about a loudener? Speed cocker? An attachment for shooting down police helicopters?

Actually, Flash provides a write-only clipboard. It can't read the clipboard unless the user gives it permission (short of some vulnerability in Flash, of course).

Don't forget that every security patch that Microsoft releases is a hole that blackhats could already have been exploiting. Patches created now could (and often do) fix vulnerabilities dating back to the release of Windows 2000 or Windows NT. There's no way to guarantee that the holes aren't known and exploited by others.

That being said, any system with proper firewalling mitigates much of the issue. If the only port open to the public network is the one running the proxy software (or whatever it is), then there is very little attack surface.