We had a wonderfull time playing fligh simulator (remeber becoming so often a peperoni pizza) or dungeon of moria with PLATO when I was freshmen
A friend of mine (I'm a debian sysadmin) has developped a tool to find who is downloading a given file in realtime. It is used by police to track chlidren porn downloader in several european contries. It's quite effective and has a long strory of success. I wanted to sell that product to the police of my country (european) to track those guys but they wanted to use it to track music downloaders (our license restrict the use of the tool to track chlidren porn downloaders). We did not agree here but in other places we did. So I know for sure that those kind of tools is around for years...
Why should a (web)server be allowed to issue any request ? It should be configured to answer queries only, no ? iptables is great and easy to set up for that task. Even for software update, one may push the package needed to the target server in place of the usual pull from the target; so no exceptions are needed on the firewall.
For desktops it's a little bit more complicated... but using a home partition mounted with noexec should suffice. Installing a new software is not a casual issue but a real event and should be taken care of by someone knowing what he's doing. That's why root was invented, isn't it ?
I don't have the capacity to resist posting...
The only place I've ever seen LED light bulbs is at http://www.ccrane.com/lights/led-light-bulbs/. Not associated with this company at all, they just send me a catalog every now and then. I'd definitely be interested in these, but the cost is still to high.
Our business in life is not to succeed but to continue to fail in high spirits. -- Robert Louis Stevenson