I'm sure he's not the only Sci-Fi author to have put these ideas into fiction. I had a great time reading his Neutronium Alchemist novels and others and seeing his description of how mind/computer interfaces could function.

I think it's a lot more realistic than Star Trek (gasp :) to imagine that future spacers will be sitting on an acceleration couch with their eyes closed--and seeing space around them as if they were outside, than to be sitting at a console with hundreds of controls, relying on the speed of electrons traveling through meat. And I loved their ability to superimpose heads-up displays onto their vision. I suppose I'm getting beyond the scope of this story...

-Aaron

I can't say specifically how you go about firewall rules and that particular equipment, but we have an inbound ACL on our gateway cisco router that blocks incoming TCP connections on port 445, which this worm uses to try and talk to vulnerable windows boxes, AFAIK.

On our 7505 that handles our customer's DSL connections, we have an outbound rule that blocks 445. It only has 53 matches after months without a counter reset.

The ACL on our border router shows tremendous amounts of matched packets. I can't recall exactly how long ago these counters were reset, I believe around a month to a month and a half:

deny tcp any any eq 445 syn (11118380 matches)
permit ip any any (358140948 matches)

That's about 3% of incoming packets. Non-scientfic, sure, but it's certainly more than a little blip on the radar. Bastards.

In the time it took to preview and edit my post, the count went up to 11118552. That took about a minute.

After tiring of the increasing load on our incoming mail servers running spamassassin, I undertook to spend a couple of days finding as many netblocks that ONLY have spam coming from them.

It's shocking really, that I ended up spending more than two days since there were so many spread out all over the place at various colo companies. And I'm sorry to say that what I found is that nearly all of the snowshoe spammers I found were riddled around in colos here in the US. There are a bunch of ISPs out there that seem to be making a bunch of money from snowshoe spammers, so much so that they don't mind allocating half of a damned /19 for the spammers to use and populate with randomly generated domain names. And, of course, just to make it easier for us poor and broke sysadmins, these colos don't just put them all into nice contiguous blocks of IP addresses. I've about given up complaining to the likes of GalaxyVisions, Pacific Internet Exchange, AboveNet (yes, Abovenet is these days hosting lots of snowshoe spammers--sad). The list goes on and on.

I'm up to ~375 netblocks we no longer accept SMTP connections from. The load average on our three MXs is usually about half what it used to be now.

I think we used a 486-class processor.. a Cyrix processor if I remember correctly, in our mail server here until 2002. So I agree with you.

Back in 1993, I think, I replaced my 486SX 33Mhz with a 486DX 66Mhz, and I remember paying $600 for the thing!