Re:Me Average Joe (Score 1)

I go to school at the University of Washington(where Dittrich works) and actually work for C&C(the division Dave works for). I remember, back in the days of living in the UW dormitories(voted 3rd most dungeon-like in the US) we had ethernet; we also had filters on our routers to prevent people from setting up servers. THe filters simply denied incoming TCP/IP packets -- but things like ICQ still worked. Why? Because ICQ is started on -your- machine, by packets being sent initially to Mirabilis. This opens a connection, which the router continues to allow, since it was initiated from the inside. There are various little ways to get around said filters which certain people figured out, but those weren't the people you had to worry about(security wise).