The State of AntiOnline
Mon Jun 21 00:05:48 MDT 1999
ATTRITION Staff


Sometime today, in the most reliable section of AntiOnline (the reader mailbag),
JP responded to reader comments regarding why he had begun to deny all HREF
links from ATTRITION to AntiOnline.

   "Yes, Brain Martin is screaming that I'm unprofessional because I put him 
   on my denied referer list. Because I have something to 'hide', as he says. 
   Truth be known, the reason attrition is on my denied referer list is because 
   they put up a bunch of links on their sites designed to trigger our network
   monitoring stations, and bring up snide little messages from Martin himself. 
   I wanted nothing to do with him, or his silly little games to become some sort 
   of 'Cult Hero' as he calls himself, so I blocked referers from him and all of 
   his little goons. I know his heart is broken, but he'll just have to cope."

Rather than take the time to explain everything in great detail, we'll just
list all the problems we find in this statement.

   1. Journalist can't even spell "Brian" right.

   2. Unprofessional for SEVERAL reasons, not just this.

   3. So if that explains the deny on Attrition, why the deny on HackerNews
      DisOrg, and OSALL who did no such thing? (caught in a hasty excuse again)

   4. Those HREF lines will only trigger IDS written by fourth graders.
      href="http://www.antionline.com/cgi-bin/phf-is-really-ereet/..
      Any fourth grader can see this is not a valid attempt at exploitation.

   5. "From Martin himself". Five admins here, and I am automagically guilty.

   6. Personal attack against a nickname. Rather than answer the allegations,
      he must resort to diverting attention on something so trivial as 
      a nickname.

   7. Once again, that professional behavior. "his little goons"


For those of you following the recent AntiOnline saga, there is a lot more going
on behind the scenes that JP will not tell you about. We will :)


Downtime

Earlier today (6.20.99), the main AntiOnline page found the mailbag updated, along
with this message:

   A Note To Our Users: There will be no further updates until
   Wednesday, due to upgrades to our infrastructure. We apologize for
   this, but look for a large site update Wednesday morning.

One can't help but wonder what goes on at AntiOnline. Part time hobby news sites 
are updating with more frequent news. Yet this 500,000 dollar organization
can't seem to produce even one new piece a day?

In the last week or two, even Attrition staff have released more original
and breaking news pieces than AntiOnline. 


AntiBot, AntiSearch and Attrition

Sometime around 5.3.99, the AntiOnline search engine (AntiSearch), which is
populated by a utility called "AntiBot" (footprint: "Phantom/2.2f8 AntiBot")
stopped archiving and referring visitors to Attrition. Despite AntiSearch
giving Attrition based URLs to over 1000 AntiOnline visitors, JP claimed
his engine would no longer support a "temple of hate".

   From: John Vranesevich (JP@antionline.com)
   To: dc-stuff@merde.dis.org
   Date: Mon, 03 May 1999 19:56:23 -0400
   Subject: Re: JP, Rip-off artist (fwd)

   Greetings:

   As for you being upset that I removed attrition from our search engine.  Now 
   honestly, why would we set up our search engine to supply links to a site 
   which is quickly becoming little more than a temple of hate?  

That said, I wonder if Mr. Vranesevich would care to explain his sudden change 
of heart? Between June 19 and June 20, AntiBot was responsible for at least
3458 hits to the Attrition server. Better, AntiBot's poor coding lead it to
attempt to archive over 1500 files that didn't exist. If JP and AntiSearch
are not supporting this "Temple of Hate", why is the AntiBot so interested
in our site? Don't get us wrong, we'd rather see the information we offer used
for all people, JP included. Just seems a bit hypocritical to us. Lets look at 
the proof:

The file "anti-access" and "anti-error" were generated using grep and looking
for either "AntiBot" or the IP it came from.

Here we show the first and last hit the past few days:

forced /home/admin# head -1 anti-access 
209.166.177.38 - - [19/Jun/1999:17:39:23 -0600] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 403 341 "-" "Phantom/2.2f8 AntiBot"
forced /home/admin# tail -1 anti-access                             
209.166.177.38 - - [20/Jun/1999:15:44:57 -0600] "GET /mirror/attrition/com/www.phrack.com/about/hfglogo.jpg HTTP/1.0" 200 27634 "-" "Phantom/2.2f8 AntiBot"

Here you can see not only the errors, but the directory structure it was 
attempting to archive. JP was notified of this bug over six months ago BTW.

forced /home/admin# head -1 anti-error 
[Sun Jun  6 02:58:22 1999] [error] [client 206.191.90.139] File does not exist: /home/web/livewire/payphones/photo/
forced /home/admin# tail -1 anti-error 
[Sun Jun  6 03:05:37 1999] [error] [client 206.191.90.139] File does not exist: /home/web/livewire/payphones/usa/missing/
forced /home/admin# 

And a total of how many hits it generated.. just short of 5000 total!

forced /home/admin# wc -l anti*
   3458 anti-access
   1527 anti-error
   4985 total
forced /home/admin# 


Our Special

To this day, JP and AntiOnline still haven't responded to our special report in 
an adult fashion. Once again, we must ask about JP's double standards. When he
releases an article libeling members of Attrition and other businesses, all
with no backing, it is acceptable. Yet when Attrition releases their own report
giving explicit detail, email, IRC logs, and logical conclusions, JP runs around
screaming 'libel', while his other full time admin threaten the same?

   From otter.happyhacker.org IRC server:
   IrcLog061099:(NetShad0w) were fixin to open the can of woop ass
   IrcLog061099:(NetShad0w) Net-security.org.. attriton... bron buster... HNN (lopht)
   IrcLog061099:(RedPen) why NetShad0w?
   IrcLog061099:(NetShad0w) Libel

NetShad0w is Brad Davis of AntiOnline. The "other guy" working full time.

Conclusion

How can a site/business caught in so many lies, so many hypocritical statements,
continue to function? Why do people continue to visit the site when they can
get more reliable news, a better source for files and exploits, and a 
better and more unbiased search engine?

With so many fallacies, so many obvious lies, and so many pathetic excuses,
don't you think it's time to move on?