Network News

A new cyber-stalking law for Victoria, Australia, has world-wide implications, for those who stalk people on the net, or via email, impersonate others or post false information about others. See the full article HERE.

Wallops-watchers were shocked this morning to be told that Austnet's domain has expired and had been registered by someone in Kansas, and that AustNet would be closing down in the next few days. Luckily for all this was just Hawkon's April Fools day joke :)

Last night, AustNet peaked again - reaching 13919 concurrent connections. This is about the 4th time that AustNet has reached a new peak in recent history and demonstrates that our userbase and the network are growing healthily. Congrats guys and gals!

As of today, AustNet statistics for the past 24 hours will be available on the site in graph form. User count, channels, server count and IRC Operator count are all graphed, updated hourly. In coming weeks we hope to add weekly graphs and longer term graphs.

Routing has extended the kas.* server's testlink for an extra 30 days due to administrational reasons. The server's vote and DNS entrys will be remain suspended until if/when the server is permlinked.

An old worm (wkbot) has been re-released into the wild with currently a high payload. The majority of people receive this virus from kazaa/imesh/IRC. As a means to help others infected with the ident problem Austnet has ignored the idents of affected users.
The things to look out for are your ident being set to LL????? (random numbers replace the question marks) or a file called cmd32.exe or system32.exe. If you or a friend has found this then might be a good idea to take a visit into #ava for some assistance. As yet there is no fixfile for this virus and the online scanners are struggling to remove it (although they do detect it)

This virus has many malicious functions, some of these include;
Opens two randomly selected TCP and UDP ports to connect to the hacker.
Listens for the commands from the hacker using its own IRC channel.
The commands allow the hacker to perform any of the following actions:
Upgrade the worm
Steal the system/network information and send it to the hacker
Download and execute files
Perform Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against the hacker's targets
Send the worm to other IRC users
More information on this virus can be obtained from #ava or from Symantec

Today Ezekiel has been raised to level 200 ASD. This means he can now help with password retrievals, help with stolen nicknames and deal with channel suspensions. Congratulations to ezekiel, who is an asset to the Austnet Services Department!

With much demand for the latest news in these troubled times, a new channel has been set up - #newsroom, which uses an eggdrop script to run live updates from the CNN and ABC news rooms. The script updates every 3 minutes so receives the LATEST news on whats going on in the world.

In line with Digital's sponsors company restructuring, the server is now hosted by Infinite Networks. For this reason, the server has now changed names to infinite* and can be connected to on infinite.tx.us.austnet.org.

On Friday the 21st March, around 50 people from #Scumshine and ScumShine.com showed their feelings by walking to the state library in protest against the war. Afterwards, all Scumshiners went to Metro Nightclub and enjoyed a night out. We thank all the people for turning up and thank the lovely people who organized the event.