Flashes of Panic

I’m in Amherst for the weekend, despite aforementioned quantities of C to be written. I had hoped to have spent five or six hours, by now, holed up in the College library hacking away. I’ve actually managed about two hours of work, and not at the library.

It turns out that, while the library allows guest registration to its wireless network, it’s pretty tight about what kind of traffic is allowed in and out. HTTP and HTTPS traffic, no problem. Retrieving POP and IMAP mail, no problem. Sending mail with SMTP, with or without SSL, no dice. And, the deal-breaker from my point of view, no SSH connections to my University accounts.

I can understand filtering outbound SMTP aggressively; that’s a legitimate anti-spam, anti-malware-contagion step for an open network. But SSH? Almost by definition, an SSH user is making an encrypted connection to a remote system; most likely they’re a registered user there, but either way, they’re not causing trouble for your network. What’s the sense in blocking them?

I went to the local public library and found the same network situation. Ironically, the only place (other than the private network I’m now on) where I was able to get connected was the bakery/coffeeshop where I had lunch.

Any ideas about why you’d filter SSH on a public network? Are those brute-force SSHd attacks still around?

Now Playing: You Dirty Rat from Sister by Letters To Cleo