Wasted ASCII

I recently got into a debate with a guy in one of my favorite forums. He was arguing that it was very easy to compromise the integrity of the EFF’s Tor network, and that he could put up a bogus bank site and hijack credentials and such.

I went on for at least 5 well thought-out responses — detailing at various levels why his fears were not completely justified. Regardless of what I said, however, he just charged forward with the same FUD.

I finally just put it all one the table and asked him if he thought he had figured out a way to completely compromise the integrity of this network that DARPA took years to develop. He essentially said yes, but in about 100 words that I barely understood. At that point I bowed out of the debate.

A few minutes later, a buddy of mine on the forum IM’ed me and told me that this guy I had wasted all this time on had tangled with him as well. Evidently, he had at one point set up a proxy on his system for his friends to use.

The clincher was that he was doing it so that they would all have a new Internet source IP in the 192.168.x.x range — since that’s the range he used on his LAN.

The moral? Don’t waste ASCII. If someone is that far gone, read the signs and get out early.