Portscan yourself!

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

| If you only have one machine, this URL can be used to portscan yoursef.
|
| http://www.dslreports.com/scan

Interesting. It gave my gateway box a clean bill of health. But I may
do  a  bit of checking to see if I can find more details of what they
actually do.

One thing that did make me a bit nervous: They require that you  turn
on  java to run their test.  There's no obvious reason that they need
to do this, as all the java seems to do is implement a  few  buttons.
This  could  be done much more easily with a conventional <form> with
<input type=submit> buttons.  When a site uses java or javascript  to
do  such  things,  I  automatically wonder what else their downloaded
code may have been doing on my machine.  I've  used  these  languages
enough that I always keep them turned off except for single pages.  I
know some of the nasty things I could do to a client who  has  either
language enabled, and I'd bet that their programmers do, too.

Maybe I'll send them some email about it.