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A new account from nowhere?



 
 
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  #1  
Old March 1st 19, 09:23 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Rene Lamontagne
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,549
Default A new account from nowhere?

Suddenly from nowhere a new account has shown up in my Thunderbird
newsreader called Freenews.netfront.net!!!!!
I did not set this up nor did anything to bring it up, It just appeared
out of nowhere. I tested it and it seems to be Functional.
I will now switch to it and send a test message to this newsgroup.
This is very strange indeed, Any Ideas?

Rene
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  #2  
Old March 1st 19, 09:33 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Rene Lamontagne
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,549
Default A new account from nowhere?

On 03/01/2019 2:23 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
Suddenly from nowhere a new account has shown up in my Thunderbird
newsreader called Freenews.netfront.net!!!!!
I did not set this up nor did anything to bring it up, It just appeared
out of nowhere. I tested it and it seems to be Functional.
I will now switch to it and send a test message to this newsgroup.
This is very strange indeed, Any Ideas?

Rene


OK, I just tried to send a post using this new account and got a text
message box stating that that account does not accept newsgroups but
only e-mails. So it's got me puzzled, as it is listed at the bottom of
my newsgroup accounts.

Rene
  #3  
Old March 1st 19, 09:47 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
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Posts: 11,873
Default A new account from nowhere?

Rene Lamontagne wrote:
Suddenly from nowhere a new account has shown up in my Thunderbird
newsreader called Freenews.netfront.net!!!!!
I did not set this up nor did anything to bring it up, It just appeared
out of nowhere. I tested it and it seems to be Functional.
I will now switch to it and send a test message to this newsgroup.
This is very strange indeed, Any Ideas?

Rene


Thunderbird has context sensitive behavior and a set
of honored URIs (not URLs, it's a different thing).

As a result of this, if you feed it a URI, it can
even do neat things like set up accounts. And if you
were using a free news server, the account setup
might actually work. Whereas for username/password
protected accounts, it might make a mess (it will
do the preliminaries, but not get the details right).

In terms of email account setup, Mozilla+staff have
tried to automate setup of well-known email addresses.
Again, making some guesses or inserting their own
preferences for connect method. Which might include
encrypted incoming and outgoing port types.

So while I'm not up on the details as to how you
achieved this specific plum, the capabilities are in there.
It's wired for monkey business...

*******

When you get the Thunderbird error

"You cannot send to two servers at once"

this was an architecture design mistake in the newsreader
code. The fix is like this. If you're sending to these groups

alt.comp.os.windows-10
comp.sys.acorn

you change the syntax so it reads like this. You set all
the groupnames in the crosspost, to the *same* server.
This is an alternate supported syntax for TB newsgroup names.

news.eternal-september.org/alt.comp.os.windows-10
news.eternal-september.org/comp.sys.acorn

On transmission, Thunderbird says "I see what you did there"
and it changes the message header before transmission back to

alt.comp.os.windows-10
comp.sys.acorn

but sends the message out through "news.eternal-september.org"
as instructed. What that does, is prevents it from examining
all newsserver newsgroup lists and randomly trying to send
the message to multiple servers at the same time.

So the

news.eternal-september.org/alt.comp.os.windows-10

is an example of a URI. There are a total of four formats
for newsgroup headers, and that's the second format.

Thunderbird might also attempt to use a MID from the
command line.

Maybe you could do something like this.

thunderbird alt.burp
thunderbird

then see what a mess it made, or what the reaction was.

The first might attempt to add an alt.burp subscription
to one of your newsservers. In the past, this lead to
users "unintentionally" adding "fragments" to Thunderbird.
This happened enough, not only did Thunderbird have
certain magical URI formats, it also needed the addition
of "fragment filters" so that obvious too-short garbage
entries would automatically be prevented from being
added to accounts, and scaring the crap out of people.

So when your default email client is Thunderbird, you
right click, copy something perhaps, it may be possible
to cause the OS to use COM to send what looks like a URI
to Thunderbird as your preferred agent. And then Thunderbird
says to itself "Oh, he wants to add some netfront.net acct".
And then the automation runs amok, the string is longer
than a fragment, and so on. The account setup pre-baked
table may have an entry for the freenews variant.

If you download the source tarball for Thunderbird,
you might pick some of this stuff up. When I used to
get the "send to two servers" error, that ****ed me
off enough, I started reading source code. And that's
where I figured out the fix for my "problem".

At one time, they didn't monkey with the newsreader
code in there. It was as if "no developer wanted to
touch it" (the code for newsreading, was imported
from Netscape Communicator). But their reserved nature
has changed over the years, and that code is likely
entirely different now (since more asynchronous behaviors
are in the code and it behaves like a nutbar inside).

Best guess,
Paul
  #4  
Old March 1st 19, 10:03 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
😉 Good Guy 😉
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,483
Default A new account from nowhere?

On 01/03/2019 20:23, Rene Lamontagne wrote:

This is very strange indeed, Any Ideas?



Yes we do have many ideas here. For example, because of your advanced
age, you must have clicked on a link such as this:

Old Nutter can Click this
news://freenews.netfront.net/alt.comp.os.windows-10


This works alright here after subscribing to various newsgroups.



--
With over 950 million devices now running Windows 10, customer
satisfaction is higher than any previous version of windows.

  #5  
Old March 1st 19, 10:11 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Andy Burns[_6_]
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Posts: 1,318
Default A new account from nowhere?

Rene Lamontagne wrote:

Suddenly from nowhere a new account has shown up in my Thunderbird
newsreader called Freenews.netfront.net!!!!!


maybe you clicked on a URL like

nntp://freenews.netfront.net/some.or.other.group


  #6  
Old March 1st 19, 10:19 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Rene Lamontagne
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,549
Default A new account from nowhere?

On 03/01/2019 3:11 PM, Andy Burns wrote:
Rene Lamontagne wrote:

Suddenly from nowhere a new account has shown up in my Thunderbird
newsreader called Freenews.netfront.net!!!!!


maybe you clicked on a URL like

nntp://freenews.netfront.net/some.or.other.group



No, I am very cautious about what I click on, I always check and make
sure I know what I an choosing for a purpose.
I guess I will just delete it for it serves no purpose.

Rene

  #7  
Old March 2nd 19, 12:48 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
VanguardLH[_2_]
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Posts: 10,881
Default A new account from nowhere?

Rene Lamontagne wrote:

Path: uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail
From: Rene Lamontagne
...
Suddenly from nowhere a new account has shown up in my Thunderbird
newsreader called Freenews.netfront.net!!!!!
I did not set this up nor did anything to bring it up, It just appeared
out of nowhere. I tested it and it seems to be Functional.
I will now switch to it and send a test message to this newsgroup.
This is very strange indeed, Any Ideas?


Your test post was NOT sent through Freenews. It was sent using
individual.net as proven by the injection node in the Path header.

From what I found online, freenews.netfront.net (in Hong Kong) might be
a read-only server. However, when I use a telnet session to check,
"telnet freenews.netfront.net 119" reports back a status of "200
news.netfront.net InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.4.6 (20090602 snapshot)
ready (posting ok)." Their status says posting is okay (allowed).

_They spamify posts sent through their server(s)_
Their NNTP server spamifies posts through it by append a fake
signature block of "--- news://freenews.netfront.net/". 3 dashes,
space, and a bunch of following text is not a valid sigblock
delimiter, and they know that. They don't want their spam hidden from
users that configure their NNTP clients to hide signatures (which are
rarely on-topic, often ego-stroking fluff, or spam). A valid sig
delimiter line is 2 dashes, space, and a newline (the sig starts on
the NEXT line). As such, anyone using Netfront chooses to be their
spam affiliate, and should get filtered out along with other spammers.

Who else has physical access to your computer? Who else shares this
same computer? Did you configure Windows to bypass the login screen by
using auto-login, so anyone can log into your Windows account on that
computer?
  #8  
Old March 2nd 19, 01:43 AM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10
Rene Lamontagne
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 2,549
Default A new account from nowhere?

On 03/01/2019 5:48 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
Rene Lamontagne wrote:

Path: uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail
From: Rene Lamontagne
...
Suddenly from nowhere a new account has shown up in my Thunderbird
newsreader called Freenews.netfront.net!!!!!
I did not set this up nor did anything to bring it up, It just appeared
out of nowhere. I tested it and it seems to be Functional.
I will now switch to it and send a test message to this newsgroup.
This is very strange indeed, Any Ideas?


Your test post was NOT sent through Freenews. It was sent using
individual.net as proven by the injection node in the Path header.

From what I found online, freenews.netfront.net (in Hong Kong) might be
a read-only server. However, when I use a telnet session to check,
"telnet freenews.netfront.net 119" reports back a status of "200
news.netfront.net InterNetNews NNRP server INN 2.4.6 (20090602 snapshot)
ready (posting ok)." Their status says posting is okay (allowed).

_They spamify posts sent through their server(s)_
Their NNTP server spamifies posts through it by append a fake
signature block of "--- news://freenews.netfront.net/". 3 dashes,
space, and a bunch of following text is not a valid sigblock
delimiter, and they know that. They don't want their spam hidden from
users that configure their NNTP clients to hide signatures (which are
rarely on-topic, often ego-stroking fluff, or spam). A valid sig
delimiter line is 2 dashes, space, and a newline (the sig starts on
the NEXT line). As such, anyone using Netfront chooses to be their
spam affiliate, and should get filtered out along with other spammers.

Who else has physical access to your computer? Who else shares this
same computer? Did you configure Windows to bypass the login screen by
using auto-login, so anyone can log into your Windows account on that
computer?


Thanks for the research you did on this VanguardLH.
I am the sole user of this machine and no one else can access or use it.
I live alone in an apartment and do not have friends using the system.
So not knowing how it actually got there I deleted the account, so one
less problem.

Thanks, Rene

 




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