[plug] SOOTYS: Internet treasure hunt.

[Andrew Pamment]

hi there,

this is sort of off topic yet serious, but then, i forgot what the topic 
was ages ago. umm i had an idea, kindof like an internet treasure hunt. 
a lot of people are vaguly interested in learning a bit more about the 
internet and networks and stuff, and it's can be pretty hard to 
understand for those of us who arn't born geniouses.

my idea (although, it's proberly been thought of before) wouldn't be so 
much like finding information on the internet that you learn from, but 
the actual finding itself.

for example, most people have no idea what telnet is, or ftp let alone 
understanding the whole idea of ports, sockets, ip addresses and such. 
some of these people i am sure are curious, but feel put off by the 
whole complexity of it. so they just type in www.yahoo.com and get there 
email with absolutly no idea what is going on.

i'm not saying this would be good for learning advanced routing and 
such, but may just be a kind of, for interest's sake thing. does that 
make sense? people who are just curious and have a few questions but 
can't find anyone that speaks their language to explain it to them.

a little like when you go to see the stars through a telescope, you 
don't plan on becoming an astronomer, but you're curious.

ok, i think that makes sense, now on to the idea..

perhaps, a series of servers, say, a telnet server somewhere, a web page 
on a non standard port, an ftp server that requires a log in.. and so 
on, could be set up on the internet at various places, people then need 
to go to these places to get the information on where the next step of 
the hunt is, and some information explaining what they have just done.

this is just an idea i came up with this morning, so please feel free to 
tell me how crap it is, but if anyone has any comments or suggestions 
i'd like to hear them.

i had further ideas, like a telnet (proberly a fake type of shell login 
for security's sake) that allowed you to run a (fake again) traceroute 
to a fixed site, you then have to go to a certain server, say number 
five on the list, which went on to explain what traceroute just did, 
what ICMP is, a world that most people don't even know exist.

I think something like this, an easy, and fun (so it doesn't put people 
off) way of understanding the basic principles of the internet and how 
it works, may possibly be a good way of raising awareness for basic good 
security practices, like what a firewall is, why you should have one.

in a way a bit like sex education as well. most people i believe think 
their win98 machine is in their home and not vunerable on the internet, 
like somehow they're on the internet but not part of it.

i don't know if it could tie in with linux.conf.au 2003, seems that's 
really for professionals, but perhaps, it could be a good way of getting 
the general public curious about the whole thing, and maybe even get 
some people interested in the internet, networks and linux that would 
not have usually gotten interested.

does this sound like a good idea to anyone other than me?

andrew

-- 
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    just look at those he gives it to.