listening to ports...

B

brown monk

Registered
i'm behind a linux box that my roommate maintains and i have no access to try this...

but if one were to listen to port 80 (http default port) what would one see? all sites that one visits?

and if so, can one block certain sites?

i dont live with kids or anything but i do want to block the ad server that aol's aim connects to...

it would also be nice to know if someone out there has the ability to "listen" to the sites i'm visiting (if they can break in the linux box)....

thanks in advance.
 
If you were 'listening' to port 80 on the Linux box you'd see your computer talking to to sites on the internet via HTTP. yes you could tell which sites you were looking at, because that information is contained in the HTTP GET headers that are sent out from your machine when it wants a page. And it is possible to block traffic from certain sites, that's what firewalls are designed to do. Ask your roomate to deny packets from AOL's ad server on the firewall. Hope that helps.

Gimpy
 
That's not correct. The server is on port 80, the client (you) is on a random non-privileged port (>1024). You can run a packet sniffer like Sniffles which I found recently on versiontracker.com, it will show you everything that's going in and out of your computer. For example, I just launched it now and went to apple.com. Sniffles says that my browse (OmniWeb) used port 57692 to connect to the web site. You can also see the contents of the packets.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top