Just Ignore the GWF

I was reading a mailing list yesterday, where ISP abuse desk personnel were complaining about the morons who run crummy firewall software on their home computers and call support with complaints like, "I'm being hacked from 127.0.0.1."

These people need to have their Internet driver's license taken away from them. 127.0.0.1 is a special address reserved for your own damn computer. Such complaints, though common, indicate you've got the software locked down too tight and misconfigured to boot.

Apparently, standard procedure is to just close the trouble tickets for these sorts of incidents, marking them "GWF." That stands for goober with firewall. I think it's a great term, but I'll never again be able to read personal ads in the same way.