Stockade

A stockade is an enclosure of palisades and tall walls made of logs placed side by side vertically with the tops sharpened to provide security.

Stockade as a security fence

Stockade fortifications were simple forms of defence of military camps or settlements, used since ancient Roman times and earlier. The troops or settlers would build a stockade by clearing a space of woodland and using the trees whole or chopped in half, with one end sharpened on each. They would dig a narrow trench around the area, and stand the sharpened logs side-by-side inside it, encircling the perimeter. Sometimes they would add additional defence by placing sharpened sticks in a shallow secondary trench outside the stockade. In colder climates sometimes the stockade received a coating of clay or mud that would make the crude wall wind-proof.

Builders could also place stones or thick mud layers at the foot of the stockade, improving the resistance of the wall. From that the defenders could, if they had the materials, raise a stone or brick wall inside the stockade, creating a more permanent defence while working protected.

Stockade (film)

Stockade is a 1971 Australian musical film about the Eureka Stockade.

Cast

Production

The film was based on a musical play by Kenneth Cook which had been commissioned by the New South Wales Drama foundation and first performed in March 1971 at the Independent Theatre in Sydney. Most of the original cast returned and the play's director Ross McGregor was director of acting.

Shooting took place in May 1971 immediately after the end of the play's Sydney season. The shoot only took two weeks in at the Australiana village, Wilberforce, near Sydney. $15,000 of the budget came from the Australian Council for the Arts and $16,000 from the Australian Film Development Corporation.

Release

In December 1971 the MP for Ballarat, Dudley Erwin, criticised the use of government money to make Stockadeas it contained brothel scenes, and asked for it to be withdrawn from circulation.

Stockade (software)

Stockade is a TCP-layer blocking tool written in C++. It denies TCP/IP access to registered IP addresses by using the ipfw packet filter. It targets spam prevention, but may also be used against other attackers (e.g. brute force password crackers.)

The rate limiting approach

This approach leverages the superior determination exhibited by legitimate senders. In this respect, it may be considered similar to greylisting. Originally, the authors conceived an MT Proxy to rate-limit the SMTP connections of messages believed to be spam. That worked by adding a dummynet rule for frequent senders who had been sending messages that triggered an unreliable statistical analysis.

A key limitation of the original scheme was the consumption of local resources (in the SMTP proxy). Stockade approach introduces the notion that an inbound TCP connection may be rejected with some random probability proportional to the level of spam already seen from the connection’s originator over some configurable period of time. That probability is subject to a decay, configured as a halving time period, so that each IP address is eventually rehabilitated. That way, stockade provides for fully automatic spam mitigation.