Internet and e-mail policy and practice including Notes on Internet E-mail

←2006→ Months Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Click the comments link on any story to see comments or add your own. Subscribe to this blog RSS feed

Home :: Email 17 May 2006 Blue Security Is Kaput Email Wired reports that Blue Security shut down yesterday. It's a little hard to make sense of the explanations offered, but as best I can make out, after Blue Security's clumsy attempts to deal with a denial of service attack clobbered several other web sites, the owners appear to have pulled the plug. The investors say the technology has other uses, so we may not have heard the last of this bad idea. posted at: 02:42 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments posted at: 02:42 :: permanent link to this entry :: 2 comments comments...        (Jump to the end to add your own comment) That's one way to look at it... I'm not going to make a big deal out of whether I think that Blue Security did the right thing during the attack, because I think few know what really happened. Regardless of what anybody might say they know about the attack and base their opinions on, there are most likely a bunch of people who "know" something else and therefor have some other opinion. It's a waste of time to try to sort this all out. I don't understand completely why Mr Levine insists that the methods of the Blue Frog appliaction was a bad idea, but I'm sure his way of reasoning is justified. Maybe it's because there are better ways. Maybe instead of handling the spam, we should focus on the spammers resources, the zombie-botnets they rely so much on. If I look on the bright side, Blue Frog has shown that the business model of spammers is flawed, just like it was with telemarketing back then. Make unsolicited phone calls, and it's completely realistic to expect a complaint, and therefor there's the need of having an expensive complaint-handling system. The spammers and spam-advertised companies have somehow cheated their way out of handling complaints, and the money saved is the money they're counting on. On the other hand, maybe Blue Security was naive to think that spammers wouldn't try to counter with some sort of denial-of-service attacks. So they should've had some sort of defence mechanism in place that maybe would've discouraged the attacks, and thereby sparing the Internet. For instance, I've read that peer-to-peer appliactions are much less vulnerable against DDoS attacks. Maybe that is where antispam applications are heading now. At any rate, I think Blue Security made the right choice shutting down. Escalating the "war" may take out one of the sides, but the Internet suffers in the long run. Spammers are definitely fighting an uphill battle from now on though. (by Uwe Matzen 19 May 2006 05:55) Well, how about that... ...just found the news: A BlueFrog P2P solution is already in planning. http://castlecops.com/postitle156112-0-0-.html (by Uwe Matzen 19 May 2006 06:06) Add your comment... Note: all comments require an email address to send a confirmation to verify that it was posted by a person and not a spambot. The comment won't be visible until you click the link in the confirmation. Unless you check the box below, which almost nobody does, your email won't be displayed, and I won't use it for other purposes.   Name: Email: you@wherever (required, for confirmation) Title: (optional) Comments: Show my Email address Save my Name and Email for next time

Topics Copyright Law - 29 Email - 228 ICANN - 127 Internet - 73 Money - 31 Security - 3 My other sites Who is this guy? Airline ticket info Taughannock Networks Other blogs CAUCE It turns out you don’t need a license to hunt for spam. 26 days ago A keen grasp of the obvious Italian Apple Cake 585 days ago Related sites Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail Network Abuse Clearinghouse

© 2005-2020 John R. Levine.
CAN SPAM address harvesting notice: the operator of this website will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by this website to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.