I just remembered something that happened in 5th grade. Since I was nearly a year younger than everyone else in my class, I was pretty much the shortest one in the room. My 5th grade teacher had the entire class sing the Randy Newman song "Short People" to me. If you aren't familiar with the lyrics, they go "Short people got no reason to live."
By the way, the same teacher went to the church I was forced to go to as a kid and would always preach to us.
Friday, May 12, 2006
Thursday, May 04, 2006
BlueFrog = Anti-Spam
In case you haven't heard, spam (unsolicited e-mail) is a major problem that no-one seems to be able to solve. American politicians, most of which have probably never sent an e-mail themselves, passed a law (called CAN-SPAM) stating that if you send out solicited or unsolicited e-mail, you must allow the person to opt-out of receiving any further messages from you. Of course I'm summarizing, but you get the point.
That all seems fine, but the major problem is that the people sending out spam know that they are difficult to track down, and they feel that it's their right to consume more than 50% of e-mail traffic with promises of larger genitalia.
Why am I talking about this? There is a company called Blue Security that is attempting to offer a way to force the spammers to stop sending messages to people that don't want them. Apparently a few of the larger spammers are complying with the requests, but during the last week, it seems that a bunch of the leeches have joined forces and are currently initiating a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) that basically kills all traffic going to the web sites of Blue Security. It seems that the spammers don't like receiving approximately 500,000 messages requesting that a user be removed (one message for each e-mail account registered with Blue Security).
The second phase of the attack is (apparently) the people that are registered with Blue Security are being targeted with more spam, but that would only generate MORE traffic back to the spammers requesting opt-outs on behalf of the end-users.
Why would they do this? Greed and laziness are good motivators. Spammers get paid a lot of money for flooding the Internet with crap (greed), and it doesn't take a lot of effort on the spammers part to actually send out the messages (laziness). Asking them to stay out of my inbox and spamfolder by finding a real job would apparently be too much to ask, so until then we will need to use tools like Blue Security to keep them in check. Therefore, I ask that anyone reading this go to http://www.bluesecurity.com, download the software, register your e-mail accounts, and fight back. Sticking your head in the sand will only make matters worse.
That all seems fine, but the major problem is that the people sending out spam know that they are difficult to track down, and they feel that it's their right to consume more than 50% of e-mail traffic with promises of larger genitalia.
Why am I talking about this? There is a company called Blue Security that is attempting to offer a way to force the spammers to stop sending messages to people that don't want them. Apparently a few of the larger spammers are complying with the requests, but during the last week, it seems that a bunch of the leeches have joined forces and are currently initiating a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) that basically kills all traffic going to the web sites of Blue Security. It seems that the spammers don't like receiving approximately 500,000 messages requesting that a user be removed (one message for each e-mail account registered with Blue Security).
The second phase of the attack is (apparently) the people that are registered with Blue Security are being targeted with more spam, but that would only generate MORE traffic back to the spammers requesting opt-outs on behalf of the end-users.
Why would they do this? Greed and laziness are good motivators. Spammers get paid a lot of money for flooding the Internet with crap (greed), and it doesn't take a lot of effort on the spammers part to actually send out the messages (laziness). Asking them to stay out of my inbox and spamfolder by finding a real job would apparently be too much to ask, so until then we will need to use tools like Blue Security to keep them in check. Therefore, I ask that anyone reading this go to http://www.bluesecurity.com, download the software, register your e-mail accounts, and fight back. Sticking your head in the sand will only make matters worse.
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