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Blue Security Reborn As Social Action Enabler
griswaldo writes "Wired News writes about the re-birth of the ill-fated Blue Security as a social action company. According to the article, founders of the former anti-spam company that made headlines after incurring the wrath of a Russian spam king have set up a company called Collactive that provides tools to organize grassroots action on political and social web sites. The article mentions a global warming initiative called WorldCoolers and, for the Slashdot YRO crowd, the Privacy Alert Network that kicked off by letting people comment on Homeland Security's latest crazy idea."
The DHS, on a mission to turn the US into Communist China, has made it nearly impossible to submit comments to regulations.gov about their "Automated Targeting System". Alas, Collactive works like a charm and submits the comments with a push of a button. Power to people! Try it yourself at http://ws.privacyalertnetwork.net/points/point?id= 444
You've just caused several dozen Slashdot mods to cranially self-destruct, after they couldn't figure out whether to mod you -1 Troll or +5 Informative.
Maybe this will bring user-generated sites to everyday folk. I can already envision my grandma telling me how many stories she Dugg, and all without even leaving her bridge game!
From the article:
...
"Once it's installed, the organizers can send alerts to users or update the software with scripts that know how to take particular actions, such as automatically filling in feedback forms on a politician's website. End users can also forward e-mail alerts to their friends, who have the option of installing the software themselves and joining the network."
"By picking a couple of issues that all Americans agree on, we can really rain holy privacy hellfire," Scannell said.
If you simply define spam as "unwanted commentary," a large, disruptive user base that does nothing but repeat itself could easily be placed in there.
Another problem is this: Dr. Smith disagrees with the movement being "addressed" by the Collactive users and wishes to comment. She/He should be able to offer feedback like anyone else, but if 537 near-duplicate comments fly in while she/he responds, then his/her comment is very likely to be either mass-deleted or simply overlooked.
The point is simply this: political debates should be won by the good arguments, and NOT by drowning the opposing side in a flood of automated replies. From where I'm sitting, this just looks like a hack of a piece of software trying to push a hack of an argument.
Turning coffee into code.
I missed Blue Security in the headlines, but what these guys seem to be doing is pretty cool. Providing a way for people to send and receive information about issues they care about isn't really ahead of it's time technology-wise, but is definitely an appropriate and commendable use of technology.
I don't know how much hype comes from the word AJAX being thrown around, but if ever there was a place for it, I say they've found it. A niche, and a productive one at that.
Better luck this time, guys.
I've actually been chasing this one spamming idiot around for months. It's really weird in that he's the only spammer that seems to bother that address, and he's a totally small-scale nuisance level spammer. Kind of a throwback to the old days of 10 years ago? He per force switches ISPs, websites, and DNS services continually, sometimes gets bounced out for a few days, but keeps right on coming back for more. It's actually sort of nice to find at least one spammer that stupid.
Of course, the big fear is that he'll get a lightbulb and figure out how to sell his email addresses to a *REAL* spammer.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Are we all destined to become tertiary adjuncts?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I guess after you get your ass handed to you by a Russian spam king, the DHS isn't all that scary.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
In short: a spamming network. Oh the irony.
AFAIK, anti-spam methods tried to solve the problem on the email clients.
But what about whitelists for email servers? Maybe something similar to the DNS system, with propagating server lists. So, you register your server with your telco, wait an hour or two, and the thing is propagated. Registration should be free, but a mandatory delay of at least 10 minutes between registration should be there; the telcos are also free to check if somebody is registering tons of servers (maybe a limit would do). This allows emailservers to reject unknown ones along with all their mail, so spammers could no longer setup a room full of machines sending millions of emails a day, and spambots with their own SMTP servers are useless. Furthermore, if some trojan hijacks Outlook accounts for spamming, email servers could (a) introduce an one second delay, thereby limiting the max amount of emails per day while not overly hurting the user, (b) report when a whitelist server suddenly sends heaps of data, and the sending server is obliged to investigate this and warn clients that they are sending too much.
All of this requires no client changes, they are all server side updates.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
The worldcoolers thing looks interesting. Something I have always wondered however is why solar powered (or at least augmented) air conditioning is not widespread. I could see it taking off in California for example - imagine the benefits - no contribution to global warning from power hungry mains powered coolers and free to run.
The problem with so many spam "solutions" is that they're all predicated on the vast majority of server admins in the world all magically agreeing on the solution and implementing it, all at once.
The whitelist solution is useless when 99.9999% of valid email servers are not yet on the whitelist, right? Because if you turned on whitelist filtering you'd just be blocking all mail. So no one will install and activate the filter until the vast majority of valid email senders *are* registered.
Now consider all of those busy admins of the outgoing mail servers. If they don't register to your whitelist, what happens? Nothing, because no one is filtering yet. So if they have to choose between sorting out this registration process (if they even happen to hear about it...) vs. replacing the flaky memory in server "vulcan22", which will they choose?
But we just need one of the big guys to get behind the plan, right? Well, Hotmail or Yahoo can't just turn on filtering either, because even if they saturate the globe with hugely expensive advertising explaining to email admins that they'd better register their servers before filter rollout in 2008, it simply won't happen for many, many servers until something actively *breaks*. And anyone using the podunk.com ISP suddenly finds their emails are rejected by Hotmail (but nowhere else)... so Hotmail customer support gets a flood of help requests, threats, angry emails, etc. etc.
Are you still sure the whitelist idea is good?
Think of online systems in terms of evolution. Every step has to have a good reason, or no matter how attractively you propose it, it cannot survive.
The Blue Security concept actually *worked* partly because it DID involve the end user. People pissed off by spam actually had legal recourse that they *knew* made the spammer's lives a little more difficult. "Sure, you can bulk-advertise with spam, but every spam you send us is going to result in one more complaint clogging up your order forms."
So even when there were only a handful of users (before the spam started dropping), there was a small benefit.
As soon as the userbase grew to 1/2 million or so (a drop in the bucket in terms of internet users, mind you) the benefit became large. My spam dropped to about 4 or 5 a day.
Of course, BlueSecurity's business model was an huge Achilles' heel. They were fairly decisively taken out of the game because of it. They were on the right path, though: counter automated contacts with automated responses. Keep it legal FTW. A small userbase can know they're at least a small thorn in the spammer's side, and a large userbase is a force to be reckoned with.
Work on a distributed system much like the BlueFrog approach started at Okopipi.org, but has lost steam. Anyone who wants to stir things up again should stop by and see what they can do.
> a large, disruptive user base that does nothing but repeat itself
/.!
Yay for
*runs*
I guess when Russian mafia politics starts poisoning people with rare nuke byproducts, right when Russian mafia politics rolls out new ICBMs, and Russian mafia politics steals huge oil/gas operations for their favorite clients, smart Russians start to work together against their mafia government.
But is it too late for them to do anything but inspire a new generation of gulags?
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make install -not war
> called Collactive that provides tools to organize
> grassroots action on political and social web sites.
Well, an anti-spam company should know well how to generate spam.
Remember, it's not spam if it benefits you or a cause that's worthy to you.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.