Hallelujah!! I can print maps for my expense reports!!! But holy cow, they also provide old satellite images? My colleague here is looking at the exact same maps page, and he is seeing a current map, i see something that I'm not kidding must be 20 years old. (Wow. So that's what it looked like before all the roads were built in this area.)
What passive agressive assholes Google are.....
Oh well at least i can print travel summaries, screw you very much Google. They are gonna get a lot of lies in the user agent data they collect from now on. And they deserve it for the horrible web 2.point.suck.my.balls UX garbage they've been inflicting on us. Way to go Google, punishing us for keeping our browsers up to date with horrible UI designs. I flipped my agent spoofer to something ancient, and the classic Google maps is back!!! Awesome!!!
Google will never again know my real browser agent details. They are dead to me. Now of only Open Street Maps could actually search for addresses with exact character accuracy in the search term...... Then I'd never use Google at all.
And now a little thank you prayer to DuckDuckGo, my private mail server, and my jail broken Android devices. Google account required to log into a computer - please, let me off this evil Google Bus. Life without google is becoming possible, which makes my odds on humanity surviving another century go way up.
Geeze, glad I live in Eurpoe now as an expat (not England - shudder). There is a strong living memory continentally of how horrible society can be if a central authority knows when where and what you purchase and who all your associates and family are. This attitude that only illegal thigs are purchased with cash and that credit cards are so convenient is just propoganda you've been spoon fed since the cradle. Question what you think you know and the motives of the people who try to shape your opinions and actions.
Besides, it's not today's laws you need to worry about. It's future laws handed down retroactively by an "elected" crackpot you should fear as they start tapping into the digital histories of an entire population seeking wrong doers.
It doesn't hurt that cash has no bank fees, and that ATM's virtually everywhere. It's a vital component to a free society in this digital age, and we need to appreciate and enjoy cash as a healthy medium which encourages commerce and jobs to stay within our communities. (As opposed to online shopping which just transfers profits to overseas tax havens and up some yacht owner's nose.)
You are so right. I'm gonna go get some popcorn also to soothe my rage....
If they keep doing this a few more times, we will see a proper fork emerge and perpahs Mozilla would run out of funds just like Gnome did recently.
We don't need our desktops to be made as idiotic as our tablets. Workstations are for time constrained creation, tablets are for casual consumption. UX designers need to keep this straight and optimize them respectively.
I know this is a stale/. post by now, but to your Q: Ramadeus
I was a member a few weeks prior to the attacks. Boy you just cant pay for fun like this!
My frog client is still up and it can connect to the mother ship, however no opt-outs are being issued. All of my spam reports are being accepted via SMTP - I'm expecting a big volley of opt-outs once team blue gets situated. When I first signed up it was also like this. It took a week before Opt outs started flooding out - part of the Blue Frog due process philosophy I guess.
Between Blue Security relocating to Prolexic and Prolexic being under a constant state of attack (see link: http://www.prolexic.com/spam/spam-051006.php ) I'd say everyone is pretty busy. We'll probably be hearing from the Blue Security guys pretty soon on what's going on. They're usually very good at keeping everyone up to date on status.
Stick in there. I read somewhere that these recent criminal acts have forced Blue Security to execute their plans to scale up their systems ahead of schedule. So rather than a controlled upgrade / migration it's turnning into a "turn the servers off, scramble like crazy, turn them on" type thing. Migration can be hard even under good conditions - I'd hate to try it while at war.
Also, as a "beta" system they might not have thought they'd need big boy (and big dollar) protection from the likes of Prolexic this soon. I don't think anyone could have guessed how mad the Spammers got and how many resources they would be willing to throw at one little anti-spam outfit... And it seems the fight isn't over. Quite a vote of confidence! Anything criminals hate - I by default like!
I believe you can download source and compile yourself. They've claimed to be open source from the get go.
Just checked, and they are on SourceForge. When you go to BlueSecurity.com click "other systems". From there click linux and it will send you to their Sourceforge.net area. The source for the windows client is also there.
Being a suspicious person by nature, I did exactly what you are suggesting when I first signed up to Blue Frog before these recent attacks.
The accounts I invented when I signed up with Blue Security: Not a single e-mail has been recieved except for the confirmation e-mail Blue Security first sent.
The old accounts which always recieved e-mail: On May 1 my cumulative spam jumped from 200 per day average to 500.
Obviously the spammers graduated from kindergarten and figured out how to compare a cleaned list from their original. But they have not invented quantum computers to crack oneway hashed encryption. If they did I think they'd be off somewhere else making more money than they do from spam.
My frog is also incommunicado... But on the good side - the reports that Blue Security has been online and available in Isreal and some parts of europe seem to be true.
Go to watchmouse and punch in a blue security url. I've been doing this all week, and it seems that server in Frankfurt has had no problem resolving and pinging Blue Sec. since the start. But global DNS propogation certainly seems jacked.
DDoS is manageable but DNS tamper? I'd say this is an effective lesson that the net is extremely vulnerable to criminal interruption. The smart heads need to get together and fix this.
And Whisker69 seems to be another pro-spam advocate I've seen cruising around. At least Whisker is brave enough to have a name though - hats off to him/her. You are indeed welcome to your opinions and I respect that and agree to disagree with you.
The grass roots pro-spam propaganda ring doesn't have many participants... I say let them speak so we can get to know them and profile their little rears.
Legal actions are a very likely result of this criminal attack. With luck it won't be between the bloggers and Blue Sec, but rather a joint action suit with BOTH the bloggers and Blue Sec. team on one side, and Joe Spam King on the other.
The Blue Security team must be very careful what they say over the next weeks so that they don't tamper or invalidate any of their evidence or generate negative legal claims that could be used against them.
To name this criminal and direct all of our righteous rage against him... To goad us into hirig hit men, and otherwise tar and feathering the bastard.. All that would look bad in court.
They are doing the right thing by playing it cool. Definitely acting professional. Courts love professionals and hate those who fly off at the mouth all the time.
So sit tight fellow froggers! I too have about 1500 spam saved up from the last 3 days - just ITCHING to get into Blue Sec's mail servers. My last few submissions were bounced back as undeliverable due to the DDoS thing. But I'm saving my precious special ham for it's day of glory...
Claiming that Six Apart should take legal action against Blue Security because criminals were attacking Blue Security is absurd. It's like blaming the rape victim for getting raped.
All us Frog users have been desperate for news about our pals at Blue Sec. I appreciate the effort they took to get word out to us. The fact that the spammers then directed their attack towards SixApart shows just how desperate and belligerent they are. They are greedy godless bastards. And their actions shall undo themselves.
Guys, I'm growing tired of the high moral argument that "it's not right to fight abuse with abuse" or "eye for an eye still leaves you blind".
War and drama asside: I keep waiting for someone to make this point but I'm not seeing it yet.
Spam is a solicitation to contact the advertised party in the hopes that you will give them money. Otherwise known as an advertisement. THEY CONTACT US. It's called the free market. In turn we all have the right to use the communication path they supply to request that they leave us alone.
Is it illegal to contact some company you see on a billboard or in a TV commercial? What absurdity! What is this world coming to where everyone gets sucked into DDoS drama at every chance? Blue Froggers are just doing business within the realm of the law. No stretching the rules. No sensationalism.
The only reason spammer servers crash is because they aren't prepared and are poorly designed. They have two options: 1. Seriously upgrade their infrastructure to handle whatever degree of responses their advertisements generate & hire more staff to process the hits their ad generates. =or= 2. Seriously decrease their advertisements to be in line with their capacity to manage their generated trafic.
It's just economics and common sense. This DDoS talk is a waste of time - the Blue Frog client is much nicer to the spammers than they are to us. And this huge amount of anger directed at Blue Frog is proof that it bites into their freedom to be irresponsible.
They can keep their pill pushing sites - I don't care if there are suckers out there dumb enough to give them money. I just want them to stop bothering ME. They will never get one red hot cent from me. They WILL get endless trouble from me as long as they continue to disrespect my privacy.
Might surprise you but I actually want to agree with you on a philosophical level really badly. And sorry about any insult that came through - heat of typing and all. My bad. I appreciate your openness and concede that Eye for Eye philosophy it isn't the highest moral ground.
But to use higher reasoning requires reciprocal action which I'm not seeing from the irresponsible bulk e-mailing organizations in question. So although we may agree that Blue Frog isn't perfect in a higher moral sense (we're talking J.C. himself here), I must ask if you've got a better solution up your sleeve?
Civil discourse has been exhausted with these folks. The responsible bulk e-mailers have already left me alone. Judging by the content of my SPAM now, only the most criminal section of the industry is still assaulting me. They seem to feel it is their god given right to phish, scam, cheat and steal anything they can get their hands on. They prey on our good morals. Many aren't reachable by US law.
So it's easy:
If you take every SPAM message you receive as an invitation to an offer (which they are for the most part) than I see no flaw in visiting and lodging a single complaint for each offer they make. We've been technically unable to do this until now - frogger makes it easier. It's still ME making the complaint from MY laptop. Eye for eye is too strong a term even. It's more like an eye for a pinky toe. Who needs their pinky toe anyway? The spammer is getting a great deal here. All they need to do to stop hearing from me is to stop spamming me. Where's the flaw? I don't think this amounts to a DDOS attack.
And yes, you raise a fine point regarding the effects on our ISP's and the net as a whole. My position is that Blue Frog requests aren't high bandwidth with the intent of bottlenecking traffic - they are aimed at forcing a human to distinguish real Viagra orders from opt-out requests. In fact Blue Security even goes as far as to coordinate opt out requests over time so as to not deal damage to our ISP's out there or shut down compromised but otherwise innocent systems.
Talking volume: A typical SPAM is 4-60 K. Not sure but I'd say the content of an opt out request may be smaller. Certainly no more than if I visited their site and filled out the text fields myself. If they remove my address from their list then the ISP saves buckets over time on bulk mail volume that ceases to exist.
Big "if" I agree, but if it happened: ISP wins. I win. Joe Spammer enjoys a richer list of potential contacts (because I sure as hell won't ever give him a penny.) Everyone wins.
But sadly you're wrong. I hate when people talk about things they haven't researched.
1. No mail bombing has occured from Blue Frog members to the spam kings. Blue Frog only automates the opt out requests I always used to type into their bogus boner drug web sites. Never a single e-mail issued in return.
2. No innocent victims. I'm a willing and proud Blue Frog user. Spammers are willing crooks if they don't listen to my personal requests to be removed from lists. (We all know they don't.) To my knowledge no adverse impact to 3rd parties has been reported. Advise if you know of any innocents that are being affected. (Irresponsible computer users that allow their boxes to be hijacked aren't innocent in my mind. You're responsible for what your dog does. You're responsible for what your box does.)
3. Two words. Open Source. If you have an IQ above room temperature - go download and read their code. Compile yourself. Compare check sums. It's been done.
4. I'm pretty sure your rationalle suffers from inappropriate analogy syndrome. I understand though. How could you select a fitting analogy when you haven't studied the subject? It's an understandable and common mistake - that's why I'm writing to help you out.
This isn't a war against terror. It's just a community of brave folks standing up and saying "we are sick of Spam". No laws broken. The anger it's drawn from the Spammers is proof of it's effectiveness. (The war on terror could benefit from more community action such as ours.)
We are not idiots. We knew from day one that any "List Cleaner" tool could be used to confirm addresses that were already posessed. We signed up anyway. It's a tribute to the spammers complete lack of brains that it's taken them a year to figure out how to do a DIFF comparison of an old list versus their originals and come up with a threat e-mail to us.
I put my addresses in that list because the more spam they send me - the more opt-out requests I will send to their criminal web sites. The difference between us is that I have a lucrative day job and can keep this up for YEARS. They have to make a living from it and won't be able to divert their spam resources against us Blue Froggers for ever.
And please don't get it wrong - it is MY laptop that issues the opt out messages. *I* am the one absolutely sick of criminals. Blue Frog is just a helpfull tool towards that end. And I dare say - Blue Frog is much more civilized than the nasty things I used to do against them. (I've got my Lad Vampires annoying 419 scammers as I type. And that IS a DDoS attack.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Hallelujah!! I can print maps for my expense reports!!! But holy cow, they also provide old satellite images? My colleague here is looking at the exact same maps page, and he is seeing a current map, i see something that I'm not kidding must be 20 years old. (Wow. So that's what it looked like before all the roads were built in this area.)
What passive agressive assholes Google are.....
Oh well at least i can print travel summaries, screw you very much Google. They are gonna get a lot of lies in the user agent data they collect from now on. And they deserve it for the horrible web 2.point.suck.my.balls UX garbage they've been inflicting on us. Way to go Google, punishing us for keeping our browsers up to date with horrible UI designs. I flipped my agent spoofer to something ancient, and the classic Google maps is back!!! Awesome!!!
Google will never again know my real browser agent details. They are dead to me. Now of only Open Street Maps could actually search for addresses with exact character accuracy in the search term...... Then I'd never use Google at all.
And now a little thank you prayer to DuckDuckGo, my private mail server, and my jail broken Android devices. Google account required to log into a computer - please, let me off this evil Google Bus. Life without google is becoming possible, which makes my odds on humanity surviving another century go way up.
Geeze, glad I live in Eurpoe now as an expat (not England - shudder). There is a strong living memory continentally of how horrible society can be if a central authority knows when where and what you purchase and who all your associates and family are. This attitude that only illegal thigs are purchased with cash and that credit cards are so convenient is just propoganda you've been spoon fed since the cradle. Question what you think you know and the motives of the people who try to shape your opinions and actions.
Besides, it's not today's laws you need to worry about. It's future laws handed down retroactively by an "elected" crackpot you should fear as they start tapping into the digital histories of an entire population seeking wrong doers.
It doesn't hurt that cash has no bank fees, and that ATM's virtually everywhere. It's a vital component to a free society in this digital age, and we need to appreciate and enjoy cash as a healthy medium which encourages commerce and jobs to stay within our communities. (As opposed to online shopping which just transfers profits to overseas tax havens and up some yacht owner's nose.)
You are so right. I'm gonna go get some popcorn also to soothe my rage....
If they keep doing this a few more times, we will see a proper fork emerge and perpahs Mozilla would run out of funds just like Gnome did recently.
We don't need our desktops to be made as idiotic as our tablets. Workstations are for time constrained creation, tablets are for casual consumption. UX designers need to keep this straight and optimize them respectively.
I know this is a stale /. post by now, but to your Q: Ramadeus
I was a member a few weeks prior to the attacks. Boy you just cant pay for fun like this!
My frog client is still up and it can connect to the mother ship, however no opt-outs are being issued. All of my spam reports are being accepted via SMTP - I'm expecting a big volley of opt-outs once team blue gets situated. When I first signed up it was also like this. It took a week before Opt outs started flooding out - part of the Blue Frog due process philosophy I guess.
Between Blue Security relocating to Prolexic and Prolexic being under a constant state of attack (see link: http://www.prolexic.com/spam/spam-051006.php ) I'd say everyone is pretty busy. We'll probably be hearing from the Blue Security guys pretty soon on what's going on. They're usually very good at keeping everyone up to date on status.
Stick in there. I read somewhere that these recent criminal acts have forced Blue Security to execute their plans to scale up their systems ahead of schedule. So rather than a controlled upgrade / migration it's turnning into a "turn the servers off, scramble like crazy, turn them on" type thing. Migration can be hard even under good conditions - I'd hate to try it while at war.
Also, as a "beta" system they might not have thought they'd need big boy (and big dollar) protection from the likes of Prolexic this soon. I don't think anyone could have guessed how mad the Spammers got and how many resources they would be willing to throw at one little anti-spam outfit... And it seems the fight isn't over. Quite a vote of confidence! Anything criminals hate - I by default like!
ATB.
Um, Marvinglen..
I believe you can download source and compile yourself. They've claimed to be open source from the get go.
Just checked, and they are on SourceForge. When you go to BlueSecurity.com click "other systems". From there click linux and it will send you to their Sourceforge.net area. The source for the windows client is also there.
Being a suspicious person by nature, I did exactly what you are suggesting when I first signed up to Blue Frog before these recent attacks.
The accounts I invented when I signed up with Blue Security:
Not a single e-mail has been recieved except for the confirmation e-mail Blue Security first sent.
The old accounts which always recieved e-mail:
On May 1 my cumulative spam jumped from 200 per day average to 500.
Obviously the spammers graduated from kindergarten and figured out how to compare a cleaned list from their original. But they have not invented quantum computers to crack oneway hashed encryption. If they did I think they'd be off somewhere else making more money than they do from spam.
My frog is also incommunicado... But on the good side - the reports that Blue Security has been online and available in Isreal and some parts of europe seem to be true.
Go to watchmouse and punch in a blue security url. I've been doing this all week, and it seems that server in Frankfurt has had no problem resolving and pinging Blue Sec. since the start. But global DNS propogation certainly seems jacked.
DDoS is manageable but DNS tamper? I'd say this is an effective lesson that the net is extremely vulnerable to criminal interruption. The smart heads need to get together and fix this.
If you want to try a global ping:
http://www.watchmouse.com/en/checkit.php
& punch in a URL. www.bluesecurity.com is still alive in Frankfurt.. Not sure if they're able to dish out web pages though...
Okay. Yet another Spammer hiding as anonymous.
d esk/browse_frm/thread/9bbfff5777bf9ef6/
And Whisker69 seems to be another pro-spam advocate I've seen cruising around. At least Whisker is brave enough to have a name though - hats off to him/her. You are indeed welcome to your opinions and I respect that and agree to disagree with you.
But for the rest: See earlier post on Google Groups - looks like a match:
http://groups.google.com/group/24hoursupport.help
The grass roots pro-spam propaganda ring doesn't have many participants... I say let them speak so we can get to know them and profile their little rears.
Legal actions are a very likely result of this criminal attack. With luck it won't be between the bloggers and Blue Sec, but rather a joint action suit with BOTH the bloggers and Blue Sec. team on one side, and Joe Spam King on the other.
The Blue Security team must be very careful what they say over the next weeks so that they don't tamper or invalidate any of their evidence or generate negative legal claims that could be used against them.
To name this criminal and direct all of our righteous rage against him... To goad us into hirig hit men, and otherwise tar and feathering the bastard.. All that would look bad in court.
They are doing the right thing by playing it cool. Definitely acting professional. Courts love professionals and hate those who fly off at the mouth all the time.
So sit tight fellow froggers! I too have about 1500 spam saved up from the last 3 days - just ITCHING to get into Blue Sec's mail servers. My last few submissions were bounced back as undeliverable due to the DDoS thing. But I'm saving my precious special ham for it's day of glory...
All the best folks,
B.
Another Spammer posing as an anonymous coward?
Claiming that Six Apart should take legal action against Blue Security because criminals were attacking Blue Security is absurd. It's like blaming the rape victim for getting raped.
All us Frog users have been desperate for news about our pals at Blue Sec. I appreciate the effort they took to get word out to us. The fact that the spammers then directed their attack towards SixApart shows just how desperate and belligerent they are. They are greedy godless bastards. And their actions shall undo themselves.
Guys, I'm growing tired of the high moral argument that "it's not right to fight abuse with abuse" or "eye for an eye still leaves you blind".
War and drama asside: I keep waiting for someone to make this point but I'm not seeing it yet.
Spam is a solicitation to contact the advertised party in the hopes that you will give them money. Otherwise known as an advertisement. THEY CONTACT US. It's called the free market. In turn we all have the right to use the communication path they supply to request that they leave us alone.
Is it illegal to contact some company you see on a billboard or in a TV commercial? What absurdity! What is this world coming to where everyone gets sucked into DDoS drama at every chance? Blue Froggers are just doing business within the realm of the law. No stretching the rules. No sensationalism.
The only reason spammer servers crash is because they aren't prepared and are poorly designed. They have two options:
1. Seriously upgrade their infrastructure to handle whatever degree of responses their advertisements generate & hire more staff to process the hits their ad generates.
=or=
2. Seriously decrease their advertisements to be in line with their capacity to manage their generated trafic.
It's just economics and common sense. This DDoS talk is a waste of time - the Blue Frog client is much nicer to the spammers than they are to us. And this huge amount of anger directed at Blue Frog is proof that it bites into their freedom to be irresponsible.
They can keep their pill pushing sites - I don't care if there are suckers out there dumb enough to give them money. I just want them to stop bothering ME. They will never get one red hot cent from me. They WILL get endless trouble from me as long as they continue to disrespect my privacy.
All the best folks!
B.
Hey ZwithaPGGB,
Might surprise you but I actually want to agree with you on a philosophical level really badly. And sorry about any insult that came through - heat of typing and all. My bad. I appreciate your openness and concede that Eye for Eye philosophy it isn't the highest moral ground.
But to use higher reasoning requires reciprocal action which I'm not seeing from the irresponsible bulk e-mailing organizations in question. So although we may agree that Blue Frog isn't perfect in a higher moral sense (we're talking J.C. himself here), I must ask if you've got a better solution up your sleeve?
Civil discourse has been exhausted with these folks. The responsible bulk e-mailers have already left me alone. Judging by the content of my SPAM now, only the most criminal section of the industry is still assaulting me. They seem to feel it is their god given right to phish, scam, cheat and steal anything they can get their hands on. They prey on our good morals. Many aren't reachable by US law.
So it's easy:
If you take every SPAM message you receive as an invitation to an offer (which they are for the most part) than I see no flaw in visiting and lodging a single complaint for each offer they make. We've been technically unable to do this until now - frogger makes it easier. It's still ME making the complaint from MY laptop. Eye for eye is too strong a term even. It's more like an eye for a pinky toe. Who needs their pinky toe anyway? The spammer is getting a great deal here. All they need to do to stop hearing from me is to stop spamming me. Where's the flaw? I don't think this amounts to a DDOS attack.
And yes, you raise a fine point regarding the effects on our ISP's and the net as a whole. My position is that Blue Frog requests aren't high bandwidth with the intent of bottlenecking traffic - they are aimed at forcing a human to distinguish real Viagra orders from opt-out requests. In fact Blue Security even goes as far as to coordinate opt out requests over time so as to not deal damage to our ISP's out there or shut down compromised but otherwise innocent systems.
Talking volume: A typical SPAM is 4-60 K. Not sure but I'd say the content of an opt out request may be smaller. Certainly no more than if I visited their site and filled out the text fields myself. If they remove my address from their list then the ISP saves buckets over time on bulk mail volume that ceases to exist.
Big "if" I agree, but if it happened: ISP wins. I win. Joe Spammer enjoys a richer list of potential contacts (because I sure as hell won't ever give him a penny.) Everyone wins.
All the best.
But sadly you're wrong. I hate when people talk about things they haven't researched.
:)
1. No mail bombing has occured from Blue Frog members to the spam kings. Blue Frog only automates the opt out requests I always used to type into their bogus boner drug web sites. Never a single e-mail issued in return.
2. No innocent victims. I'm a willing and proud Blue Frog user. Spammers are willing crooks if they don't listen to my personal requests to be removed from lists. (We all know they don't.) To my knowledge no adverse impact to 3rd parties has been reported. Advise if you know of any innocents that are being affected. (Irresponsible computer users that allow their boxes to be hijacked aren't innocent in my mind. You're responsible for what your dog does. You're responsible for what your box does.)
3. Two words. Open Source. If you have an IQ above room temperature - go download and read their code. Compile yourself. Compare check sums. It's been done.
4. I'm pretty sure your rationalle suffers from inappropriate analogy syndrome. I understand though. How could you select a fitting analogy when you haven't studied the subject? It's an understandable and common mistake - that's why I'm writing to help you out.
This isn't a war against terror. It's just a community of brave folks standing up and saying "we are sick of Spam". No laws broken. The anger it's drawn from the Spammers is proof of it's effectiveness. (The war on terror could benefit from more community action such as ours.)
We are not idiots. We knew from day one that any "List Cleaner" tool could be used to confirm addresses that were already posessed. We signed up anyway. It's a tribute to the spammers complete lack of brains that it's taken them a year to figure out how to do a DIFF comparison of an old list versus their originals and come up with a threat e-mail to us.
I put my addresses in that list because the more spam they send me - the more opt-out requests I will send to their criminal web sites. The difference between us is that I have a lucrative day job and can keep this up for YEARS. They have to make a living from it and won't be able to divert their spam resources against us Blue Froggers for ever.
And please don't get it wrong - it is MY laptop that issues the opt out messages. *I* am the one absolutely sick of criminals. Blue Frog is just a helpfull tool towards that end. And I dare say - Blue Frog is much more civilized than the nasty things I used to do against them. (I've got my Lad Vampires annoying 419 scammers as I type. And that IS a DDoS attack.