What’s intriguing about this Blue Security/Blue Frog episode, where angry spammers attack the anti-spam company with a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which in turn directs traffic (unwittingly or wittingly, it’s not clear yet) and temporarily brings down blog hoster TypePad, is this: The guy behind Blue Security, Eran Reshef, is founder of Skybox,… Read More »
I’ve been trying to make some sense of this recent drama involving Blue Security, an anti-spam registry that effectively tries to deter uncooperative spammers by overwhelming their servers, and recent outages at TypePad and LiveJournal apparently caused by a revenge attack by spammers on Blue Security. (Here’s some more information on Blue Security and the… Read More »
Spammers should understand that if the best way into our inbox is by entertaining us. Most spam is just awful: offensive, grammatically dreadful (even allowing for efforts to get around filters) and revealing of the piteous lives the spammers and their drones lead. But if they could only smarten up their act we’d probably let… Read More »
Plaxo is dropping the “Hi, I’m updating my address book. Please take a moment to update your latest contact information…” email which has, over the past three years, raised more than a few hackles. (What is a hackle? And can they ever be in any other state than raised?) Anyway, people (including myself) have objected… Read More »
In last week’s WSJ column (subscription only, I’m afraid) I wrote about how Bayesian Filters — derived from the theories of an 18th century vicar called Thomas Bayes and used to filter out spam — could also be used to sift through other kinds of data. Here’s a preliminary list of some of the uses… Read More »