The Red-faced Blue Frog

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 »

The Death of WorldCom

WorldCom, once the U.S.’ second largest long distance phone company before falling into bankruptcy and fraud convictions, is no more. At least, as a name. As Netcraft, a UK-based Internet monitoring and security company, records: WorldCom.com has been taken offline, erasing the web’s last traces of the brand that became a symbol of white collar… Read More »

The Blue Frog vs PharmaMaster

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 »

Skype SMS’ Teething Problems

You’ve probably all heard of Skype’s new SMS service, which is very cool. If you have a Skype-Out account, you can send SMS messages to cellphones and, if you register you cellphone number with Skype, the recipients can reply to you on your mobile phone. Great idea. Only problem: It doesn’t work. Well, it does… Read More »