My Friend Fred and the 2nd Internet Revolution
My friend Fred is a small, blue frog. He may be an acquaintance of yours as well. But if he is not, let me introduce him to you. You'll be happy to know him.
As I said, Fred is a small, blue frog. Contrary to most frogs, he doesn't eat flies. His particular choice of feed is spam. Yep, he is a spameater, and man, does he gobble them up!
You may have guessed already that Fred is a cyberfrog, and right you are. He is a small program that you can download for free from www.bluesecurity.com or www.downloads.com. What he does is as easy as it is brilliant. When your spam is reported in one of any number of ways, the guys at Blue Security determines both who it is from and who it is for. That is, who is sending you the unsolicited email (the spammer), and what company he is pushing products for (the spamvertizer). They then politely tell him to stop digging this particular hole, at the very least with regard to all the Blue Community members. He can do so by downloading an encrypted file that contains the email adresses of all the members, and cleaning his list against this.
If he does not comply with this request, Fred jumps into action. For every spam received by a Blue Community member, he sends one opt-out request to the spammer and/or the spamvertizer. As it is one for one, tit for tat, it is a very measured response, well within legal boundaries. However, for the spammer/spamvertizer who may foolishly have sent of millions of spams, the result can be an avalanche of requests that will be difficult to handle, potentially costly (the domain can easily get closed down, at least temporarily), and very unpopular with the culprit's ISP.
This has been so effective that several of the world's largest spammers (and many smaller ones) have taken Blue Community members off their spam lists. For many members, this has meant
a marked decrease in the number of spams received, sometimes from a flood to a trickle. And as multi-domain, multi-account users we can vouch for its effectiveness.
This, of course, has not gone down well with the leeches that make a living from spamming. As there is no chance they'll ever sell anything to a Blue Community member, the sane thing would be to comply and clean their lists. But some are not sane (big surprise), and have mounted various attacks. One is a spam claiming to have "cracked" the encrypted database (easily demonstrated to be untrue) and threathening to flood members with 10 or 20 times more spam (has not happened). Another is a huge distributed denial of service attack on the Blue Security servers that has overloaded them, so that we are now into the second day with the Web site down and my friend Fred disconnected.
The first Internet revolution was going from the old USENET discussion groups to this wonderful new thing called the World Wide Web. The second is this: Claiming our email back from the spammers. We've grown so used to the nuisance of spam that we'be long taken it for granted. Well, as it turns out, that was premature. There really is a solution, and lo and behold, it comes in the form of a small blue frog sitting in the bottom right of your computer screen.
The Blue Security and Blue Community web site will be up shortly, if it is not already when you are reading this. Be sure to sign up (as I said, it's free) both to rid yourself of the spam you receive today, and to avoid new adresses or whole domains in getting spammed.
On the BeCyberSafe web site, we'll teach you the best and easiest way to work with Fred. But the most important thing is that you do!
As I said, Fred is a small, blue frog. Contrary to most frogs, he doesn't eat flies. His particular choice of feed is spam. Yep, he is a spameater, and man, does he gobble them up!
You may have guessed already that Fred is a cyberfrog, and right you are. He is a small program that you can download for free from www.bluesecurity.com or www.downloads.com. What he does is as easy as it is brilliant. When your spam is reported in one of any number of ways, the guys at Blue Security determines both who it is from and who it is for. That is, who is sending you the unsolicited email (the spammer), and what company he is pushing products for (the spamvertizer). They then politely tell him to stop digging this particular hole, at the very least with regard to all the Blue Community members. He can do so by downloading an encrypted file that contains the email adresses of all the members, and cleaning his list against this.
If he does not comply with this request, Fred jumps into action. For every spam received by a Blue Community member, he sends one opt-out request to the spammer and/or the spamvertizer. As it is one for one, tit for tat, it is a very measured response, well within legal boundaries. However, for the spammer/spamvertizer who may foolishly have sent of millions of spams, the result can be an avalanche of requests that will be difficult to handle, potentially costly (the domain can easily get closed down, at least temporarily), and very unpopular with the culprit's ISP.
This has been so effective that several of the world's largest spammers (and many smaller ones) have taken Blue Community members off their spam lists. For many members, this has meant
a marked decrease in the number of spams received, sometimes from a flood to a trickle. And as multi-domain, multi-account users we can vouch for its effectiveness.
This, of course, has not gone down well with the leeches that make a living from spamming. As there is no chance they'll ever sell anything to a Blue Community member, the sane thing would be to comply and clean their lists. But some are not sane (big surprise), and have mounted various attacks. One is a spam claiming to have "cracked" the encrypted database (easily demonstrated to be untrue) and threathening to flood members with 10 or 20 times more spam (has not happened). Another is a huge distributed denial of service attack on the Blue Security servers that has overloaded them, so that we are now into the second day with the Web site down and my friend Fred disconnected.
The first Internet revolution was going from the old USENET discussion groups to this wonderful new thing called the World Wide Web. The second is this: Claiming our email back from the spammers. We've grown so used to the nuisance of spam that we'be long taken it for granted. Well, as it turns out, that was premature. There really is a solution, and lo and behold, it comes in the form of a small blue frog sitting in the bottom right of your computer screen.
The Blue Security and Blue Community web site will be up shortly, if it is not already when you are reading this. Be sure to sign up (as I said, it's free) both to rid yourself of the spam you receive today, and to avoid new adresses or whole domains in getting spammed.
On the BeCyberSafe web site, we'll teach you the best and easiest way to work with Fred. But the most important thing is that you do!
posted by Frode Fanebust at 2:08 AM
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