On the other hand, a spammer known as “Pharma Master”, upon discovering that Blue Security had a blog at SixApart, took personal joy in attaking the service and bringing down over 9,000 servers. Although Blue brought the traffic, it was a game with the spammers to see how many servers they could take down.

Again, though, the choice by Blue to point their domain to SixApart was wrong, and unethical. I just can’t help but think though that the spammers have gotten the attention, and wrath, of millions of people worldwide.

Consider this analogy. Let’s say Payless Shoes sprung a leak in a water main. They remedy the situation by hooking up a hose and piping the water next door to dump water into Albertson’s. “Oh, poor baby. You couldn’t buy your Cheerios for 8 hours.”

Hey, if they want to start a fight with spammers more power to them. But if one of my customers redirected a DDoS to my network because they couldn’t handle the consequences of their actions, I’d have some not too pleasant words for them.

Gah! I can’t believe I spelled “their” as “there”! I sware I no how to right werds.

Thanks for the reply.

While I agree with the ethical issue behind Blue Security pointing their domain to the SixApart servers, I am willing to bet it did more good than harm. It awoke the sleeping giant, and the spammers are in for a world of hurt if they pull that stunt again.

The Lycos campaign was entirely different from Blue Security. With Lycos. you installed a screensaver that sent floods of packets to the spam sites. These floods of packets had nothing to do with the spam you personally received. They were just random. As such, with enough users on board, a DDoS attack was created. It was shut down, because it was against the law. Plain and simple.

With the Blue Security campaign, each user is sending requests as outlined in the CAN-SPAM Act. So quite to the contrary, Make Love Not Spam wasn’t a similar campaign at all.

Finally, the journalist of the post, Mitch Wagner, has not blogged on his personal blog, the one that is being hosted on the SixApart servers, since June 2005. Also, there is no sign of him using his blog for a “business” as you pointed out, or any financial gain. So I am failing to see what is so important about his blog that it needs to be up every minute of every day.

At any rate, thanks for your comments.

It seems like some spammers obviously don’t like it. Why else would they fight back if it wasn’t being effective? Rock on.

I’m sure you’d feel the same way if your business was shutdown because somebody else was having problems. It wasn’t just not “the best choice”, it was downright wrong. If Blue Security wants to go around picking fights with spammers I guess that’s there choice, but they better be ready for an arms race. I hope you recall that Lycos tried a similar thing a couple years ago, titled Make Love Not Spam, and it didn’t work either.

Vigiliantism is taking the law into your own hands. This means, that whether or not the action is illegal, you will still pursue what you are sought out to do. In the Old West, these were commonly referred to as “outlaws”. Here, users are not taking the law into their own hands, but rather operating fully withing the confines of the law. If the action was illegal, I would believe that most Blue Security users would not be participating.

If you would like to play with words, fine. I am not. Although on the surface, the fight against spam may seem malicious, it is not. We are not out to hurt, corrupt, or destroy the spammers or their servers themselves. Heck, I don’t care if they continue their spam ring operations. If they would just comply to my first request to opt-out, then I wouldn’t have to keep reminding them, now would I? Persuasion can seem malicious, if all you look at is flood-requesting over and over that spammers take you off their list. But persuasion isn’t always malicious, and it certainly isn’t so in this case.

“I’m no spam apologist, and the BlueSecurity idea is intriguing, but let’s not pretend it’s something it’s not. Me, I’m happy to let bogofilter do its job with 6-month tuneups and so I have no reason to get involved in a war.”

Why just use filters? You’re not doing anything to stop the amount of spam coming in. You’ve buried your head in a hole, ignoring it, hoping it will go away. Just because it is out of sight doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It a major problem, including identity theft, porn, phishing and other illegal tactics. Would you let this sort of garbage flood your physical mailbox? I can’t sit around, and do nothing about it. If there was such an antispam reporting tool for Wordpress blogs, you better believe I would have that installed too.

Let’s not pretend it’s something it’s not? And what are we pretending it to be? It is an antispam tool that is very effective. It’s eliminating spam from my mailbox. It’s fighting the Good Fight, and you think I’m wasting my time by actively deterring spammers? I’m sorry you feel this way. It takes only a couple minutes to report hundreds of spam messages, so I am wondering where this lengthy time, that you are too busy with, is?

Anyway, thanks for your comment. You may want to try it out, I think you’ll have a greater understanding of how exactly it works.

Let’s see, from your own blog: “Bluesecurity is fighting the good fight.” and “I will let my spam collect until the service is restored, then they will get hit hard. If this is the end of Bluesecurity, which I hope not, we’ll find other resorts to put spammers where they belong. In hell.” Sure sounds like vigilante to me. Ok, so it’s within the bounds of the law - so it’s legal vigilantism.

Now let’s look at your pet word “persuade”. “You see, this is the big difference between a DDoS and Blue Security, is the word “malicious”. I think we can all agree that malicious is the desire to harm, corrupt or destroy. Hopefully, I don’t need to pull up a Google definition for that one. The design of Blue Security is to persuade.”

You and Blue Security both say you are fighting spammers. I think we can all agree that fighting involves intent to harm, corrupt, or destroy. Many a war has been fought to persuade the other side into acting, thinking, or talking a certain way. So I’m sorry but I’m not buying your argument against DDoS. And yes, I’d say the slashdot effect is an unintentional DDoS - just ask anyone who’s been slashdotted.

So in short, you’re just playing with words. The fact is, you picked a fight with spammers, and fight is what you got. As with any fight/war, expect criticism from all kinds including lazy or sensationalist reporters.

I’m no spam apologist, and the BlueSecurity idea is intriguing, but let’s not pretend it’s something it’s not. Me, I’m happy to let bogofilter do its job with 6-month tuneups and so I have no reason to get involved in a war. I have more interesting things to do with my time. Remember opportunity cost. If the spammers get you to waste time fighting them, then they’re to benefit.