Blue Frog croaks but may rise again
Open source project to create anti-spam opt-out tool based on the defunct Blue Frog service.
Last month, Blue Frog, the anti-spam service offered by Blue Security, was
forced to roll over and accept defeat after suffering a retaliatory attack
from a spammer.
Blue Security championed a DIY-style anti-spam campaign in which the
company's half a million customers were encouraged to send replies to the
spam they received. The idea was that the resulting traffic would overload
the spammers' servers and hamper their email-sending activity severely.
Indeed, some spam companies did agree to stop mailing Blue Security's
customers.
Last month, however, the company's website, along with those of many of its
partners, was hit by a denial-of-service attack, which is believed to have
originated from a particular Russian spammer. In addition to the DoS attack
the company was threatened with a second attack that the attacker claimed
would include a computer virus unless the company ceased its activity. The
company felt that it had no choice than to close its anti-spam operations.
Now, however, two software developers are attempting to recreate a more
robust, open source version of Blue Security's anti-spam service. The
developers announced their intentions in a CastleCops forum, and are
searching
for interested parties to participate in the project and lend support.
The project is named the Okopipi Project, Okopipi being the Amazon Indian
name for the blue poison dart frog found in Suriname, South America.
According to the project's founders, 'The rules of engagement would be the
same as Blue Frog. One spam equals one opt-out request. No DDoS. We [will]
use bandwidth throttling [that is] sufficiently low to not overwhelm the
site. It proved effective before. We see no need to change this. All
actions will be approved by a steering committee.'
Comments and suggestions
have been invited on the fledgling project - for full details, or to sign
up to development and general discussion mailing lists, see
http://www.okopipi.org/.
01 June 2006
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