"If anyone threatens you with a gun, the police are able to shoot at them before they harm anyone"

Not true. The police are *not* free to start blowing people away just because a gun has been waved; they are supposed to diffuse the situation if at all possible without any violence. Escalating violence always leads to a shitstorm, not peace. Ever heard that "an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind"?

Blue Security wasn't playing by the "fight fire with fire" rulebook, either. They weren't another set of frothing-at-the-mouth antispam machine gunners. They were -- very simply -- allowing email users to submit 1 complaint for 1 illegal spam without spending their entire lives filling in webforms on sites flashing genitalia at them.

Get it? One complaint for one spam. With simple instructions on how the spammer can clean blue frog members off their list. Not a DoS, and wouldn't affect the spammer's website at all (besides the work of sifting through the complaints), unless they sent a huge load of spam to many, many Blue Frog members at once. If that affected their servers (which normally didn't happen) -- hey, that's the cost of doing business by pissing off 99% of your customers.

Please don't praise Blue Security as some kind of attack dog; they were just simplifying what every consumer has a right to do (but is otherwise almost impossible in the spam world...) -- complain.

[ reply ]

Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/articles/11392/33838#33838