Blue Security Reborn As Social Action Enabler 29
griswaldo writes "Wired News writes about the re-birth of the ill-fated Blue Security as a social action company. According to the article, founders of the former anti-spam company that made headlines after incurring the wrath of a Russian spam king have set up a company called Collactive that provides tools to organize grassroots action on political and social web sites. The article mentions a global warming initiative called WorldCoolers and, for the Slashdot YRO crowd, the Privacy Alert Network that kicked off by letting people comment on Homeland Security's latest crazy idea."
Congratulations! (Score:2, Insightful)
If you can't beat spam, add to it! (Score:5, Insightful)
"Once it's installed, the organizers can send alerts to users or update the software with scripts that know how to take particular actions, such as automatically filling in feedback forms on a politician's website. End users can also forward e-mail alerts to their friends, who have the option of installing the software themselves and joining the network."
"By picking a couple of issues that all Americans agree on, we can really rain holy privacy hellfire," Scannell said.
If you simply define spam as "unwanted commentary," a large, disruptive user base that does nothing but repeat itself could easily be placed in there.
Another problem is this: Dr. Smith disagrees with the movement being "addressed" by the Collactive users and wishes to comment. She/He should be able to offer feedback like anyone else, but if 537 near-duplicate comments fly in while she/he responds, then his/her comment is very likely to be either mass-deleted or simply overlooked.
The point is simply this: political debates should be won by the good arguments, and NOT by drowning the opposing side in a flood of automated replies. From where I'm sitting, this just looks like a hack of a piece of software trying to push a hack of an argument.
can't beat = join (Score:2, Insightful)
In short: a spamming network. Oh the irony.
What about mail server ID? (Score:3, Insightful)
But what about whitelists for email servers? Maybe something similar to the DNS system, with propagating server lists. So, you register your server with your telco, wait an hour or two, and the thing is propagated. Registration should be free, but a mandatory delay of at least 10 minutes between registration should be there; the telcos are also free to check if somebody is registering tons of servers (maybe a limit would do). This allows emailservers to reject unknown ones along with all their mail, so spammers could no longer setup a room full of machines sending millions of emails a day, and spambots with their own SMTP servers are useless. Furthermore, if some trojan hijacks Outlook accounts for spamming, email servers could (a) introduce an one second delay, thereby limiting the max amount of emails per day while not overly hurting the user, (b) report when a whitelist server suddenly sends heaps of data, and the sending server is obliged to investigate this and warn clients that they are sending too much.
All of this requires no client changes, they are all server side updates.
King's Pawn (Score:3, Insightful)
But is it too late for them to do anything but inspire a new generation of gulags?