[NetBehaviour] Spammer Slammer Targets Politics.

marc marc.garrett at furtherfield.org
Tue Dec 19 14:56:12 CET 2006


Spammer Slammer Targets Politics.

By Ryan Singel.

The brains behind a doomed antispam service are turning their technology 
into an online swarming tool for activists, hoping to subject 
politicians and government agencies to the kind of mass pressure Blue 
Frog once inflicted on spammers.

With its Blue Frog software, Israel-based Blue Security made it easy for 
spam victims to automatically send opt-out requests to advertised 
websites, either in e-mail or through online order forms on the sites 
being promoted. In practice, that meant that some sites were deluged 
with thousands of such messages simultaneously, prompting critics to 
charge that the service was little more than a vigilante 
denial-of-service tool.

Controversial or not, the company claimed to have forced some of the 
world's top spammers to remove Blue Frog users' e-mail addresses from 
their e-mail lists, before a retaliatory cyberattack by a Russian 
spammer forced the service to close its doors last May.

Now founders Aran Reshef and Amir Hirsh are reincarnating their software 
to turn armies of internet users into political activists. Their new 
Collactive platform takes the drudgery out of grass-roots action, 
letting armchair activists fill out online petitions, file comments in 
rule-making proceedings, send letters to their representatives in 
Congress and seed collaborative web forums with sympathetic news items 
-- all with the push of a button.

more...
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72291-0.html




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