* * * * * And of course, it was related to spam > OK, so why is any of this information—about a company completely unrelated > to Six Apart—important background? Because according to a post on the North > American Network Operators Group mailing list, at some point yesterday the > people at Blue Security decided that the best way to deal with the attack > was to point the hostname www.bluesecurity.com to their TypePad-hosted > weblog, bluesecurity.blogs.com [1]. > Via shadesong [2], “The dishonor of Blue Security [3]” Changing DNS (Domain Name Service) records to fend off a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack is certainly a novel approach to the problem. And from reading up on Blue Security, their spam fighting approach seemed to have pissed off the major spammers enough to launch a DDoS against them. But I suspect this has much larger implications than just if Blue Security was right in what they did or not—it gives more fuel to the AT&Ts and Comcasts that want to carve up the Internet into fiefdoms of classed services [4], for our protection of course. The little conspriacy theorist [5] inside me wonders if the likes of AT&T and Comcast aren't indirectly funding spamming companies in the hope of pushing people over the edge into accepting a more tiered service plan for our protections, of course. [1] http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg17230.html [2] http://shadesong.livejournal.com/2857873.html [3] http://q.queso.com/archives/001917 [4] http://www.savetheinternet.com/ [5] http://www.crank.net/computer.html Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org .