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Surf safety survey

Posted on 26 Jul 2006 at 16:28

Davey Winder examines web safety tools, witnesses the demise of a promising anti-spam firm and goes ego surfing

Unfortunately, this is when PharmaMaster launched the second prong of his attack, against the Blue Security site itself. This initially took the form of persuading a collaborator among top-tier ISP staffers to block Blue Security's IP address at backbone router level. This was in itself an astonishingly worrying turn of events, but not so worrying as what happened next. Blue Security, unable to communicate outside of its native Israel, posted a statement about the situation at its old blog address at TypePad. Within half-an-hour, a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack occurred at any site connected with Blue Security, bringing down millions of Movable Type blogs (and the collateral damage didn't stop there, as web and mail servers hosted by Tucows were also targeted).

Within the space of just a few days, it became obvious that Blue Security was losing this battle, despite showing signs of winning the war (CEO Eran Reshef told me it had already persuaded six out of the top ten spammers worldwide to remove those on its Do Not Include Registry from their lists). But Reshef felt he had no choice but to close Blue Frog once it became clear just how organised and powerful the army of bots being used against it - and the companies associated with them - actually were. I can quite understand Reshef not wanting to be responsible for continuing an action that could, conceivably, have taken down large swathes of the internet, but by giving in so quickly he's handed a victory to this spammer that will surely come back to bite us the next time anyone makes a breakthrough towards eliminating the spam economy.

Or maybe not, if the open-source Okopipi (www.okopipi.org) project has anything to do with it. Grasping that Blue Frog had the right idea but the wrong delivery mechanism, Okopipi sets out to do much the same thing, but removes the central servers from the equation and replaces them with a P2P approach, using what it's calling a "FrogNet" in memory of Blue - an Okopipi is a poisonous blue frog found in Surinam. With this weak point removed, it should be a lot more difficult for spammers to bring the service down. Well, that's the theory at least, but for now it remains theory, as the project is in the earliest stages of development. Of course, whether Okopipi has the resolve to stand up to the spammers when - and I think it really is when and not if - they attack again, only time will tell. If you want to know more or even to get in on the ground floor and contribute to the development process, join in the discussion at groups.google.com

Ego surfing

Everyone does it. Ego surfing, I mean. Googling your own name has become something of a national pastime, but the results can be difficult to measure in terms of just how big your online ego actually is. Until now that is, thanks to www.egosurf.org and its ego surfing calculator, which is designed to determine just how popular you are in the blogosphere. Simply enter your name and the address of your blog or web domain, together with the search engines you want to measure within - Google, Yahoo, MSN (all in co.uk and .com varieties), as well as del.icio.us and Technorati - and let it run for a minute or two in the background. It uses an undisclosed algorithm to tot up where you rank, how many mentions you get, and then translates these into a set of ego points. The only problem is that there's still no real metric here yet, because by themselves such points are pretty meaningless, despite the flashy speedo dial that displays them. Over time, some kind of league table might be devised, beyond the biggest egos list that's available now.