Information
Community members reported their spam to Blue Security, which analyzed it to make sure it met their guidelines, then reported sites sending illegal spam to the ISPs which hosted them (if it could be found, contacted and were willing to work with them), to other anti-spam groups and to law-enforcement authorities in an attempt to get the spammer to cease and desist. If these measures failed, Blue Security sent back a set of instructions to a Blue Frog client. The client software used these instructions to visit and leave complaints on the websites advertised by the spam messages. For each spam message a user received, their Blue Frog client would leave one generic complaint, including instructions on how to remove all Blue Security users from future mailings. Blue Security operated on the assumption that as the community grew, the flow of complaints from tens or hundreds of thousands of computers would apply enough pressure on spammers and their clients to convince them to stop spamming members of the Blue Security community.
The Blue Frog software included a Firefox and Internet Explorer plugin allowing Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo! Mail e-mail users to report their spam automatically. Users could also report spam from desktop e-mail applications such as Microsoft Office Outlook, Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird.
Users who downloaded the free Blue Frog software registered their e-mail addresses in the "Do Not Intrude" registry. Each user could protect ten addresses and one personal DNS domain name.
Blue Frog was available as a free add-on within the Firetrust Mailwasher anti-spam filter. It was also compatible with SpamCop, a tool with different spam-fighting methods.
Blue Security released all its software products (including Blue Frog) as open source: the developer community could review, modify, or enhance them.
Read more about this topic: Blue Frog
Famous quotes containing the word information:
“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“Computers are good at swift, accurate computation and at storing great masses of information. The brain, on the other hand, is not as efficient a number cruncher and its memory is often highly fallible; a basic inexactness is built into its design. The brain’s strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it.”
—Jeremy Campbell (b. 1931)
“The information links are like nerves that pervade and help to animate the human organism. The sensors and monitors are analogous to the human senses that put us in touch with the world. Data bases correspond to memory; the information processors perform the function of human reasoning and comprehension. Once the postmodern infrastructure is reasonably integrated, it will greatly exceed human intelligence in reach, acuity, capacity, and precision.”
—Albert Borgman, U.S. educator, author. Crossing the Postmodern Divide, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1992)