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/