Who’s to blame?
I’ve been going through news reports about the whole Blue Frog thing that I wrote about yesterday here, here and at a few other places as well. The more I read these reports, the angrier I become.
Some of these are probably the selfsame people who talked about "collateral damage" and how "you can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs" when Bush declared his "war on terror" and went over to Iraq in search of WMDs. But now, let a few million "innocent" bloggers be deprived of their daily right to ramble, and out come the pitchforks and the torches. Not to get at the real culprit mind you, but to crucify the guys who actually seem to be fighting the spammers. So I guess a few thousand foreign lives have no value but by God, we have to protect the inalienable right of our innocent bloggers to blog daily, gosh darn it!
(Of course, a reverse of the same rhetoric was used by a Blue Frog defender elsewhere :p He said, and I quote, "First, the media says ‘shame on us’ for going after a sick group of people who fly planes into buildings (and who are bent on our destruction). Now, they are saying ‘shame on Blue Security’ for trying their best to fend off a cyber CRIMINIAL who thinks the Internet is his to do as he pleases." So I guess the rhetoric can be used both ways – and even to defend the viewpoint of those who think that Blue is at fault. But the rhetoric stays :p)
Now I’m by not a die-hard Blue-freak :p But Blue Security appears to be doing something about spam when almost all that these so called experts do is to sit around and talk about it. Sure, Blue seems to have been rather stupid in the way they handled the attack. But then again, if their claims are true (and the fact that they have traffic reports showing the decline in traffic to their site seems to indicate that they were working based on a hypothesis that they thought was true), they didn’t know about the DDoS and so weren’t knowingly throwing TypePad to the lions. So why are all these "experts" hell-bent on vilifying Blue Security?
Is it just the human mob mentality where you pick on the closest handy-looking victim because you really don’t care who you blame as long as you have somebody to blame? Or is it more sinister? Are these people blaming Blue because they really don’t want spam to go away because that would mean that their "expert" advice would no longer be needed – at least with regards to spam and so revenue streams will dry up? Or is it just a case of the little green eyed monster rearing its head? I don’t know … but the reporting about the incident, at least, seems a little biased.