A new Black Frog anti-spam model, based more than loosely on the defunct Blue Frog service, is being set up over at Okopipi.
Ok0pipi itself takes its name from a poisonous blue frog indigenous to Suriname, and its intent is to be just as poisonous to spammers, using Blue Frog as its model. Blue Frog closed its doors after an unrelenting DDOS attack by spam giant PharmaMaster.
The new service, Okopipi’s Black Frog, will attempt to keep the location of their servers private, and include an element of P2P (peer-to-peer), in an effort to avoid a similar fate.
“This project aims to become a distributed replacement of antispam software Blue Frog,” explains Okopipi. However rather than using one centralized server, it will be distributed across many servers. “Only the Okopipi administrators will know their locations,” says Okopipi. Their hope is that this will make the service less vulnerable to a DDOS attack.
Maybe, maybe not. If Black Frog hopes to take down spammers’ servers, as did Blue Frog before it, then that means finding those servers. Why the folks at Okopipi think that spammers can’t just as easily hide their servers – or, conversely, think that a spammer’s server can be found but Black Frog’s can’t, is a mystery.
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Or perhaps they don’t really care if the servers of their faithful – those who will be part of their P2P network – get taken down.
In either case, wethinks that Okopipi’s Black Frog is either underestimating spammers, or overestimating themselves.
And that doesn’t even get to the fundamental issue – and the fundamental flaw in both Black Frog’s and Blue Frog’s model: participating in a DDOS, even against spammers, is illegal. And unethical.
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The name “Black Frog” was dropped and is no longer accurate – the only correct name is “Okopipi”.
1. Okopipi will not DDoS. Nor will it engage in any other illegal or harmful attack on the spammer.
2. The program does not go after the spammer, but the website that is advertised. The spammer is impossible to find, but the website is public. It has to be.
3. This is roughly how the program functions:
– After a number of spam messages for one website are reported, the owner of the website receives one request to remove Okopipi members from his mailing list.
– After ten days (in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act) have passed, if the same website is still being advertised, the website owner receives one opt-out request for every spam mail reported.
– To avoid bringing down the server, the opt-outs are throttled in their frequency.