Escalating the war on spam, a California company wants to let thousands of users collaborate to disable the websites spammers use to sell their wares.
A leading anti-spam advocate, however, criticized Blue Security's Blue Frog initiative as being no more than a denial-of-service attack, the technique hackers use to effectively shut down a site by overwhelming it with fake traffic.
"It's the worst kind of vigilante approach," said John Levine, a board member with the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail. "Deliberate attacks against people's websites are illegal."
Eran Reshef, Blue Security's founder and chief executive, denied any wrongdoing, saying Blue Frog was merely empowering users to collectively make complaints they otherwise would have sent individually.
Here's how the technique works: When users add e-mail addresses to a "do-not-spam" list, Blue Security creates additional addresses, known as honeypots, designed to do nothing but attract spam. If a honeypot receives spam, Blue Security tries to warn the spammer. Then it triggers the Blue Frog software on a user's computer to send a complaint automatically.
Thousands complaining at once will knock out a website and thus encourage spammers to stop sending e-mail to the "do-not-spam" list.
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Surge in legality: The number of digital music tracks legally downloaded from the internet almost tripled in the first half of 2005 as the use of high-speed broadband connections surged around the world, the international recording industry said Thursday.
The International Federation of Phonographic Industries said that 180 million single tracks were downloaded legally in the first six months of the year, compared to 57 million tracks in the first half of 2004 and 157 million for the whole of last year.
The federation credited the increase to a 13 percent rise in the number of broadband lines installed around the world, along with an industry campaign to both prosecute and educate against illegal downloading.
It said there was just a 3 percent increase in illegal file-sharing to 900 million in July, from 870 million at the start of the year.
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Developing situation: Sony has unveiled a range of development tools so software companies can develop games for its next-generation PlayStation 3 video game console.
Sony (SNE) said it acquired Britain's SN Systems and formed strategic alliances with U.S.-based Ageia Technologies, Havok and Epic Games to provide more tools.
Having led the worldwide console gaming market for the last decade, Sony is counting on PlayStation 3 to dominate in all aspects of networked home entertainment -- games, movies, music and more.
The company had said in May at the Electronic Entertainment Expo that it planned to launch PlayStation 3 in 2006, but there had been concern among developers about the immense cost of creating games with movie-quality graphics for a machine with unparalleled processing speed.
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AP and Reuters contributed to this report.
