I have been getting a lot of press attention for the recent fiasco regarding the denial of service attack suffered by anti-spam company Bluesecurity. Now bluesecurity have issued a purported timeline to describe what happened from their point of view. (You can tell someone is hostile or annoyed when they use words like 'purported' :-).
The timeline from bluesecurity (BS, as it's such a great acronym in American English) is frustratingly vague. It uses phrases like 'tampering with the Internet backbone using a technique called "Blackhole Filtering".' As Thomas Pogge, a philosophy professor of mine, used to say: that's not even wrong yet. There is no "Internet backbone", there is no technique known as "Blackhole Filtering", and blackhole routing is not normally described as tampering. So the whole explanation is nonsense. It is literally non-sense: cannot be made to refer or mean anything. I don't actually care whether BS knowingly redirected a DOS at the Six Apart sites or not (Although I'm sure that BS and its lawyers do). What I care about is that millions of angry netizens are being miseducated about how the Internet works. In the following, I'll try to correct some of that miseducation.
