Monday, February 25, 2002		Bits & Bytes

Opt-in e-mail: A term that refers to promotional e-mails that have been requested by the individual receiving them. Unlike spam promotional e-mails that get sent out to large lists of recipients without regard to whether or not they want the information, opt-in e-mails are only sent to people who specifically request them.

Pulsing zombie: A form of DoS attack known as a degradation-of-service attack, as opposed to a denial-of-service attack. Unlike a regular zombie that paralyses a system by inundating it with a steady stream of attack traffic, the pulsing zombie attacks with irregular small bursts of attack traffic from multiple sources on a single target over an extended period of time.

BXXP: Pronounced beep. Short for Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol an application protocol framework for connection-oriented, asynchronous request or response interactions. It was designed as a tool kit specifically to handle XML documents on the Internet.