Re: Getting tired of Spam? Wanna fight back? Here's how...

> "Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests
> data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.

Lycos is at risk of being the subject of a class action suit if their abusive idea damages legitimate sites. The Lycos concept is trivial to subvert when spammers start sending out spam with a few decoy web sites sprinkled into their spam. These innocent sites then start getting hammered by the DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack engine built into the screensaver. And the innocent sites will sue Lycos and their screensaver users.

DDOS attacks are already illegal under US law.

Lycos says their technology will prevent a server from being flooded to the point of crashing. And this technology is flawless?

The download site is www.makelovenotspam.com, but it was insecure, and hacked yesterday with a message that the concept was abusive. The site is down today. Seems to show that Lycos can't be trusted to run a secure resource, and that hackers could subvert their idea and distribute altered screensavers that would do *who knows what* instead of their advertised purpose.

Lycos says the sites to be hammered are chosen manually, and no mistakes would be made. How does the innocent site appeal a listing? How would the administrators distinguish a real spammer from a bad guy trying to discredit their competitors with made-up spam?

> Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by
> keeping their servers running flat out.

Lycos has horribly underestimated the sneakiness and evil tactics that will be adopted by the spammers to counteract this abusive idea.

> The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the
> tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data."

ISPs who see their customers running this abusive tool, and then disconnect their customers for particiapting in this stupid idea, will be doing the net a favor.

Fighting spam does NOT require us to sink to their level, and fight abuse by the use of further abuse. This idea sounds good to the casual observer, but to us in the trenches of professional spam-fighting, it was examined and dismissed in ten minutes as one of the dumbest ideas to come along in a long time.
>
> The upshot of this article is, if enough people use the screensaver, the
> costs of a spammer to do business (which is up till now very low) will
> become so prohibitive that they'll be forced to stop, or pay huge bills
> for bandwidth usage that will outstrip any spam profit that they make.

Spammers almost never pay their bandwidth bills. They steal it. There are trivial countermeasures that they can take to the Lycos threat. If Lycos had been part of the current community of spam-fighters, they could have avoided this PR embarassment. But they try to go it alone, and expose their shallow thinking.

> Sounds good to me. To read more, go to BBC News .

> I think I'll give it a shot.

Please don't.

> I'm flat fed up with my inboxes being filled with offers to enhance
> various parts of my anatomy, watch girls perform lewd acts, buy the latest
> whatchamadoodle, and help some poor prince get his father's fortune out of
> the country.

That's fine. Learn to track them, complain to their providers, or use a good filter like SpamPal so you never see their crap. Recent advances in filters, both free and commercial, are surprisingly effective. If you're still seeing much spam at this point, your ISP is not providing good service, or you haven't been looking for an effective solution. You can solve this problem using something other than manually deleting them after they arrive.

Don't sink to their level and become like the enemy. At that point they've won.

> Let's fight back.