Lycos screen saver attacks spammers
Friday, December 3, 2004 Posted: 12:08 AM EST (0508 GMT)
MADRID, Spain (AP) -- At the risk of breaching Internet civility, Lycos Europe is offering computer-users a weapon against spam-spewing servers: a screen-saver program that automatically hits the offenders with data to slow them down.
Around 65,000 people already signed up for the offensive, called "Make Love not Spam" before Tuesday's official launch on a website by the same name, the company said. It is urging its 22 million users to download the screen-saver, but says anyone with a computer is welcome to it.
The company insists the technique is legal -- it says the culprit servers are simply choked a bit, not completely asphyxiated -- and dismissed concerns that computers which ping servers blamed for unwanted Internet traffic are further clogging the world's digital pipeline.
The program activates whenever a computer equipped with it goes into standby mode, and sends so-called HTTP get-requests to what Lycos says are servers known to generate unsolicited e-mails. When done en masse, this eats up precious bandwidth, causing the servers to overload and slow down, the company said.
The goal, said Lycos Europe spokesman Kay Oberbeck, is to "show the owners of such spam web sites that there is massive interest of thousands of users who are not willing to just give up against more and more spam each day."
Lycos chooses its targets by reviewing spam monitors such as
www.spamcop.com and manually checking blacklisted sites to see if they really do carry products promoted by spam.
But Oberbeck acknowledged the risk of going after a legitimate site that has been hijacked by a spam-spewing site. "You have to be careful and that is what we are doing," he said from Guetersloh, Germany.
He said Lycos takes care not to crash spam servers altogether, respecting at least some of their bandwidth. "They will never go down below 5 percent bandwidth. Never."
Is it legal? "Yes. We checked."
Cyberspace activism -- such as virtual sit-ins in which computer users gang together and point browsers at a site, then use automated tools to send requests to it -- is not new, said Dorothy Denning, a professor of defense analysis at the Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.
But in this case a for-profit company is the driving force.
"I guess the interesting question is whether or not that company might be liable under some law, and would probably be liable, certainly, at least under a lawsuit by the spammers," she said.
And the Lycos screen-saver adds more traffic to the Internet even as it tries to clear it of unwanted traffic, and probably has a minor impact on the targeted sites. "Those sites can always just pack up and use another IP address," Denning said. Or they can just buy more bandwidth.
"The cost of adding extra bandwidth may be worth the reward that comes from spamming," she said.
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My views:
I think this is AWESOME, and hope more people use this, and BLAST these freaking spammers servers. Crash them!
BTW, spammers have found my guestbook, and attempt to post their **** and URL's. But I don't allow links!! HAHA! Dumb asses. Well, I have their IP's, and have banned their IP's from even GETTING to the server. (Meaning they cannot reach my domain name) [img]smile.gif[/img]
Spam is slowly destroying the internet. Usenet (Newsgroups) have all mostly been ruined. 80% of all emails sent last year were all SPAM emails.
SOMETHING has to be done. I remember the days before the mass public knew about the internet--1994-ish, when there were no ad banners, no pop ups, and it was ALL content. I think the worlds governments should somehow make email addresses be like drivers licenses. You must register it, and it is 100% traceable. Pass laws that 100% ban spam email in all Countries.
It's getting so bad, it's beginning to really piss me off to where I don't even like to check my email--and have created secret email addresses I only give to friends and NEVER post it on a website or in a forum--as bots will 'phish' for email addresses and sell them to spammers.
How do YOU feel about spam these days? I mean, now they use the windows messenger service to do pop ups (a service you should have OFF), spam guestbook's, spam FORUMS (which makes me want to kill them) and it's only going to get worse unless some law is passed where these weasels cannot spew their rubbish.