Monday, November 29, 2004

Make Love not Spam


If you are tired of spam, there appears to be another way to pay them back for the wonderful 'service' a spammer forces upon you.

Lycos have come out with a screensaver which makes requests from known spam servers, in the hope that this will drive up their bandwidth costs to such a degree that it will force some out of the market.

I am not sure that this is entirely legal, but for now you can get the screensaver here, and join in the fight, before someone realizes this is in fact a USEFUL thing, and shuts it down. A denile of service attack is ilegal, and Lycos say that they have tested this and say that none of the servers will stop working, but it should seriously impact their running costs.

Each person could generate about an MP3's worth of spam mashing data a day, and when lots more download it, then it's going to get ugly. Aside from the DoS thing, there could be an issue with people being slowed down in general, with this traffic on certain networks.... We shall see.

**UPDATE**
Suprise suprise, everyone jumped on this one and lots of legal wranglings abounds. Everyone wanting to say nya nya, just for the sake of it, but holding off JUST A LITTLE, because of seemingly joining forces with those evil spammers!

Lots of articles (click this for an example) all telling of how bad Lycos are blah blah blah... Nice try lads, it's a shame nothing really happened.



Spam is tasty for people!

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