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 hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.
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.
Posts: 7790 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I like how they programmed it not to cause an overload, but to just cost the company a lot of money and slow response times down.
Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
I thought about this for a while, and its problematic.
1) its clearly malicious in intent, and it is quite possibly illegal.
2) it costs innocent ISPs a lot of money.
3) Its not terribly effective, as there are several easy technical fixes.
4) It gives the spammers too much power. Once they get up to a certain amount collectively, they can all just band together and temporarily redirect their DNS to some victim they want to eliminate and give them a stupendous bandwidth bill.
5) Its too open to exploitation. Since the screensaver responds to signals from the outside those signals can be compromised, or even the screensaver itself. This is, of course, bad.
6) Its not a huge cost to spammers. While in the short term it may cause them some issues, they'll just figure out ways that make it trivial (such as get a hosting plan with better bandwidth -- or even better, jump on a shared host and put a rock solid cap on how much bandwidth they're willing to use each month and watch the host file a lawsuit against Lycos). Spammers already have to deal with DDOS's, the bandwidth from this will be accomodatable.
7) Spammers can do business without much of an internet site (or any, really). Its the pipes they send stuff out on that are the ones they need, and those usually aren't targetable by any tactic like this.
8) Even if this works somewhat, it'll just lower the barriers to entry for spammers. Right now there are an okay number of large companies that really send out huge amounts of spam. As those large companies expend more resources on counter-screensaver, it doesn't decrease the amount of spam overall, it just decreases the amount of spam they send, which means other spam companies start up or increase their marketshare. Economically this is likely to increase the competition and efficiency in spamming.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Lycos did not want to use e-mail to fight back, said Mr Pollmann.
"That would be fighting one bad thing with another bad thing," he said.
It doesn’t make a difference that this website uses internet traffic and not email. Essentially, what this screensaver does is spam the spammers.
Posts: 2149 | Registered: Aug 2000
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