Lycos screensaver to blitz spam servers

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/26/lycos_europe_spam_blitz/print.html>

The Register


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 Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/26/lycos_europe_spam_blitz/

Lycos screensaver to blitz spam servers
By Jan Libbenga (libbenga at yahoo.com)
Published Friday 26th November 2004 16:31 GMT

Lycos Europe has started to distribute a special screensaver
(http://makelovenotspam.com/intl) in a controversial bid to battle spam.
The program - titled Make Love Not Spam, and available for Windows and the
Mac OS - sends a request to view a spam source site. When a large number of
screensavers send their requests at the same time the spam web page becomes
overloaded and slow.

The servers targeted by the screensaver have been manually selected from
various sources, including Spamcop, and verified to be spam advertising
sites, Lycos claims. Several tests are performed to make sure that no
server stops working. Flooding a server with requests so that the server is
unable to respond to the volume of requests made - a process known as a
distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack - is considered to be illegal.


Lycos believes the program will eventually hurt spammers. 'Spamvirtised'
sites typically don't sell advertising, so they have to pay for bandwidth.
Therefore more requests means higher bills, Lycos argues.

A spokesman for Lycos in Germany told The Register he believed that the
tool could generate 3.4MB in traffic on a daily basis. When 10m
screensavers are downloaded and used, the numbers quickly add up, to 33TB
of 'useless' IP traffic. Seems Lycos may hurt not just spammers. .

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'