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Lycos Declares War on Spam Servers
Psychotext writes "The Register have posted a story about a new screensaver from Lycos that targets known spam servers (taken from spamcop and verified by hand) with traffic in order to raise their bandwidth costs and hopefully price them out of the game. Lycos state that this is not a DDOS as Lycos monitors the site's responsiveness and throttles back when the site starts to falter. The screensaver is available here for Mac OSX, Mac OS9 and Windows, though you might need to lie about what country you are from." Reader JohnGrahamCumming writes "As part of preparing for the MIT Spam Conference I've put together a survey on what people are experiencing out there with spam, what they are doing about and followed it up with a test of different views of an inbox filled with spam and ham. You can take the test and be part of the survey results in January."
This is Lycos Europe, not lycos.com, two totally different companies that shares nothing but the name and the logo.
Well, to be perfectly honest, people trying to blacklist specific dynamic IPs (or even small ranges of them) are just showing their ignorance of how the net works.
Part of verifying IPs as spam sites should include the obvious; checking to make sure it's not an IP in some ISP's dynamic IP pool.
This type of checking is already implemented by some ISPs when deciding if email should be accepted or not by their mail server. (My boss set up a small mail server on his Charter cable connection, for example. Charter, instead of issuing him a true static IP, decided to give him a "fixed dynamic IP". Basically, they just punched his network card's MAC address into their DHCP server and told it to always issue him the same IP out of their dynamic pool.) This causes his mail server to be unable to handle emails destined for AOL, because they know his IP is in a dynamic range for Charter.
Sometimes, I've seen my own dynamic IP come up as blacklisted on services, but a closer inspection typically shows they just blacklisted the whole ISP, or at least their whole pool of dynamic addresses. These types of bans are usually temporary measures put in place because they're having problems coming from somebody on that ISP and they can't afford to wait around until that ISP co-operates with them to track down the individual doing it.
I'm not sure which spam gang does this at the moment, but Empire Towers would be the best bet. (They use tricks like asymetric routing to spoof the source of a TCP connection. They can make it look like a huge amount of spam is coming from a dial-up connection on an ISP with outgoing port 25 blocked. ;^)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Not all spammers get $$ by people buying somthing from them. Sometimes the site linked to in the email has a referer in it and leads to some site other than the e-mailer's and they get paid based onthat reffer id being assosiated with a particular non-acredited mortage loan for penis enlargement pills.
There are other ways they make money, and some is just random guessing to find valid emails (via various mechanism) for re-sale to other spammers.
I'd swear some of this spam is pure bs to entertain the spammer who could care less about making $$ than simply seeing how many people he piss off with idiot e-mails and chain letters(AOL in conjuction with microsoft and the fda are tracking this e-mail, send it to 183 close friends in the next 27.34 minutes or we kill a kitten and you'll come down with warts!).
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
A company that brands a product "Lycos Sidesearch" that Ad Aware finds as spyware isn't going to get me to install their screensaver; I don't care how long the name has been a brand on the Internet.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
This was my first reaction too. I downloaded the s/w to analyse it, the MacOS-X version is not a standard bundle, just a carbonised ppc executable. /Users/john/Library/SWF Desktop/SWF Desktop.app ?? .biz .ezybrzy africa bigger lonely & buyherb
strings reveals some blowfish setups, in a screensaver?
some filecopywithcompression, which might be just sloppy compilation...
chmod 777 hmmm,
and buried in one section of binary Shakespeare's monkeys have inserted amongst the other bits & bytes
Anybody with a sandpit network like to see what comes out of a machine running this thing?