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Lycos Anti-Spam Screensaver Brings Down Spam Sites
ChairmanMeow writes "According to BBC News, the screensaver released by Lycos Europe that targets spam websites has been a bit too successful at targeting spam sites, bringing down two sites, with a third responding intermittently, and raising concerns that the screensaver amounts to a DDoS attack against spam sites. Of course, spammers deserve to be punished, but will DDoS attacks against spam websites help to curb the problem of spam?" While the screensaver allegedly throttles back when a site slows, it would seem it's being a bit overzealous.
Really,
:grrr:
Is there anything legally wrong with this?
It's not a "bot" army in that the owners of the PC's opted in to do this.
-nB
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Damn 2 min between posts BS has got to go. Should be limited to within topics or something
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Who controls the list of "spam sites"? What are the criteria for becomming a victim? I would personally like this process to be transparent before I encourage anyone to participate - I do think they have the best intentions, but the potential for abuse is a bit scary.
That's what sucks about the spam war.. the good guys have to be careful how they deal with the problem to avoid accidentally screwing someone innocent. The bad guys just double their output.
No, it's not- it's fighting back. This should serve as a lesson to those spyware kiddies, too. It's about time these malware losers got a taste of their own medicine.
Does it matter? Mission (screw the spammers) accomplished either way.
Exactly. If the mortgage guys don't like the packets coming from our screensavers, why haven't they sent us any opt-out requests?
Welcome to the Internet. :-)
No, seriously, the 'net was founded on principles of consensual anarchy. That's the way it has always been, and the way it always should remain. By signing onto the Internet, the spamming companies agreed to join a transnational network that was effectively above the laws of any one nation. If someone wants a protected little world, they should wall themselves off from the 'net behind eight firewalls and never communicate with the rest of the universe. If a whiny, crybaby spam business wants to fight against it, let them try. Next time, the 'net's tendency towards autocorrection will ensure that they get BGP blackholed for all eternity.
The right solution for solving spam is not one of government. We don't need laws to make DOS attacks on spammers legal because they were never illegal to begin with. They agreed implicitly to accept whatever the Internet threw at them when they signed on. This is the way the Internet has always worked---when polite discourse fails to correct the error of one's ways, the 'net's response is to isolate the problem in the harshest possible manner to serve as an example to others who might choose to also act in ways that are harmful to the best interests of the 'net.
There's simply no other mechanism for solving this sort of problem other than everyone giving up on unsigned SMTP, and since too many people aren't willing to do that, the only alternative is to simply packet-spam the spammers into oblivion. I say, let their routers burn.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
a) Their bandwidth bills go up from all of these bots reloading them, increasing the cost of using spam a LOT.
b) The people who would want to buy their product are discouraged by long pageloads and sporadic outages, decreasing their revenues.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.