That didn’t last long: Lycos withdraws its spammer-DDOSing screensaver
Only a few days after releasing its “good idea” of DDOSing spammer websites by geting lots of people to run a screensaver, Lycos has abandoned the idea.
However Lycos isn’t apologetic. (I don’t think there was anything to apologise about. Spammers effectively DDOS email and blogs. Their pinch point is their websites. So let’s use our spare CPU cycles on them too.) It says that when Netcraft was looking at the spammer sites claiming to be down, they weren’t being targeted by its program.
You know, I wouldn’t put it past the spammers to make it look as though this was going on…
- These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
- Lycos screensaver tackles spam websites.. if you can find it (1 December 2004; score: 160.27%)
- This is just *madness*: more than a thousand attempted comment spams a day (7 December 2004; score: 55.92%)
- We apologise for the lack of a front page earlier... (28 October 2004; score: 43.17%)
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December 7th, 2004 at 9:53 am
I still don’t think it was right to DDOS the spammers. Yes, it has great appeal but doesn’t that bring us down to their level?
December 7th, 2004 at 10:40 am
Why assume that there’s a moral dimension to what goes on between machines? If our machines are used to make their machines ineffective, who loses exactly? This is a real “ends and means” debate. But I think that we can already see that we’re effectively fighting against a guerilla force here (because spammers are now using multiple distributed machines), so the only way to be effective is to strike at the head.
Seriously: I wrote about the first spam to Usenet in 1994. Things are so much worse now that it’s clear to me that normal methods are ineffective.
Secondly, we use spare CPU cycles to do things like search for aliens, find drug candidates and so on. Why not use them also to improve our quality of life by cutting off some of the low stuff, as well as heightening the best of what we have? If you could download a screensaver that would (in some way) put the Mafia out of business, or prevent burglary in your street, would you?
December 7th, 2004 at 11:54 am
I would use a screensaver to put such criminals out of business but not, as with DDOS, if it used questionable methods! I think it comes back to the money angle…how can we stop spammers getting their hands on the money that drives their nasty habits? DDOS was an interesting experiment but I don’t think it will be repeated. So maybe we can look at the payment systems - the card companies that the spammers (or spamvertised sites) use to collect the money. Which one does the world’s biggest spammer use? If enough customers then threatened to cut their credit cards in half because of that relationship, might that make a difference?
December 7th, 2004 at 3:37 pm
And now the Lycos stunt has backfired! See The Register - “Fake Lycos screensaver harbours Trojan”.
December 8th, 2004 at 1:28 pm
Yes, the fake screensaver (which is surely recruiting at least a few machines to the spammers’ cause by creating Trojan proxies) is part of the rule one must remember: the spammers are now much smarter technologically than the average user, or even the slightly clued-up user.
What we need is an anti-spam solution that *builds* on people not being very technologically clever. Unfortunately I think this may be as attainable as fat-free lard.