make LOVE not SPAM

Lycos, the webby company responsible for Tripod webhosting, an old search engine and a bunch of other stuff (they used to be a bit of a 'player', back before Google conquered all), should be heartily congratulated for their make LOVE not SPAM screensaver. Basically, it's a screensaver, created in Flash, that grabs a list of known spammers' websites from their servers, and then, whenever the computer is idle, starts requesting pages from them. They've been careful to make sure that the websites targeted are the actual websites selling Generic V1agra and Genuine Ro1ex Replicas, and not the domains being used to spam through, by getting one of their team to visit the site first to inspect it.

The reason for all this is simple - making it unprofitable for spammers. Getting loads of machines to request pages is how a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack functions, but the Lycos sponsored version isn't looking to take down servers, just push their bandwidth up massively so they have to pay more for the hosting. Given that they normally expect maybe one in ten thousand emails to result in somebody visiting their website, they don't normally have advertising to subsidise costs, or have a server package ready for several gigabytes of transfer a day, either in infrastructure or cost packaging. As a result, it'll suddenly become very expensive to continue annoying the world! On the flip-side of this, each screensaver is designed to download about 3-4Mb a day tops, which is like a single MP3 - that's next to nothing in cost to us.

The scheme hasn't officially started yet, but already there's getting on for 70,000 screensavers installed, and the spammers targetted so far have had to send out 180Gb of data. I think this could work...

...provided Lycos can keep up with the popularity! The sheer number of people attempting to download the screensaver, and the number of screensavers attempting to download spam lists, has brought makelovenotspam.com grind to a (hopefully temporary) halt!

A bit of techy info - the screensaver is built in Flash and is available for Windows and MacOS (9 and X). I imagine with a little persuasion the SWF that has been packaged up could be obtained from Lycos for use with Linux boxes with Flash screensaver capabilities installed. Be sure to knock a hole in your firewall to let it get the data - probably easiest to do if you 'Preview' in Windows. Loads more techy information here.

Ace. Die spammer!