Lycos' anti-spam crusade: clever but no, thanks...
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Tagged with: I have to admit, it has to be the most creative campaign in a long time: the Lycos Europe 'Make Love, Not Spam' screensaver. The idea of a distributed DOS attack client to bring spammers on their knees is something I actually discussed with a friend a couple of days ago. What a nice idea, if it weren't for the disadvantages attached to it, such as going to jail and further clogging up the internet with useless traffic...
Spam pisses me off. Being an internet-oldbie I've experienced a spam-less internet for a couple of years which was truly great. One could leave their email address harmlessly on any site without getting any unwanted mails, one could surf any site without popups and other annoying advertisements, one could set up interactive communities without them being spammed to oblivion. But alas, those days are long gone. We're left with an internet dominated by stuff the majority of it's users does not want but cannot escape from. Penis enlargement cream, drugs, loans, online casino's, the list is almost endless. These days we have to arm ourselves with serverside and/or clientside spam-blockers, trojan detectors, spyware removal tools, popup blockers, virus scanners, wiki-spam blockers and blog comment-spam blockers in order to be online in peace.
What if we could teach those spammers a lesson. The internet community itself fighting back against spam has always been an interesting thought to me but up till now no one ever bothered or dared to launch an effective campaign against it. We're only taking defensive measurements such as the examples I listed a while earlier in this story.
Lycos, a 100% commercial enterprise on the net is now trying to stand up as the anti-spam-prophet by launching a crippled DDOS client in the shape of a screensaver. Instead of launching a full force DDOS attack on the spammer's website it gently fires off some HTTP requests in order to increase load on the spammer's webserver. The idea is intriguingly clever, commercially. However I'm not buying it and I'm not participating.
Spammers need to piss off. I guess we all agree on that statement, except for the spammers themselves maybe. However a commercial enterprise such as Lycos presenting itself as the movement against spam feels like the proverbial 'fucking for virginity' to me.
To me there's only one truly effective way to deal with spammers: tough legal action, preferrably international. But I guess we'll have to wait for another 10 or 20 years until the 50-60 years old policy makers of this world have turned into drooling senile old farts until the current generation will be those who make the rules until this will happen. Until then we might just have to develop a seti@home style DDOS client which, albeit slightly illegal, might effectively bring down the spammers without any affiliation to yet another party who's in it for the money.
I'll just keep on dreaming...
What if we could teach those spammers a lesson. The internet community itself fighting back against spam has always been an interesting thought to me but up till now no one ever bothered or dared to launch an effective campaign against it. We're only taking defensive measurements such as the examples I listed a while earlier in this story.
Lycos, a 100% commercial enterprise on the net is now trying to stand up as the anti-spam-prophet by launching a crippled DDOS client in the shape of a screensaver. Instead of launching a full force DDOS attack on the spammer's website it gently fires off some HTTP requests in order to increase load on the spammer's webserver. The idea is intriguingly clever, commercially. However I'm not buying it and I'm not participating.
Spammers need to piss off. I guess we all agree on that statement, except for the spammers themselves maybe. However a commercial enterprise such as Lycos presenting itself as the movement against spam feels like the proverbial 'fucking for virginity' to me.
To me there's only one truly effective way to deal with spammers: tough legal action, preferrably international. But I guess we'll have to wait for another 10 or 20 years until the 50-60 years old policy makers of this world have turned into drooling senile old farts until the current generation will be those who make the rules until this will happen. Until then we might just have to develop a seti@home style DDOS client which, albeit slightly illegal, might effectively bring down the spammers without any affiliation to yet another party who's in it for the money.
I'll just keep on dreaming...
