Whenever I hear about projects to flood spammers’ servers and bring down their sites, I think it’s a good idea. I was interested in Lycos Europe’s new screensaver, which follows in footsteps of SETI@Home, offering a distributed solution to a common problem:
Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail. Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.
Sign me up. Not yet, apparently, as they’re launching only in Europe. I hope Lycos is extremely zealous about ensuring that only spammers’ sites get hit by these distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. The Register notes that these types of attacks are illegal (presumably) in the US. I also recently read about Project Honeypot (which sounded to me like the title of some softcore porn film). They’ve got a different take on distributed spam fighting.
UPDATE: As far as I can tell, there are no actual geographical restrictions on this screensaver. It only uses 3.4 MB of upload bandwidth a day–a trickle for the average broadband user.
UPDATE #2: In a predictable irony, the Lycos site has been unavailable for at least a couple of hours. Is it getting DDOS’d by the spammers, or by its own success?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Hmmm, I got it last night. I think I told them I was from the UK. Anyway, it’s cute! I put it on my laptop so it can run overnight. I’ll have to get it installed on my desktop too so it can run 24/7. It’s a sort of peaceful protest thing, isn’t it? I like it.
I’ve always been a big fan of “stuffing the front doors” when it comes to companies that use spam as their primary method of advertising. I figured something like this would come along, and if you’re running a company that’s using spam to draw clients, we’ll let it work for them. Maybe let it work a little TOO well. They send out 500,000 spam about their site, and then for the next three days, they get hit with 1,000,000 hits every hour, from all over the world.
The thing I’ve wondered about is if the “hit” should happen at a particular orchestrated (but seemingly random) time so they have just enough time to try to recover from the first wave, and FWUMPH, they’re down again.
The bigger question becomes what happens if spammers coordinate URLs in messages to target their competitors or detractors. It’s not hard to imagine it happening that way. I mean, the last thing lycos needs is for someone to start sending spam emails that they slurp the URLs from and, oops, the url actually points back at them thus costing them more money. It could happen and I venture it probably will now that people will be jumping on this misguided attempt at targeting spammers.
I can’t say I support the idea. For one, it smacks of vigilantism. Second, it is possible for spammers to spoof their origins and direct the wrath of recipients towards innocent sites, getting them blacklisted and such. Third, adding more traffic to the Internet taxes everyone’s use (just a bit) and doesn’t really stop them in the end. The Internet has often exhibited self-policing and self-regulating behaviour, but this just doesn’t seem to get anyone very far in solving the actual problem, though I’m sure it feels great for a few vindictive moments.