make love not spam
LYCOS Europe released a screensaver for Windows and OS X today that essentially launches a DDOS attack on known spammers. It’s technically not available in the US, but if you just click the UK area of the map, you can get it too. LYCOS claims that the server requests it makes throttle down when the offending website starts to slow down, which is what would technically make it legal, but I say, fuck em. These spammers deserve to have their sites shut down permanently, and I applaud LYCOS for having the balls to do something about it.
For those of you who don’t totally understand, spammers send you unsolicited email to get you to go their bullshit websites. Often those websites sell something directly, and are rarely advertising supported. A DDOS attack is basically a flood of website request, coordinated to cause the website to slow down to a crawl and barely be able to function. For many websites this also means astronomically high hosting costs. DDOS attacks are illegal, but if LYCOS actually throttles back prior to website performance degradation, the repercussion will simply be super high costs for the spammers to keep their sites up and running. It’s a genius and ballsy idea. Congratulations.
I highly recommend you download and run this screensaver at makelovenotspam.com.
[via slashdot.]
I like pie.
As Tom Tom mentioned, seems that the site is already under its own DDoS attack, can’t get to it. A nice idea that is already dead?
Download mirror:
http://home.comcast.net/~fuckspyware/MLNSscreensavernl.exe
SPAM – no one likes it, nor do I dig this idea. I agree with Tom Tom, the amount of bandwidth on the internet will be increased .. needlessly. So if you have, persay 20 million people browsing, then their computer doing even more “browsing” while idle it will affect others not envolved in this hair-brained scheme. Yeah, ISP’s are gonna have a hay-dya with this one. It will be interesting to see the legal ramifications of this once it has been live for a few weeks – poo on Lycos!