Lycos Releases Spam-Fighting Screensaver

2 Dec, 2004 at 12:30am ET Article published in Tech

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 will it make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out. The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data.

Submitted by: Thrax

Source: Neowin

Comments

2 Dec 2004 ~ 12:40am RWB Don't they get their revenue by you clicking on those ad's? Like a fraction of a penny per click... so wouldn't this just help them?
2 Dec 2004 ~ 1:10am primesuspect **** lycos! They created sidesearch, that totally insiduous ****ed up piece of spyware that infected millions of computers! And now they're suddenly ANTI spyware? I don't buy it for a second.
2 Dec 2004 ~ 1:40am RWB It's like AOHell giving away Virus protection....
2 Dec 2004 ~ 2:05am Lord_Night

primesuspect wrote:

**** lycos! They created sidesearch, that totally insiduous ****ed up piece of spyware that infected millions of computers! And now they're suddenly ANTI spyware? I don't buy it for a second.

Hey Prime It's another way of Lycos going.. oh were good guys now.. but still have the spam and the infecting software built into the screensaver now.

and yes, each time you click or submit to a spam site they get 1/100 of a cent, so if you have a program that jsut sits there and hits there sites.. .well that is auto pay for them,

lycos is so stupid
2 Dec 2004 ~ 9:26am mmonnin I think you can still request data from a website without actually getting that hit count that helps revenue like it sounds Lycos is tying to do. I still wouldnt do it because it will prolly be full of spyware as well.
2 Dec 2004 ~ 10:14am Sputnik marc's right on all counts there. http get's dont have to have a referrer in their header, so they're just getting alot of stuff all the time
2 Dec 2004 ~ 2:32pm FAH_WW Let's just say they had better not visit my site as I will find a way to sue them for attacking my site.

The folding community forum has been blacklisted several times by SpamCop. That's bad enough. But this bl*sted screensaver could be told to hit my bandwidth, which comes directly out of my pocket.

It's illegal for a start...
2 Dec 2004 ~ 2:47pm Zero1 I dont know how many times i got infected with the lycos sidesearch on my old computer, and now they want to make a screen saver to help stop spam, I dont see how that works?

Is Lycos trying to clean up there act or just make themselves look good?
2 Dec 2004 ~ 2:59pm primesuspect There has got to be a financial motive if lycos is concerned. Believe me, they could give a **** about the "good of the people" :shakehead
3 Dec 2004 ~ 8:41pm SchWartz The stated goal was drive up the economic cost of running spam servers, with the added perk of giving all us "distributed" PCs a/k/a schlub Windows PC users a way to fight back in the manner of vigilantes. Although the attack was supposed to throttle back as the spam servers reached capacity, today's report is that it turned into a DDOS attack, according to netcraft and slashdot. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/02/2221253
http://news.com.com/Antispam+screensaver+downs+two+sites+in+China/2100-7349_3-5474963.html?tag=nl
The spam servers taken out were in China, which means the US law enforcement couldn't touch them, even if they were willing to try.
Another tool coming down the pipe in, hopefully not too long, is the "Turntide" router, which throttles down incoming spam at the edge of an ISP's network, and before the spam hits the ISP's mail servers, with the goal of driving up sender cost. http://www.turntide.com/router/
Supposedly Iowa Telecom implemented it and saw an 80% drop in mail volumes, as spam servers were not allowed to use bandwidth. Symantec bought the technology not too long ago, but I don't think its been deployed yet.
http://www.turntide.com/
4 Dec 2004 ~ 1:39pm FAH_WW To me the idea it would 'throttle back' on 80% load is totally crazy anyway - there is no way a client can work that out - it just means one of those clients gets a server cannot be reached or similar, and it will just try again.

Servers don't return info like - "I'm being loaded at 81% for this call" as far as I am aware. They MAY return a "Server busy" message, but even that is not always the case.

My new worry here is the concept of using this concept as a virus - I know, scr files are used as that regularly - as there will be people who feel this is a great idea. Those people are entitled to their opinion, but as I end up paying for that opinion I don't necessarily agree
4 Dec 2004 ~ 3:20pm SchWartz Yup--stupid idea for many reasons. What do you think of the turntide thing?

FAH_WW wrote:

My new worry here is the concept of using this concept as a virus - I know, scr files are used as that regularly - as there will be people who feel this is a great idea. Those people are entitled to their opinion, but as I end up paying for that opinion I don't necessarily agree