News Anti-spam plan overwhelms sites

The shoe's on the other foot now! Lycos's anti-spam campaign claims it's first victims, according to the Beeb:

A plan to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers seems to be getting out of control.

Earlier this week Lycos Europe released a screensaver that bombards spam websites with data to try to increase the cost of running such sites.

But analysis shows that, in some cases, spam websites are being completely overwhelmed by the traffic being directed their way.

The Lycos plan has also come under fire for encouraging vigilantism.

More here

Call it what you will - DDoS, vigilantism - I call it brilliant. I'm sure there's a very apt Klingon proverb that covers this: 'Vengeance is a dish best served by screensaver...'

 

No, its crap cause it makes every other site on that server and connection go down as well.

YAY lets clog the already over-stretched internet even more.

 

no, it's great.
but hasn't worked for me for the past couple of days - I (and Waz) was (were) wondering server had been (D)DOS'd...

 

Working for me

 

2 wrongs dont make a right, this may seem like a fun thing to do, and indeed it is funny. but uh, i dont know that its right. wrong begets more wrong.

 

I hope none of you hit an innocent site, because if I was the webmaster of that, I would be looking at legal action...

 

it'll serve the guys who host the spam sites right for hosting illegal sites, wouldn't it ? SPAM is illegal, serving something to generate spam must be illegal no ?

edit: and dgb, do you really think a company such as LYCOS, would just fire at anyone ? im sure they do research into the sites there given information on!

 

One mistake and they could be in for a hell of a lot of hurt... I'll pass on running it...

Hell it may even be illegal to do it to spammers, I mean a DDOS attack is what this is isn't it, and I'm pretty sure they are not legal.

 

Yea, the world isnt ideal but clogging up network hubs and servers with crap = bad. And if your site/bit was affected or whatever then im sure you'd moan.

So, the site is taken offline, then they move it to another server. That takes all of 30minutes, if they arent already doing so. Meanwhile some poor techy is having to cope with DDoS attacks cause Lycos is encouraging people to break the law. Why dont they also include a p2p program in the same screensaver?? Im sure they'll get away with that as well.

 

Repost, kinda.

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=76031

 

Kinda, but no. This about the effects the screen saver is having, rather than just posting a link.

 

I don't mean to be rude Bindibadgi, but this is just crap. What do you think that spammers are doing? Clogging up network hubs and servers with CRAP! And you know why? Because ISPs don't care enough to police their own customers for TOS problems as long as the bills get paid on time.

It's time for that to change.

The company I worked for, until recently, spent millions and millions of dollars catching spam and deleting it before it got to peoples' desktops. If they hadn't paid that millions of dollars, the amount of time wasted by employees would have cost ten times as much.

Spam is, 99 times out of 100, unpoliceable, and the people who are required by their own contracts to police these matters, ISPs, do not. If the police aren't policing, then sorry folks, time to break out the guns and f' up the criminals. As far as I'm concerned, sites on the same ISP that gets shut down will leave, and bankrupt the ISP that didn't stick to its own TOS.

Good job Lycos!

 

Well actually the screensaver only downloads about 5MB a day per client, which with a massively distributed client base means you shouldn't really see any clogging on networks. The only server that will go down is the one hosting the spam site.

No two wrongs don't make a right, but sometimes vegeance is rather satisfying

 

i run that screensaver, great idea if you ask me. Doing something illegal to something that isnt supposed to exist isnt illegal. but what the screensaver does isnt illegal anyway, so it doesnt matter.

 

Interesting legal system you live in...

I'm pretty sure it would be called a DDOS, and I'm pretty sure that they would be illegal.

I'm not sticking up for the spammers here, just pointing out the possible ramifications.

 

even if its not illegal for 1 person to do it, the summation of the whole system is taking websites offline, thus a DDOS attack, which isn't exactly legal. bad solution.

so legoman666, wherever you're from is it legal to say, kill an illegal immigrant? he's not supposed to be in the country, so its not illegal to do something illegal to him like beat him to death with a spade, right?

and yeah im pretty sure that adding a pile of junk traffic is gunna screw up a network and cause some harm to legit sites too. this is a pretty bad idea all around if you ask me. funny at first but it smells fishy

 

Well the idea was not to overload the spammers' sites. The idea was to get them up to 95% load and make them generally dead slow but not kill them and hence be legal. Lycos had some sort of load monitoring thing to take care of that. But obviously it didn't work with some sites and so they got knocked over hence it turns out the scheme is illegal.

 

Fair enough. I just feel sorry for techies.

 

The Lycos stuff is offline now.

And the Spammers were redirecting traffic from this back to the lycos server anyway. In fact Lycos were conducting denial of service attack on themselves.