Comments on: Lycos Europe: 'Make love not spam'

Web portal launches screensaver designed to bombard Web sites that are promoted in unsolicited e-mail.

[David Arbogast]

Law Suit Coming

I'm sure I hate SPAM as much or more than the next guy... but this plan sounds like it is going to end badly. As we should all know by now, one broken law does not justify breaking another. I have a feeling that intentionally targeting and disrupting business for these companies, no matter how much we hate them, is going to be tried as illegal and anticompetitive behavior...

[My-Self]

Lawsuits ? Bring them on !

Lycos manages 40 millions email accounts in Europe.

They certainly choose among the spamming scums those who inundated their customers the most. They are in Europe, and there, spamming is illegal ! (EU Directive on Data Protection and Telecommunications)

Sooo ... on one side a spammer complaining about the cost for hosting his ***** enlargement pill website in China, on the other side a company who can provide literally truckloads (if printed!) of proofs that their opponent broke the European antispam laws and inundated their customers with forged, fraudulent, unwanted, unwelcome and illegal junk. They'll have their day in Court and I want a sit in the first row ;-)

Also, to file a lawsuit, you need to provide your name, address, etc ... and it's all public ! Spammers must hide, they can't afford the publicity.

Lots of peoples sought about doing what Lycos is doing, but were anxious to go ahead. Lycos, by being the first corporate entity to do it opens the way, I bet we'll soon see a bunch of open source copycat softwares that will be way more aggressive than Lycos's screen saver.

I have the screen saver, and I expect millions of peoples will download and use it too. Raising spammer's cost and making it unprofitable is the way to go !

Interestingly, the worst opposition will certainly come from "antispam" technology vendors (where most of the money is in the spamming/antispam business) who desperately need high volumes of spam to sell their wares ...

[David Arbogast]

Law Suit Coming

I'm sure I hate SPAM as much or more than the next guy... but this plan sounds like it is going to end badly. As we should all know by now, one broken law does not justify breaking another. I have a feeling that intentionally targeting and disrupting business for these companies, no matter how much we hate them, is going to be tried as illegal and anticompetitive behavior...

[My-Self]

Lawsuits ? Bring them on !

Lycos manages 40 millions email accounts in Europe.

They certainly choose among the spamming scums those who inundated their customers the most. They are in Europe, and there, spamming is illegal ! (EU Directive on Data Protection and Telecommunications)

Sooo ... on one side a spammer complaining about the cost for hosting his ***** enlargement pill website in China, on the other side a company who can provide literally truckloads (if printed!) of proofs that their opponent broke the European antispam laws and inundated their customers with forged, fraudulent, unwanted, unwelcome and illegal junk. They'll have their day in Court and I want a sit in the first row ;-)

Also, to file a lawsuit, you need to provide your name, address, etc ... and it's all public ! Spammers must hide, they can't afford the publicity.

Lots of peoples sought about doing what Lycos is doing, but were anxious to go ahead. Lycos, by being the first corporate entity to do it opens the way, I bet we'll soon see a bunch of open source copycat softwares that will be way more aggressive than Lycos's screen saver.

I have the screen saver, and I expect millions of peoples will download and use it too. Raising spammer's cost and making it unprofitable is the way to go !

Interestingly, the worst opposition will certainly come from "antispam" technology vendors (where most of the money is in the spamming/antispam business) who desperately need high volumes of spam to sell their wares ...

[ttul]

This is a horrible idea

Yahoo Europe is making the wrong-headed assumption that spammer URLs are actually hosted by spammers or people who profit from the spamming.

Spammers are stupid, but not that stupid. They will respond to this attack by exploiting unwitting hosting companies who will be the real victims of this attack. And when these companies are attacked, they will respond with civil suits and criminal prosecution against Yahoo.

If this *** for tat approach was used to remedy other social problems, the world would be in an even more sorry state than it is in currently.

BTW -- Yahoo should pay attention to upcoming technologies that can help to passively annoy spammers without legal issues. Such as MailChannels (www.mailchannels.com).

You are mistaken

Actually, this will work even better if the spammers are not hosting their own servers. Spamming is in direct violation of such hosting contracts, so the spammer's website is certain to be disabled if bandwidth clogging becomes a serious issue for the hosting company. Furthermore, such hosting plans almost always have a bandwidth limit over which additional fees must be paid (by the spammer). So the spammer might actually lose money due to his/her illegal activities. Sounds good to me!

[My-Self]

Innocent "bulletproof host" ...

There is no such thing as an innocent hosting company providing long term service to a spammer. Careful hosting company will enforce their TOS and cancel the spammer's account as soon as they start getting spamcop report and complaints. Lycos targets those specialized in spam hosting who keep spammers, agree to move their IP to fool blacklists and hide behind the fact that the spam was not sent from their network.

The truth is, spam friendly hosting is very expensive, and that's why upstreams turn a blind eye. If Lycos (and others) start to flood them, they will reconsider their position to prevent the activities of their spamming customers from adversely impacting their real customers.

If it all works well, spammers will have nowhere to run, and their hosting costs will enlarge faster than their customer's ******* ;-)

[ttul]

This is a horrible idea

Yahoo Europe is making the wrong-headed assumption that spammer URLs are actually hosted by spammers or people who profit from the spamming.

Spammers are stupid, but not that stupid. They will respond to this attack by exploiting unwitting hosting companies who will be the real victims of this attack. And when these companies are attacked, they will respond with civil suits and criminal prosecution against Yahoo.

If this *** for tat approach was used to remedy other social problems, the world would be in an even more sorry state than it is in currently.

BTW -- Yahoo should pay attention to upcoming technologies that can help to passively annoy spammers without legal issues. Such as MailChannels (www.mailchannels.com).

You are mistaken

Actually, this will work even better if the spammers are not hosting their own servers. Spamming is in direct violation of such hosting contracts, so the spammer's website is certain to be disabled if bandwidth clogging becomes a serious issue for the hosting company. Furthermore, such hosting plans almost always have a bandwidth limit over which additional fees must be paid (by the spammer). So the spammer might actually lose money due to his/her illegal activities. Sounds good to me!

[My-Self]

Innocent "bulletproof host" ...

There is no such thing as an innocent hosting company providing long term service to a spammer. Careful hosting company will enforce their TOS and cancel the spammer's account as soon as they start getting spamcop report and complaints. Lycos targets those specialized in spam hosting who keep spammers, agree to move their IP to fool blacklists and hide behind the fact that the spam was not sent from their network.

The truth is, spam friendly hosting is very expensive, and that's why upstreams turn a blind eye. If Lycos (and others) start to flood them, they will reconsider their position to prevent the activities of their spamming customers from adversely impacting their real customers.

If it all works well, spammers will have nowhere to run, and their hosting costs will enlarge faster than their customer's ******* ;-)

[ttul]

oops

make that http://www.mailchannels.com

[ttul]

oops

make that http://www.mailchannels.com

Already signed up and loving it !!!!!!!!

Hey, you wanna increase your d!ck size?
Hey, you wanna look young and unwrinkled?
Hey, you'z be a stupid **** that believe in this crap?

If yes, have we got something to sell you!

Well, this screensaver just made those bogus sells expensive. I just logged on and clicked "international english" and downloaded the screensaver. I scanned it and monitored it. It has no virus nor spyware.

This is a macromedia flash applet that just pings the b@stards to death.

To those spammer sympathizers, this is NOT an illegal Denial of Service attack. No service is denied at any given time. It just got expensive. That's all. All you armchair lawyers trying to scare people away from retaliation against your stinking spam, bugger off.

Way to go Lycos. Just for this, I'm signing up even though I don't use Lycos. Oh, the screensaver is FREE.

Already signed up and loving it !!!!!!!!

Hey, you wanna increase your d!ck size?
Hey, you wanna look young and unwrinkled?
Hey, you'z be a stupid **** that believe in this crap?

If yes, have we got something to sell you!

Well, this screensaver just made those bogus sells expensive. I just logged on and clicked "international english" and downloaded the screensaver. I scanned it and monitored it. It has no virus nor spyware.

This is a macromedia flash applet that just pings the b@stards to death.

To those spammer sympathizers, this is NOT an illegal Denial of Service attack. No service is denied at any given time. It just got expensive. That's all. All you armchair lawyers trying to scare people away from retaliation against your stinking spam, bugger off.

Way to go Lycos. Just for this, I'm signing up even though I don't use Lycos. Oh, the screensaver is FREE.

Realistic solutions to anti-spam

It would be nice if we could attack spammers like this.

As a developer working on more realistic solutions to spam. More details from:
http://www.windeveloper.com/consult/consult.htm

I analyzed the content of a large number of spam emails and can guess what spammers will do. They will simply hide a number of urls within the mail of innocent companies together with the URL of the spammer's site. They can easily make these invisible.

[My-Self]

Lycos's answer is realistic and powerful

There is one point you miss : the URLs provided to the screensaver are all manually selected by peoples at Lycos who actually monitor both the amount of spamvertisement and the target websites content. Spammers can add as many links to ibm.com or microsoft.com in their spams as they want, humans sorting out the addresses will not put them in the list.

A more realistic response might be for the spammer to manipulate the DNS records of his domain to redirect the activity against his site toward an unrelated legitimate target. I don't know if this is already checked in the screensaver, but Lycos must check both the URL and the IP or they'll be in trouble soon.

If you're curious, here is the realtime data ...
http://backend.makelovenotspam.com/xml/

Raising spammer's cost and making it unprofitable is the way to go !

Realistic solutions to anti-spam

It would be nice if we could attack spammers like this.

As a developer working on more realistic solutions to spam. More details from:
http://www.windeveloper.com/consult/consult.htm

I analyzed the content of a large number of spam emails and can guess what spammers will do. They will simply hide a number of urls within the mail of innocent companies together with the URL of the spammer's site. They can easily make these invisible.

[My-Self]

Lycos's answer is realistic and powerful

There is one point you miss : the URLs provided to the screensaver are all manually selected by peoples at Lycos who actually monitor both the amount of spamvertisement and the target websites content. Spammers can add as many links to ibm.com or microsoft.com in their spams as they want, humans sorting out the addresses will not put them in the list.

A more realistic response might be for the spammer to manipulate the DNS records of his domain to redirect the activity against his site toward an unrelated legitimate target. I don't know if this is already checked in the screensaver, but Lycos must check both the URL and the IP or they'll be in trouble soon.

If you're curious, here is the realtime data ...
http://backend.makelovenotspam.com/xml/

Raising spammer's cost and making it unprofitable is the way to go !

[hadaso]

What they should really bombard

What they should really be bombarded are the spammers' mail servers. Any machine identified as sending spam should be kept occupied doing something else. Open relays should be sent email that would make them forward email to each other or try to relay them to dead ends. This will occupy them at least part time and reduce the amount of spam they can deliver at the same time.

[Not Bugged]

Sorry won't work

The spammers have already moved into the world of illegal activities by using PCs that were infected by viruses or trojans as the source point for their spamming activity. Flooding the source would cause the poor soul who's already lost control of their own PC even more grief.

The point Lycos is making here though is that in order for spam to be commercially effective the recipient of the spam must be able to contact the sender of the spam in order to transact business. By making it difficult to contact the spammer the spammer looses and by making it more expensive for the spammers due to bandwidth cost increases their profit is reduced to a point spamming is no longer profitable (at least it's hoped it will work that way).

[hadaso]

What they should really bombard

What they should really be bombarded are the spammers' mail servers. Any machine identified as sending spam should be kept occupied doing something else. Open relays should be sent email that would make them forward email to each other or try to relay them to dead ends. This will occupy them at least part time and reduce the amount of spam they can deliver at the same time.

[Not Bugged]

Sorry won't work

The spammers have already moved into the world of illegal activities by using PCs that were infected by viruses or trojans as the source point for their spamming activity. Flooding the source would cause the poor soul who's already lost control of their own PC even more grief.

The point Lycos is making here though is that in order for spam to be commercially effective the recipient of the spam must be able to contact the sender of the spam in order to transact business. By making it difficult to contact the spammer the spammer looses and by making it more expensive for the spammers due to bandwidth cost increases their profit is reduced to a point spamming is no longer profitable (at least it's hoped it will work that way).

The Financial Side

I find it very odd that so many people can complain about this possibly costing spammers and the companies that allow them to spam money being a problem. Wining that it isn't fair to cost them money. Working for one of the largest ISP's around don't you think it costs us money to just continue to filter it, receive it, store it, staff for it, and forward it to abuse addresses, etc. Being in the support industry we probably spend approximately 90% of our time fighting spam, spyware, and viruses. I think all the companies should just put up a Terms of Use saying we bill $$$ for receiving spam and send a bill to the companies that send out spam.

More power to them I have 4 systems that are online almost 24 hours a day so I'll make sure I do my part. I already report all spammers to SpamCop.com, [e-mail], and the abuse services so whats another toy to play with.

The Financial Side

I find it very odd that so many people can complain about this possibly costing spammers and the companies that allow them to spam money being a problem. Wining that it isn't fair to cost them money. Working for one of the largest ISP's around don't you think it costs us money to just continue to filter it, receive it, store it, staff for it, and forward it to abuse addresses, etc. Being in the support industry we probably spend approximately 90% of our time fighting spam, spyware, and viruses. I think all the companies should just put up a Terms of Use saying we bill $$$ for receiving spam and send a bill to the companies that send out spam.

More power to them I have 4 systems that are online almost 24 hours a day so I'll make sure I do my part. I already report all spammers to SpamCop.com, [e-mail], and the abuse services so whats another toy to play with.

[zaznet]

Use At Own Risk!! DDoS - Distributed Denial of Service

This is a clear "opt-in" Distributed Denial of Service attack by one ISP against the hosted websites of another.

Not only is this illegal, it degrades the performance of the networks of participants. ISPs are alerady blocknig the website where the screensaver can be downloaded and where lists of targets are provided to stop the traffic being generated by it.

Each ISP has an obligation to their customers to prevent them from using DDoS tools while connected to their network. Your specific ISP may be able to recoup damages from it's customers in the form of extra fees and fines.

You use this screen saver at risk to your own finances. Not from the spammers but from the ISPs caught in the cross fire.

[zaznet]

Use At Own Risk!! DDoS - Distributed Denial of Service

This is a clear "opt-in" Distributed Denial of Service attack by one ISP against the hosted websites of another.

Not only is this illegal, it degrades the performance of the networks of participants. ISPs are alerady blocknig the website where the screensaver can be downloaded and where lists of targets are provided to stop the traffic being generated by it.

Each ISP has an obligation to their customers to prevent them from using DDoS tools while connected to their network. Your specific ISP may be able to recoup damages from it's customers in the form of extra fees and fines.

You use this screen saver at risk to your own finances. Not from the spammers but from the ISPs caught in the cross fire.

[zaznet]

Lycos Europe: Employers of Script Kiddies

Seems to me that Lycos Europe has picked up one of those virus writers who was looking for a new job. :)

[zaznet]

Lycos Europe: Employers of Script Kiddies

Seems to me that Lycos Europe has picked up one of those virus writers who was looking for a new job. :)