In the Agora: Fighting fire with fire?

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November 30, 2004

Fighting fire with fire?

Over at the World Wide Rant, I learned about a new screensaver program devloped by Lycos which aims to give spammers a major headache by automatically making hits on web sites advertised in spam, driving up their bandwidth costs.

The effort is bound to be controversial. The screensaver (which is supposed to be available at this site, which has been hacked and not yet restored as of this posting) is essentially a form of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, although Lycos claims they are fine-tuning it so that no server is completely shut down by the traffic generated by computers running the screensaver. I'm curious about the legality of running this software on one's computer. Theoretically, a person might at least run afoul of their ISP's service agreement, but I don't think spammers are likely to bring any accusations.

Posted by Eric Seymour at November 30, 2004 01:42 PM

Comments

I wont comment on the legality, but since we agree that the spammers aren’t likely to say anything it is unlikely that any legal attention would be garnered by anyone other than Lycos itself.

Assuming this runs on a standard port, an ISP wouldn’t be able to detect this much better than any P2P client, leaving them only the ability to "packet shape" and limit bandwidth on the client.

I must say that this is a novel (if level lowering) way to combat Spam.

Posted by: Foltz at November 30, 2004 02:11 PM | permalink