Lycos Vs. The Spammers

[whiteboyskim]

CNN story.

Interesting stuff there. Lycos Europe now has a screensaver that when activated, targets spammers' servers, thereby turning Lycos into another form of spammer. Ahh, the circle of irony doth go round and round.

We need Hunter-Killer squads to break into spammer dens and terminate with extreme prejudice. Nothing short of that will stop this plague.

[Eco-Logic]

And manhacks.  We need manhacks to go after the spammers and those who use spyware.

[mb737]

Lycos isn't spamming, they're performing a mild DoS attack, or at least wasting the spammers' bandwith and therefore making their cost of business too much to bear.

  Yay Lycos!

[Caine]

i need to play the devil's advocate for a second.   i do not in any way condone what a spammer does or accept that such a person has a right to clog up millions of mailboxes with garbage email.  

my stepdad and i were talking about this last night.  what makes this whole thing so dangerous is who decides you're a spammer?  how much do they investigate you before they blacklist you?  how do you prove it wasn't you and get unlisted?  

it is so incredibly easy to fake email headers and point the finger at another company/individual/group.  say you host a bunch of websites (as my folks do) and a competitor or random hacker sets you up by using your ip to spam out.  you get added without a warning or notice.  in fact, you don't even know the reason why your customers have been shut down or why your systems have been attacked, let alone who is doing it.  

in a ddos attack, you never know who is actually behind the attack.  you could ban the ip, but then you would have to do that for every single attacker, and every time they changed ip's.  block the domain or ip range and you could shut out honest customers.  all the while, you still don't know why or who.  your customers leave because of this and you end up bleeding money until you're dry.  

this kind of response to spammers will end up being abused.  no doubt about it.  if you give someone a way to hurt a company with little risk to themselves, they will.   a few years back, one of their customers hired a spamming company to spam on his behalf.  this company used information which pointed back to my folks' network and sent enough mail that the isp got notice of it.  without so much as a phone call, the isp shut down their connection.  it took 4 days to get it back, with many calls back and forth and lots of time wasted.  many of their customers left during this period because of the outage.  

this type of "eye-for-an-eye" behavior will only end when everyone is blind.

[Jeff]

And manhacks.  We need manhacks to go after the spammers and those who use spyware.

Manhacks vs spammers... now that would be a pay-per-view goldmine!