The point behind the initiative is not to attack the email senders, but the source of money. If the spam websites are never up, then the recipients cannot buy products advertised. Without the sales, there are not finances to support the spamming. If spammers can't make money sending email, then they will find something else profitable to do . . . . like phishing :-) On Mon, 29 Nov 2004 10:52:22 -0500, Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org> wrote:
On Mon, Nov 29, 2004 at 02:14:01PM +0000, Fergie (Paul Ferguson) wrote:
Techdirt has an article this morning that discusses how Lycos Europe is encouraging their users to run a screensaver that constantly "pings servers suspected to be used by spammers" and also suggests that "In other words, it's a distributed denial of service attack against spammers by Lycos."
Already noted as unbelievably stupid and dissected on Spam-L, but: getting into a bandwidth contest with spammers is a guaranteed loss, as they have an [essentially] infinite amount available to them for free. Apparently Lycos is unaware of zombies (including those hosting web sites), HTTP redirectors, rapidly-updating DNS, throwaway domains, and other facts of life in the spam sewer.
---Rsk