At 09:39 AM 29/11/2004, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:

Fergie (Paul Ferguson) wrote:

...

I'd be curious to hear what NANOG readers thoughts are on this.

It would be interesting to see how this fares when faced with a whole lot of router acls that got put in to filter out nachi

Although I generally like spamcop (one of the sources for determining spamvertised websites) for use with SpamAssassin in scoring, its not the most conservative list e.g. http://www.spamcop.net/w3m?action=blcheck&ip=198.108.1.41 list Merit as a spam source...) and the accidental listing or potential for abuse could be nasty. What about the case where the spammer gets black listed, traffic starts pounding the rouge site and then the spammer changes the A record to be www.example.com instead. Now all of a sudden www.example.com is being pounded by all those screen savers. ---Mike

Rich Kulawiec <rsk@gsp.org> wrote:

Already noted as unbelievably stupid and dissected on Spam-L,

I'm inclined to agree...

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.

... but this screensaver means that Lycos *also* have a botnet available to them. -- The advice given me about Maglites is to hold it out sideways from yourself but at shoulder height, this makes the opponent think you are standing 3 foot to one side of reality. - Rob Adams in the Monastery

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