hitting spammers where it hurts

[esllou]

[news.bbc.co.uk...]

now we await the spammers' response.

[bakedjake]

LOL. What a stupid idea on so many levels.

A PR stunt by Lycos. They can't be serious about this.

[Syzygy]

Oh, they are serious; serious about bringing themselves to the attention of the media. As you say, a PR stunt; viral marketing, but direct to the mainstream in a jingoistic fashion...

Syzygy

[Teknorat]

"But, he said, if enough people sign up spamming websites could be force to pay for gigabytes of traffic every single day."

LOL that much?

Silly Lycos

[AAnnAArchy]

Oh, like they'd even be able to keep up with the different servers that spammers use. It's just silly. They're more likely to harm innocent people than the spammers who are always a couple of steps ahead of them. How about they launch a screensaver reminding people not to buy anything from an email where the product is misspelled by using numbers, spaces or extra letters?

[encyclo]

It's one of the stupidest ideas I've seen in a long time from a dying company desperate for publicity, and a company who clearly has no clue whatsoever about the mechanics of the internet or spam.

Perhaps someone should remind Lycos that DDOSing is illegal? Saying that they'll only slow down the site rather than kill it is ridiculous, and attempting and succeeding are equally criminal anyway. And who pays for all the junk traffic generated by their zombie network? And if they hit an innocent target?

[trillianjedi]

Perhaps someone should remind Lycos that DDOSing is illegal?

That's exactly what Lycos are waiting for. They already know that of course, and have no intention of releasing the product.

But they wait for everyone to say "hang on, you can't do that" and then they issue another press release to say "damn, well, don't worry - we're right up there doing our bit to fight the cause".

Genius.

dying company desperate for publicity

Yes, ok - not genius perhaps but desperate. But you can't blame them.

TJ

[Rosalind]

Despite the soft launch, Mr Pollmann said that the screensaver had been downloaded more than 20,000 times in the last four days.

Doesn't that mean that they have already broken the law? Unless DDOS isn't illegal in Sweden, I don't know anything about Swedish law.

[encyclo]

(They) have no intention of releasing the product.

Oh, but they already have: you can download it from [makelovenotspam.com...] . To download, however, you have to agree to a disclaimer first which contains the following:

By downloading and installing the Make LOVE not Spam screensaver the users are aware of the following:
The use of the screensaver and its function is the responsability of the user.
Lycos and the developer shall not be liable for any loss or damage, of any kind, direct or indirect.

So, Lycos is dumping the responsability firmly in the hands of its customers. I'm cynical at the best of times, but this...

Note, this is Lycos Europe, not Lycos US.

[trillianjedi]

Hmmm..... thanks Encyclo - I had missed the fact that they had already launched it.

I wonder if it actually works?

TJ

[esllou]

they have posted stats on that site saying by how much certain targeted sites have slowed their response times down.

largest figure I saw was 85% reduction in website response time but they had only taken something like 300mb in traffic from that site.

[airpal]

Can somebody enlighten me... Howcome companies like Lycos, Excite, Hotbot, Altavista, Looksmart, etc. etc. have shown absolutely NO innovation whatsoever for the past 5 years? Are these companies owned by larger public companies, who have no interest in them except for milking some $$ before they crash and burn? How do these companies even stay in business, especially since they don't seem to have any business model with their 10 daily visitors from Mongolia searching through their portals/engines?

[bcolflesh]

Site has already been defaced:

[f-secure.com...]