Good morning everyone,
Thought I would share the following with you all as its a pretty
relative topic:
12.03 - Freeze on anti-spam campaign
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4065751.stm
12.02 - Anti-spam plan overwhelms sites:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4061375.stm
12.02 - Lycos launches screensaver in fight against spam
http://de.news.yahoo.com/041129/295/4bfag.html
12.02 - Community Spam Fighting Effort Faces Heat
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/advisories/suse_advisory-2115.html
12.01 - Lycos' anti-spam screensaver: Fleeting revenge is not the answer
http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/000849.html
Lycos launches screensaver in fight against spam
-------------------------------------------------
Response times of spam sites down by 85 percent
Haarlem (pts) - The Internet portal Lycos http://www.lycos-europe.com
has developed a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites
that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail. As the BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk reports, the company is hoping to make the
monthly bandwidth bills of spammers rocket by keeping their servers
running flat out. According to the Internet firm, if enough people
sign up and download the new tool, spammers could end up having to pay
to send out terabytes of data. By getting thousands of people to
download and use the screensaver, Lycos hopes to get spamming websites
constantly running at almost full capacity.
“We’ve never really solved the big problem of spam which is that it’s
so cheap and easy to do,” said Malte Pollmann, a spokesman for Lycos
Europe. “In the past we have built up the spam filtering systems for
our users, but now we are going to go one step further,” he added.
“We’ve found a way to make it a much higher cost for spammers by
putting a load on their servers.” According to Pollmann, the
screensaver had been carefully written to ensure that the amount of
traffic it generated from each user did not overload the web. “Every
single user will contribute three to four megabytes per day - about
one MP3 file,” explained Polmann.
Sites being targeted are those mentioned in spam e-mail messages,
which sell the goods and services on offer. As a rule, these sites are
different to those used to send out spam-email and only get a few
thousand visitors per day. It is expected that the sites will slow
down under the weight of data requests. Early results show that
response times of some of these sites have dropped by up to 85 per
cent.
The screensaver, which shows the websites that are being bothered with
requests for data, is due to be launched across Europe on the 1st of
December. Up to now it has only been trialled in Sweden. According to
Pollmann, the screensaver had been downloaded more than 20,000 times
in past four days. “There’s a huge user demand to not only filter spam
day-by-day but to do something more. Before now users have never had
the chance to be a bit more offensive,” he said.
Cheers,
James
--
James Couzens,
Programmer
( ( (
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