On Wednesday, December 1, 2004, 8:46:10 AM, David Skoll wrote: > On Wed, 1 Dec 2004, Kevin A. McGrail wrote:
>> Below is an interesting article from The Washington Post where it details a >> new screensaver from Lycos. The screensaver visits websites while your >> computer is idle that are referenced in SPAM and make it to a bad spammers >> list. This is done in an attempt to limit the website ability to server >> traffic efficiently by causing extra traffic. > This is a very bad idea for a number of reasons: > 1) In a lot of places, people's bandwidth is metered, so this will cost them > money. (The people running the screensaver, I mean.) > 2) Just on principle, I don't approve of software that causes this kind > of network traffic silently and in the background. > 3) The potential for DoS'ing an innocent third-party is too great. > 4) If spammers can commandeer huge armies of zombies to send spam, it's > not a big jump for them to install Web servers on the zombies so they > have a distributed network serving up their content that is resilient > against the Lycos attack. (In fact, this is the logical next step to > counter SURBL.) As long as they use a domain name in their spam URIs, which seems likely even with distributed (stolen) web service, we've got them covered with SURBLs. > My anti-spam philosophy has always had as a basic principle: "First, > do no harm." I don't think the Lycos screensaver adheres to this > principle. I agree with your comments. Bad idea. Jeff C. -- "If it appears in hams, then don't list it." _______________________________________________ Visit http://www.mimedefang.org and http://www.canit.ca MIMEDefang mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.roaringpenguin.com/mailman/listinfo/mimedefang
