Vigilantism or just desserts?

[Dr Mordrid]

Lycos has started a campaign to spam the spammers

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4061375.stm

Dr. Mordrid

[Lizzard[MPE]]

Re: Vigilantism or just desserts?

"Make love not spam"

haha

[The PIT]

Well I can see the Lycos site being taken down soon in revenge.

[Brian Ellis]

This is the most stupid thing yet in the spam war.

a) one man's spam is another man's ham

b) spammers don't readily give away their real IP number; in fact, they go to great lengths to conceal it

c) spammers are constantly changing the IP number of their originating source.

d) even if the spam gives a URL to look up and this is bombarded with DDoS, calls, as likely as not the ISP used will have thousands of legit URLs on the same server farm, and these will be also denied service

e) DoS does not just deny to a specific IP number, but can tail back to Internet nodes, potentially slowing down traffic across the whole net.

f) it is totally immoral and Lycos should be enjoined not to propagate such techniques.

g) it does not work: over the past 24 hours, after it was introduced and presumably used by thousands of thoughtless idiots, I have received, to this moment, exactly 698 e-mails, of which 78.80% (550) have been classified as spam. Over the past month, the daily rate has averaged at about 547 e-mails/day, of which 77.97% is spam, so, statistically, absolutely nothing appears to have changed from the widespread use of this stupidity. Happily, spam does not bother me, because I classify my e-mails into several different buckets automatically using POPFile. I can't remember when I last had a false positive in my spam bucket. Overall, it is running at 99.87% accuracy, most of the "errors" being unclassified, where the system is in doubt as to which bucket a message belongs to. These are usually spam, where some clever bugger is using a new technique to try and fool it. It works only once, because the next time that technique is used, it goes to the spam bucket. Scanning through the spam bucket for the accidental false positive takes me less than 1 minute/day. I consider this is much better than adopting any form of bouncing which only uselessly overloads the Internet, because my spam goes unread.

[The PIT]

Well can anyone say

Going Going Going gone.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/03/lycos_antispam_site_offline/