Lycos in Europe have developed a screensaver that can help bring down spammers. When your computer is idle, it sends out requests to websites known to be promoted in spam messages, with the hopes of substantially increasing the spammer’s bandwidth bills.
Could it work? I guess it’s a clever idea. But I’d hate to see them accidentally get a spammer website wrong, and bring down a legitimate company instead. I could send out spam pretending to be one of my competitors, and would they then get bombarded by this screensaver? And what about all this traffic, which they’re hoping will be generated by the millions who download it. I read somewhere “33 terabytes of useless traffic per day”.
Either way, I’m going to try it out. I, like many others, hate spam. And I’ll do anything I can to help fight it.
You can download the screensaver here. Select “International English” from the select box underneath the map if you’re not from Europe.
I just read an article on the Sydney Morning Herald’s website which I thought was interesting. Basically, there has been an email circulating which, it says, contains the anti-spam screensaver put out by Lycos. Instead, it actually contains a spyware program – it’s another virus. I thought it was an interesting twist! The full article is available here.
Thanks for pointing that out Tanya.
I think the screensaver actually isn’t active anymore anyway – there was too much controversy over it, understandably.