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.)
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.
Regards,
David.