Alden Bates' Weblog

Lycos is introducing a new way to fight spam. It's a screensaver which attacks the web sites of spammers, draining their bandwidth and making their site unresponsive. I'm not at all sure it's legal, but really how many people are going to have sympathy for the spammers?

Of course this could backfire. As we've already seen with SORBS, it's easy to accidentally target people who haven't done anything wrong. It's common, for instance, for a number of completely unrelated web sites to be hosted on the same server simply because the owners are signed up with the same web hosting company. An attack on one site on such a server would impact the other unrelated sites as well...