Spam saver

We've all seen those screen savers that decode radio signals to find ET, crack codes, decode DNA etc. etc. Now someone has actually created a screen saver to help stop spam, something we can all relate to. Lycos Europe's "Make love not spam" saver monitors your email for URLs that have previously been determined to belong to a spammer - they always have a web site for you to go and give up your $$$ on. When it sees one it then spawns a whole bunch of download requests from that URL, the idea being that being loaded by thousands, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of screen savers that URL would soon become useless to the owner. Just to keep the web server serving it up would require a very expensive web site set up and a huge and expensive network pipe connecting to it. Raising the bar so high would discourage most spammers and make use of such spam techniques relatively infeasible.

I love it - it basically turns all the screen saver users into a bot army on the side of good, not evil (to take that simple good vs. evil view of the world). I just hope it works. Personally I would improve the model by just broadcasting the list of spammers URLs to all the screensavers and have them continually hit them regardless of what the incoming email is especially since I don't like the idea of anyones software scanning my email except my mail client. Why not just build it into the mail client in the first place? It seems like a great candidate for an extension to Mozillas Thunderbird browser if you ask me.

Ironically, as of writing it looks like Lycos' website for the screen saver has already been hacked. If you visit makelovenotspam.com you get the message "Yes, attacking spammers is wrong, you know this, you shouldn't be doing it. Your ip address and request have been logged and will be reported to your ISP for further action.". I wonder if they were running Microsoft IIS as the web server? Doh!