CHARLES ANGELICH wrote in a message to ALL:

 CA> Hello All - 

 CA> I'm a bit surprised that there has been little mention of the Lycos
 CA> screensaver to 'spam' the spammers. 

 CA> It was mentioned in the W95 echo but nowhere else on FIDO (that I
 CA> normally read). 

 CA> For those who missed this phenomena, Lycos was giving away a free
 CA> screensaver that when activated would send 'dummy'
 CA> requests to the websites of those who attempt to profit by
 CA> spamming email accounts. Over 90,000 people downloaded the
 CA> screensaver and it did manage to disable two spammer websites and
 CA> cripple a few more.

Interesting!  This is the first that I've heard of this...

 CA> The internet 'backbone' began blocking access to the download page
 CA> for the screensaver which stopped it from working for
 CA> those who already had it installed because it loaded the URLs to
 CA> 'spam' from the same website where it was made available for
 CA> download. Seems the backbone does not _really_ want to stop
 CA> spamming as they say they do?

Now this is really strange.  I didn't think that there _was_ any central
authority for the 'net,  except those folks that give out names and tie
them to IPs.

 CA> Lycos has pulled the download for the time being and may not ever
 CA> release it again but it certainly was a "proof of concept" that
 CA> users _can_ fight back against spammers even if the
 CA> internet and those who profit from it will stand by and do
 CA> nothing. 

 CA> I am hoping that free/opensource versions of software that
 CA> expands on this concept is released at some point so that we can
 CA> drive the spammers out of business and any new ones that follow
 CA> afterwards.

Sounds good to me.

 CA> Meanwhile there is a website that does something similar to
 CA> fake banks and fake lottery websites while their webpage is
 CA> loaded into your browser. 

 CA> http://www.aa419.org/ladvampire.html 

I'll have to try and remember to have a look once I get online.  In the
meantime,  here's another thing.  Spam to me is "unsolicited
commercial _email_",  and I get a fair amount of that stuff.  Most
people just delete it. Not me.  I *BOUNCE* it.  Meaning that for each one
of those that gets sent out to me,  they get one back.  Sure,  it's only a
copy of their stuff,  saying that my email address is invalid,  and that
may help some with some of these folks,  but it also helps use up a little
bit of their bandwidth,  which is exactly what they're doing to me.  And if
enough folks did that,  it might have some effect...


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