Hello All - 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

>
>        ,                          ,
>      o/      Charles.Angelich      \o       ,
>       __o/
>     / >          USA, MI           < \   __\__

 

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