Lycos Pulls Vigilante Anti-spam Campaign 328
davidwr writes "Eweek reports that Lycos is scrapping it's anti-spam campaign: 'On Friday, Lycos Europe gave up the ghost, posting a 'Stay Tuned' note on the MakeLoveNotSpam.com Web site it was using to distribute the screensaver. The Lycos Europe home page, which heavily promoted the screensaver all week, was also scrubbed clean of any references to the screensaver.' See previous Slashdot coverage from Nov. 26, Dec. 1, and Dec. 2."
inevitable (Score:4, Insightful)
It may not work, exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
Was makelovenotspam, in its short life, effective? Almost certainly not. Was makelovenotspam a public good? I'd bet not. Was makelovenotspam good for Lycos?
Re:It may not work, exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
Lycos probably caused less distress among spammers than any form of legal action would have caused -- regardless of the outcome of any legal action.
As for Lycos and publicity: well, now we know that the management have questionable ethics to allow themselves to sink below the level of many spammers (most spammers do not instigate DDoS-attacks on their opponents although some do). I would think twice before getting entangled in any sort of business relationship with someone who is prone to operate outside the law so easily.
The lasting effect of this is that a line has been crossed. Lycos is the first legitimate business, with at least some brand-recognition, that has shown willingness to engage in activities that are exclusively associated with criminal elements on the net. The question now is whether others will follow or if Lycos represents the low point of the business.
I made some remarks about this in a blog entry on how Lycos is now contributing to the spam weapons race [borud.no] and how this might set some bad precedents.
Re:It may not work, exactly (Score:2)
Please, it was SPRAY that created this software.
Re:inevitable (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:inevitable (Score:2)
No, but it does work most of the time.
Re:inevitable (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes it does. That's virtually the only way to take out wild fires. You burn away the fuel, and the fire dies.
Trying to put out a wild fire with water is like using your piss to fight your house fire. Not very effective.
The analogy works. Spammers will cease to exist if they cannot be profitable. If ISPs take down spam sites *fast*, then no problem. But if they don't give a damn, then they should be DDoS'd. Either they remove the cancer, or we remove it for them as it affects all of us.
Re:inevitable - for sure (Score:3, Interesting)
fighting fire with fire doesn't always work
Actually Lycos is BRILLIANT. Just a year ago I would have agreed with you but careless Internet computing (primarily unsecured(able) Windows machines) and commercial spamers are ruining the experience for all.
Maybe it is time to fight back. I have no problem in running a program where if I click on a spam button, the senders IP gets 1-5% of my bandwidth for a day. This would raise their costs and throttle their output. Perhaps the upstream ISP would take
Re:inevitable (Score:3, Funny)
Re:inevitable (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course it is possible to get a gun, but since nobody has them, why should criminals take the risk?
Re:inevitable (Score:5, Funny)
Sissy. Real men don't mind getting killed.
Good, it was stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
For more: BitTorrent takes a hit from DDoS attacks [techspot.com]
It wouldn't be a surprise if the spammers re-directed their sites to the trackers, as both Suprnova and Lokitorrent had torrents for the screensaver. At the current time, it is still unknown who was behind it.
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:2)
Could it be that the spammers somehow share the same host? Maybe SuperNova has a side business...
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:2)
And if the DDOS takes down a bunch of legitimate servers upstream of the zombie?
And if the DDOS financially damages a company who had a server subverted through no fault of their own?
It's not like the spammers wouldn't instantly switch to a different server anyway...
DDOS attacks are extremely messy ways of attacking a problem. It's like using nukes to deal with 419ers. You mig
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:2)
Is this a bad thing? Those BarStewards spend a lot of time and energy looking for ways to get past our spam filters. They know we don't want their stuff but they insist on subjecting us to it.
One of my addresses gets 130-150 spams a day and I have long since given up checking for
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
It might not be on their networks. The *bad* thing about DDOS is collateral damage. e.g. what happens if the DDOS stresses the dns system, and that fails?
Again, see above - if networks dealt with zombie PCs quickly then the 419ers wouldn't be have other systems to move to.
Right... and if wishes were fishes we'd all have tails. The idea that the internet is suddenly going to become zombie proof if people started DDOSing isn't well founded.
I'm a sysadmin for a number of decent sized networks. I put a lot of effort into automated detection and isolation of trojaned machines (thanks in part to the excellent signatures at Bleeding Snort).
Then I'm sure you can imagine what it would be like to undergo a DDOS attack. It's not like spam isn't forged anyway- it's easy enough to forge the IP address that they are sending from as well.
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
I find it very sad that they don't have the balls to go through with it.
Finally someone stands up and fights a worthy cause only to stop after one week.
I have but one word for this behavior: cowardism
Will someone please pick up the towel out of the ring??
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
just so you know.
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
The execs at Lycos are accountable to board members and shareholders. The legal grounds for this kind of operation are shaky at best (I don't think there are any precedents).
Exposing the company to legal action (from the spammers, ISPs, etc) would not be in the best interest of the shareholders.
I think that whoever ok'd this plan was not the one who cancelled. Maybe he/she was simply overriden by higher-ups. Heck, for all we know, that exec might be looking for work right now.
Do you really think it was a good idea? If enough people think so, somebody will come up with a copy of it... maybe as an extension of SPEWS or somesuch service.
Myself, I think the intentions are noble but the execution flawed. Is there any accountability for this? You would no longer be just excerising your right not to be bothered by using RBL. You will be actively striking back at somebody, and innocent bystanders that get targeted will incur in damages that go beyond not being able to send e-mail.
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:3, Insightful)
I have but one word for this behavior: cowardism
How about three words.. cease and desist? If they didn't have one against them already, you had to bet someone would be sending one soon. And frankly I'm suprised such an idea made it past their legal dept (if it even went before legal). I appreciate and welcome their desire to get in this fight.. but the plan of attack was a rather bad one, imho. When
It was a good PR campaign (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a win-win. They exploited the anti-spam fervor and got attention which might translate into profits, loans, etc.
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:5, Funny)
I can see it coming; Earn credit towards BlockBuster video rentals, every 5,000,000 packets earns you $0.50 towards your next rental.
Re:Good, it was stupid - Legal (Score:2)
Make that towards your next legal rental. I don't think the MPAA can release anything that doesn't overuse the word "legal" in it.
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:2)
If I remember correctly, the Halo 2 disc had something about no public rental. I was still able to rent Halo 2. I'm not sure that Blockbuster's renting is
MPAA already heading that way... (Score:4, Interesting)
While Lycos was on unsteady legal footing in terms of their targets (i.e. it's often tough to connect a web site to the spam sender) the MPAA and RIAA can easily prove that a particular user or BitTorrent link site is sharing/hosting/providing copyrighted material. It may be just a matter of time before earlier efforts to legalize RIAA and MPAA DDOS attacks [com.com] are resurrected.
Re:MPAA already heading that way... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:2)
They could always open source the thing and let it take on a life of it's own. If it's a good idea, it will live. If not, it will die.
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:2)
2) Sure, why not? You're free todo what you want with your bandwidth? Right? If i want to load some spammers website a couple of hundred times, why not?
If you want to DDoS slashdot? Sure go ahead, you're probably one of those 1% Cmdr. Taco is talking about anyway reloading mainpage every other second.
Re:Good, it was stupid (Score:2)
How do you figure? Because they said so?
A corporation would be perfect (Score:2)
Limited legal liability comes in very handy after all those potential lawsuits. Whatever damage (real, hypothetical, etc) would be protected by the corporate shield, thus protecting the owners.
The companies that hire spammers are corps or s-corps, or LLCs too for the same reason.
no fair... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:no fair... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:no fair... (Score:5, Funny)
Said the Slashdot poster ironically.
Re:no fair... (Score:2)
Just install Windows XP without any service packs and connect it to the internet without a firewall - voila instant invite to a botnet.
Wishful thinking! (Score:2, Funny)
errr..
well summed up: (Score:3, Insightful)
besides than that.. anyone care to pull ye olde form and tick the right places for this particular 'solution for spam'?
Fine, you twisted my arm. (Score:5, Funny)
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which vary from state to state.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(x) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires cooperation from too many of your friends and is counterintuitive
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever worked
( ) Other:
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
( ) Other:
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures cannot involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures cannot involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
( ) Other:
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Nice try, dude, but I don't think it will work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Re:Fine, you twisted my arm. (Score:2)
Re:Fine, you twisted my arm. (Score:2)
change the word decribing unsolicited bulk email to be something like, "garwitz", rather than "spam". Hence, there is no more spam! Hence problem solved.
Of course, there still is the tricky problem of all the garwitz...
Re:Fine, you twisted my arm. (Score:2)
All we need to do is just look at a graph with all the answers for every topic. No flame wars!! No gaotse!! No trolls!!
Re:Fine, you twisted my arm. (Score:2)
Open relays, zombie Windows boxes, and bandwidth costs definitely are a consideration here, though. The rest, it's debatable.
next stop (Score:2)
How long until someone makes a clone of this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Clearly there is at least some interest in fighting spam with DDOS even though it's not the best solution.
Re:How long until someone makes a clone of this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine a pretty screensaver a-la-SETI, but showing number of flood packets being sent...
Re:How long until someone makes a clone of this? (Score:2)
It worked? How come I didn't notice any statistically significant change in the amount of spam I get? How come nobody I've asked noticed any change? Please explain.
If you are going to postulate that it worked you had better cough up some numbers to support your claim.
Re:How long until someone makes a clone of this? (Score:2)
for linux... (Score:2)
Personally a bit of a shame (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps the problem here is that with Lycos being the single point of failure, as well as being a customer facing organisation, its position was just untenable.
There has certainly been lots of talk about building in such a system to mail clients, and perhaps having a distributed spam-attack system that way - perhaps this will be legally more tenable (they actually emailed you personally) as well as more resilient to pressure.
Re:Personally a bit of a shame (Score:4, Interesting)
look, when the system was so stupidly built that the spammers could just add a refresh tag to forward the flood to wherever they wanted, it had no chance of really slowing the spam down at all.
kneejerk reaction tactics, with bad execution, that was only supposed to make lycos look like it was doing something for the problem in the eyes of normal folk who don't understand enough to see that it was a fucking stupid idea to do in the first place(especially stupid wheny you were a big company and actually could end up accountable for all the fucking around you do).
Re:Personally a bit of a shame (Score:2)
look, when the system was so stupidly built that the spammers could just add a refresh tag to forward the flood to wherever they wanted, it had no chance of really slowing the spam down at all.
By all accounts, it wasn't. There would have been little reason for Lycos to write a full-blown HTTP interpreter, when all they wanted was something to repeatedly fetch pages.
Re:Personally a bit of a shame (Score:2)
rtfa? apparently they did.
**Evidence of a shooting war in cyberspace was uncovered by anti-virus vendor F-Secure. The company reported that one of the spam sites under attack by the Lycos screensaver simply added a Meta Refresh tag that redirected all incoming traffic back to Lycos.**
Re:Personally a bit of a shame (Score:2, Insightful)
**Evidence of a shooting war in cyberspace was uncovered by anti-virus vendor F-Secure. The company reported that one of the spam sites under attack by the Lycos screensaver simply added a Meta Refresh tag that redirected all incoming traffic back to Lycos.**
Does the article say anything about the screensavers ability to execute said meta refresh? No. The article is obviously written by a journalist that knows little about http. A meta refresh can't possibly "redirect all incom
Re:Personally a bit of a shame (Score:2)
Re:Personally a bit of a shame (Score:4, Informative)
Update on 4th of December, 2004: Lycos has confirmed to us that their screensaver does not follow Meta Refresh tags, so this attempt by spammers will fail. --Mikko
Re:Personally a bit of a shame (Score:2)
still, it would be reasonable easy for spammers/anyone else to target 'wrong' targets with the system.
Re:Personally a bit of a shame (Score:2)
There would have been little reason for Lycos to write any HTTP interpreter, when all they needed to do was use someone else's code or a Windows API component.
Existing installations? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Existing installations? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Existing installations? (Score:2)
Re:Existing installations? (Score:2)
Campaign failed but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Campaign failed but... (Score:2)
Well crap, now we need a replacement. (Score:4, Funny)
So.... (Score:2)
How about an email program that does this (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether the client uses the exact URL in the email (which often has identification codes for the recipient of the spam or the affiliate who sent it) is a matter of debate. On the one hand, I don't want to identify myself to any spammer or show that my email is live.
On the other hand, I would want the spam site to know that using my email address will only bring it grief. As a side bonus, it might even bankrupt the site when it has to pay its spammer affiliates for all the automated clickthroughs. If a greater percentage of people clickthrough via automated means (but don't buy), it harms both the spam-marketed site (in bandwidth and affiliate charges) and it hurts the spammer when sites reduce their clickthough payment rates. I can only hope that this will cause spammer-using sites to crack down on spammers that are too aggressive.
Re:How about an email program that does this (Score:5, Insightful)
So how do you determine which is the right site programmatically?
Go off the email address? Won't work becasue the vast majority of spam uses forged From addresses (I regularly get bounces for spams some asshat has sent with my domain in the from:)
Write something that interprets the email headers and attacks the originating IP? Won't work thansk to the army of windows boxes running proxies to hide the real sender - you'll just end up attaching an innocent, if ignorant, DSL peon.
Write something that grabs URLs from the email and attacks that? Won't work either.. well, it will work, it just means that now all a spammer has to do is bung the URL of a competitor or someone they don't like in there and now you're doing a DDoS for them.
Pretty much any scheme you come up with has so many ways around it or possible abuses that it'd be more dangerous than the problem itself. Even if it isn't determined programmatically, relying on some degree of user interaction or target selection, it is likely to be open to abuse.
Re:How about an email program that does this (Score:2)
Re:How about an email program that does this (Score:2)
Bad move. Your company will not make friends that way.
What you need is something that will attack hand-picked sites and that [hillscapital.com] exists, the source is also pointed to on that page.
Be aware that it does not like Mozilla, but is fine under the konq.
One last question: all that artificial traffic will cost your company as well. Are
Re:How about an email program that does this (Score:2)
you would actually want to have that.. or would you like to be easily dossed by ANYONE who just sends some spam out? it's a stupid plan. you don't want automatic ddossing without responsibility or authentication or any intelligent means to determine if a site would deserve it(to be even slightly fair youd have to use probably a hour of deciding up, checking where the site is hosted and if innocent would be hit harder than the
Re:How about an email program that does this (Score:2)
Send a spam to G4@spammeanddie.net and the custom thunderbird software of everyone who uses spammeanddie.net floods them.
If that were the case, do you think the spammers would start filtering spammeanddie.net addresses out of their victim lists?
This is not an avocation of doing this or the Lycos thing, just noodling the idea about.
Another noodle, how about a doohickey that does this but in a way that does no harm. Get a co-ordinated effort that hits the bad sites ju
Netcraft Reports (Score:3, Informative)
Everyone who used the Screensaver: (Score:3, Funny)
Anti spam from a spyware vendor? (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe someone else can pick up the ball. (Score:2, Interesting)
Instead if a lose group of spam haters worked together to devel
Unethical (Score:2, Insightful)
It worked along the same theory that "It takes a criminal to catch a criminal" does. That sometimes, you have to get down and dirty to fight back.
If the only people that got hurt by that kind of plan were the bad guys, I'd buy it. But it doesn't work that way. There is colatteral damage and often times the innocent victims outnumber t
It's worse than that (Score:2)
The only way you could avoid this is if the zombie bots' ISP's notice huge amounts of incoming traffic and take them off-line. If this functions as a mechanism for notifying ISP's that a p
Re:It's worse than that (Score:2, Insightful)
If those machines are dDOSed their zombie problem will get fixed in a hurry (because the ISP/owner won't want to pay for the traffic, which they will have to notice because the line is going to be completely saturated). I fail to see that as a bad thing.
Re:Unethical (Score:2)
Right... So every time you reload Slashdot, you are HURTING innocent routers... Awwww, poor routers.
I've paid for my bandwidth, and indirectly support those routers. If I choose to dedicate a portion of my bandwidth to useless activities, it's entirely within my rights, both legally and morally.
Let's prosecute every web host that doesn't use mod_gzip!!! After all, they're hurting innocent routers.
Open Sourced? (Score:3, Funny)
I know a lot of people don't agree with the concept, but I do. The law is getting better but it hasn't handled the spam problem yet. Making the business model invalid is a great idea.
Think of it as free speech... by having everyone visit the website, it's just like having an old fasioned sit in so the company can't do business.
Spamming is bad (Score:2)
Vigilantes = Self Righteous Idiots (Score:4, Insightful)
We can find a solution to spam and it doesn't need to involve stupidity.
Re:Vigilantes = Self Righteous Idiots (Score:2)
Yes, Lycos is worse than Spammers in the same way that the government is worse than terrorists and mass murders. After all, the terrorists don't target individuals, they kill everyone they can...
Vigilante may have
Re:Vigilantes = Self Righteous Idiots (Score:2)
Lycos's solution doesn't make much sense though. What about spoofed mails? What's to stop me from spamming ten million people about my competitor's website, so Lycos shuts THEM down? It seems poorly thought out
Gaze into the crystal ball... (Score:5, Interesting)
Next, the spammers will start converting all the zombie PCs they now use for distributed email attacks into web servers that provide their advertisers a distributed source of order-taking. This means that unsuspecting PC owners everywhere will soon rack up astounding bandwidth overruns as URLs that point to their PC get entered into the SBS program.
Nevertheless, an SBS does strike directly at the spammers, raising the hoop a bit higher and perhaps winnowing out the less 'professional' among them.
The only sure cure for spam, of course, is to take the battle one step further, by consuming all the resources of the advertisers directly - call their phones, request literature, place fraudlent orders with non-existant CC numbers (that, of course, pass Luhn MOD 10 checking) and provide contact phone numbers that ring forever. This will swamp them with orders that tie up their sales staff, cost them money and ultimately starve them.
The only problem with "the final solution" for spam is that it takes individual effort on a daily concerted basis. So spam endures by riding on the backs of those so clueless that they actually order products from spammers and those of us too lazy to do anything about it.
Ain't humanity grand?
A program and system I hope for (Score:3, Interesting)
Would "suck" bandwidth from:
a) spamvertised sites I find in my e-mailbox; or
b) spamvertised sites other people I trust received in their e-mail box'es.
On a)
So I would pick from my e-mails web-sites I want to go down and feed the to the program. It is absolutely LEGAL. They SPAMED me, They PROVIDED their website, and they WILL PAY for extra bandwidth. I am free to post on the web these websi
Did you track the results? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's odd that attacking websites seemed to have dropped the amount of spam. Makes me wonder just how close the spam servers are to the spam website servers. Maybe the innocent victems we are so worried about are really the spammers.
Come on all you people - this was a probe - yack about good or evil and POST YOUR RESULTS!
What did this really do. I can't be the only one who tracks spam. Admins, what do you say?
one thing i've noticed (Score:2, Informative)
this is no doubt an attempt to direct the ddos over to innocent bystanders.
lycos is going to have to realize that the only way to stop spam is to remove the financial reward to those who do spam.
don't buy from spamvertised companies and you'll see the spam problem diminish.
The mob has tasted blood and wants more... (Score:5, Interesting)
It hardly seems important whether the notion of DOS-styled retribution is appropriate or even legal - no such moral or legal considerations have managed to control people's decision to download mp3's and movies for free.
This is history in the making, and as I see it, the real story is this; we have been victims with no means of defending ourselves, while our frustration and anger grow without end. Suddenly a revolutionary appears on the scene and give us hope, showing us how we can fight back.
It's no longer an issue of whether or not we will, or should fight back - the mob has tasted blood and will have more. As far as I'm concerned, it falls to forums like this one to "think-tank" relatively responsible solutions, and I've heard some good ideas here in the last week.
We all know someone is sitting in their basement right now, pulling an all-nighter, writing the next tool of mass-retribution, fueled by strong coffee and an even stronger hatred of spam. I suggest that if cooler heads are to prevail in any manner, it will be by creating a less-malicious tool of retribution, one which attempts to focus the attacks on legitimate "military targets" by requiring manual human selection of the targets, not by letting some distributed software select the targets automatically. Better hurry, the latter approach is probably more tempting to programmers who have succumbed to the blood-lust...
My bet it's a mod to Thunderbird (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm betting someone is modding Thunderbird to do this with any message that winds up in the spambox as we speak.
Of course, this would make everyone using such a program an unwitting participant in a Joe Job:
I want to bring down a web site, so I spam a link to it, and a million anti-spammers's mail programs visit the URL in a short period of time, knocking it offline or raising the bandwidth costs.
Lycos was close but not quite... (Score:3, Interesting)
Instead of attacking the site, the screensaver instead should have merely hit each URL in the email body once, just as the users EMail client would do. It should then take the most prevelant URL to the website in the spam (prevelant meaning the one appearing most) and fetch the page and again fetch each image (etc) url on that page, just as what would happen if the user had clicked on the link in the email.
Why do this? Well, for one, it will make the spammer a very very lot of money very quickly. But two, it will cost the spammers customer a huge amount of money without any sales. The cost of doing business this way would be too high (assuming enough screensavers to do this). and spammers would either have to shift their model or pick another industry.
Strong Condemnation (Score:2)
Now that's what I'd call strong condemnation. Yeah, right! Not even the dumbest thing of the month. Oh, yeah, the SCO suit is still in the courts.
Is Lycos Responsible? (Score:3, Interesting)
They didn't use it themselves.
They fully disclosed to users the functions of this screen saver.
The users intentionally downloaded it, agreed to the terms, and knowingly ran it.
I'd think blaming Lycos is legally dubious, at best.
Vigilantism is sometimes good. (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens when the law won't protect you? Sure, you possibly endure the crime being committed and lobby for laws. Or you go vigilante on them.
What happens when you're on the Internet with hundreds of different governments? You can't lobby them all and when you get laws in one country, they just move their operations to another.
You're essentially shit out of luck here, and vigilantism/mob justice is in order. You don't have to like it, but don't stop us.
"Botnet for sale!" (Score:2)
In other news.... (Score:2)
Re:Spammers mod points... (Score:2)
Re:Spammers mod points... (Score:2)
Re:Bouncing email ??? (Score:3, Informative)
It's more like taking the garbage off your lawn an scattering it up and down the street.