This BBC story says Lycos Europe (no, I don't know why there isn't a US version) has a screen saver that:
endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.
Lycos hopes will it (sic) make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.
The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data.
Comments (1)
Not a bad idea at first sight.
So it's time to take a second look.
When those spamsites are funded by adds their high hitrates would increase their add-revenu. So now the spammer has a -low- income from the few rats that react on the mail and buy from them and a second -probably higher- income from web-site adds.
Once normal sites realise they can increase their traffic -and related add-income- by spamming (preferably Lycos customers) I expect the spam rate to even increase.
Posted by sjon | November 29, 2004 9:45 PM
Posted on November 29, 2004 21:45