At the risk of breaching Internet civility, a European Web portal is offering its visitors a weapon against spam: a screensaver program that tries to choke spam servers by flooding them with junk traffic. As of Tuesday, about 65,000 people have signed up for the controversial tool from the German-based Lycos Europe, whose sites get 20 million users monthly.
The company insists the technique is legal — it says the culprit servers are simply choked a bit, not completely asphyxiated — and dismissed concerns that its "Make Love not Spam" offensive can further clog the world's digital pipeline. Still, computer experts are worried. "You don't stop a bad thing by being bad yourself," said David Farber, former chief technologist at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites). "The idea of somebody coming and hitting you and you hitting back, you both end up very hurt. It just aggrevates an already serious problem."
When a computer with the free Lycos screensaver is idle, the program sends junk commands to Web sites identified by Lycos as selling products pitched in spam. When done in masse, this eats up precious bandwidth, causing the sites to overload and slow down. The goal, said Lycos Europe spokesman Kay Oberbeck, is to "show the owners of such spam Web sites that there is massive interest of thousands of users who are not willing to just give up against more and more spam each day." |