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It's war.
by Simon at 19:19 01/12/04 (Blogs::Simon)
Lycos versus spammers
On the whole, I think this approach is likely to be counterproductive...
--
simon
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It's war. Simon - 19:19 01/12/04
Re: It's war. Dominic Search - 16:23 04/12/04
Agreed, but I couldn't resist giving it a quick evaluation... it certainly seemed to use a fairly modest amount of my bandwidth, but I understand the overall up take was way higher than they expected and their site allocation algorithm was too aggressive. Two days in it kept saying I wasn't connected to the Internet and so wouldn't work... turns out it was them who weren't connected (blocked by backbone providers).

I think the Lycos experiment was brave and worthwhile. They implemented an idea that's been discussed online for sometime and have shown there is clearly a strong public mood for vengeance against spammers. However they have also shown the fallacy of taking such vengeance into one's own hands - the escalation of tactics implicit in this kind of war is simply not the way to address the issue.

OTOH, unless the lawmakers and technologist find a solution PDQ, we could see the Lycos experiment go the way of P2P in that it will re-appear in a much more diffuse and less blockable fashion.

--
Dom

Re: It's war. Simon - 12:53 05/12/04
Just as there are zealots in the anti-spam brigade, there are zealots in the spamhausen too - the last thing needed is an all out DDoS war between the two (at least, while the potential for collatoral damage is so great).
--
simon
Re: It's war. Dominic Search - 19:24 06/12/04
True enough... but with spam now accounting for 73% of all emails (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4072647.stm) this kind of direct action is likely to increase unless a fix is found RSN.

I see that "Lycos has shut down the campaign saying it had been started to stimulate debate about anti-spam measures and had now achieved this aim" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4073547.stm

--
thoth

Re: It's war. Graham Freeman - 19:50 07/12/04
Move away from blind senders then.

As posted to my personal forums
(forums.gfreeman.com):
================================
User-A ----> SERVER-A ----> (internet) ----> SERVER-B ----> User-B

User-A connects to SERVER-A to send an email to User-B
SERVER-A sends email to SERVER-B
SERVER-B send copy of email back to SERVER-A asking for confirmation
SERVER-A replies to SERVER-B saying "yes User-A sent that message"
SERVER-B passes email to User-B
================================
Yes, it'll up to triple the overall payload for sending an email, but if that eliminates spam, it'll still end up saving.
--
gfreeman