Ran across this link today: http://makelovenotspam.com/intl/index.html.
It’s a screensaver that targets known spammers, slowly eating up their bandwidth. The visual is a map of the world with almost missle-command-like arcs showing weapons of spam destruction raining down on the evildoers. Each target site also has a little bar graph showing how much bandwidth they have left.
The screensaver will only use 3.4 megs of your own bandwidth in a 24 hour period. But the cumulative effect should do some damage if enough people use it. Not sure how effective it is, but it’s kind of satisfying to watch.
Available for Mac and PC.
Excellent
🙂
So, basically it’s a distributed denial of service attack, but done legally?
Not sure it really winds up being a DOS. More like slow constant burn. I don’t think it slams their server, but kicks their bandwidth enough so they have to pay for it. I imagine they’ll find some way to block it eventually, either technically or legally.
Looks like the spammers managed to hack the site. Careful – it’s probably not legal. Should be, though, that’s for sure. Give ’em a taste of their own medicine.
There’s a very long list of conversation threads on SlashDot about this: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/26/2129238
It shouldn’t be in a screensaver (I need to use my comp’!), but something like this SETI soft which can run in the background constantly! 🙂