fight back against Spam

[NeilV]

found this interestng little artical with a nice little download to fight back against spam (Europe only at the moment) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4051553.stm

[dreamsoftwilight]

That program would only work realistically if you had broadband of some sort. Dialup it would just get disconnected if you left it running for so long... and youd have to leave your computer running and hooked up 24/7. heh.

But its still a cool idea... not sure if it will work though.

[NeilV]

I have BB pn my system and turn it on at 8-30 - 9-00 am and it will stay on all day untill around 1- 2 am so thats around 17 hours :p so it work i am going to download it and give it a try as at the moment I am on about 10 spams a day :mad:

[Boobootifi]

Hmmm ... I actually have a problem with this. It SOUNDS like a good idea, but it's really very damaging, and as a small business owner with a website I am totally against this idea, given that I already pay through the nose for legitimate traffic to my site.

Why, you ask? Two words: address spoofing. Many spammers spoof addresses of other people, making it look like it was from Person A when it's actually not. I've gotten spam using addresses from my own website.

So, here I am, innocent website owner. Joe Spammer sends out a Viagra ad using a mail address from my site. I never send out spam. Ever. But Joe Spammer made it look like I do. Now I have to pay for extra bandwidth people send me to punish me for something I didn't do. It makes me a double victim -- first from Joe Spammer, and then from retaliation by angry people using this application.

This would work if spammers used their own addresses, but they don't. They almost never do. That's what makes them so hard to shut down.

Oh, and 10 spam a day? I get over 600 spam a day. Try being an Internet business who has been around since 1994. And because I get so much legitimate mail from people I've never dealt with before, I can't use a lot of automatic spam filtering or else I may lose real customers. I use a prefilter called MailWasher which allows me to screen and delete mail serverside before I download it. Takes me at least 30 minutes a day, sometimes longer (usually over an hour on Mondays when I don't check my mail all weekend).

...Boo

[NeilV]

i understand ware you are coming from but i was happy wth this bit of information from the artical

The sites being targeted are those mentioned in spam e-mail messages and which sell the goods and services on offer.

The list of sites that the screensaver will target is taken from real-time blacklists generated by organisations such as Spamcop. To limit the chance of mistakes being made, Lycos is using people to ensure that the sites are selling spam goods.

so hopfully it wont effect bussness like yours

(ps i know its no good for a bussness but my Yahoo account gets a ton of spams but i only go in to that account to clear it out so i dont keep track of it )

[Pecunia]

So, here I am, innocent website owner. Joe Spammer sends out a Viagra ad using a mail address from my site. I never send out spam. Ever. But Joe Spammer made it look like I do. Now I have to pay for extra bandwidth people send me to punish me for something I didn't do. It makes me a double victim -- first from Joe Spammer, and then from retaliation by angry people using this application.
No, it won't work that way.
How it will work (see also the quote from NeilV):
Joe Spammer sends out a Viagra ad using a mail address from your site. In that mail he writes the internet address of the site that actually sells the meds, say, joe-spammer-meds.com.
What happens now, is that the site joe-spammer-meds.com gets on that "blacklist" from Lycos, after a real person confirms that the site joe-spammer-meds.com actually is a spam site. Once it's on that blacklist, is scheduled for "attack".

The email-address from which the spam was sent doesn't matter. All that matters is the URL mentioned in the spam mails, so you, with a small business, aren't affected by this :)

[Boobootifi]

If that is how it will work, let 'em eat bandwidth.

...Boo

[Jacquou Le]

Alright, time to fight back those **** spam sites, hunt them down...

[Bugsy]

I agree, and think it is a good idea. I wonder though, how this would work with my google compute program I allow to run in the background. I donate my computer's idle time to research. http://toolbar.google.com/dc/offerdc.htmlI see it as more valuable to society, and don't want to give it up, but would also like to fight spam...Any of our techies here know if it would affect it?

[Keith]

I'm all for it. Nail 'em good. Sounds like fun too. It is extremely satisfying to know that you can do somehting proactive against these pests for a change.

If you want to put your computer to work on something worthwhile, I suggest you join one of the now many idle time computing projects out there. I've been running Seti (http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/), the first such program, since 1999. Their new BOINC software will let you run several projects at the same time.

BOINC-based distributed computing projects include:

Climateprediction.net (http://climateprediction.net/): Improve the accuracy of long-term climate prediction.
Einstein@home (http://www.physics2005.org/events/einsteinathome/index.html): search data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US and from the GEO 600 gravitational wave observatory in Germany for signals coming from rapidly rotating neutron stars, known as pulsars.
LHC@home (http://athome.web.cern.ch/athome/): improve the design of the CERN LHC particle accelerator.
Predictor@home (http://predictor.scripps.edu/): Solve biomedical questions and investigate protein-related diseases.
SETI@home (http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/): Analyze radio-telescope data, looking for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Plus, the Folding (http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/) project mentioned earlier.

[Janmeryet]

I'm now helping SETI - thanks for the link :)

[Janmeryet]

Oh, and Neil, if, at some future time, you find out that the anti-spam thing will work in Australia, would you let me know? Ta :)

[NeilV]

update on spam war

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4061375.stm