Anti-Spam Screensaver

Steve just sent me to a BBC News article entitled _Screensaver tackles spam websites_. It talks about a new Screensaver that Lycos has brought out at Make LOVE not SPAM. What’s that you ask? Simple. You download the Screensaver and it queries blacklists for sites that host spam sites and then starts requesting those sites. You personally will just be downloading 4MB or so a day but emm… there are lots of other people that will do that too and that means that there will be loads of traffic on those spam sites. It was comforting to know that Lycos does have people checking out the sites if they really host spam, because some sites might just be used by spammers as some fake gateway or whatever and shouldn’t have the burdon of a huge bandwidth bill. Interesting concept though ;)

Update: It seems that the Lycos site is now under constant denial-of-service attack and that several spam sites are down, even though that was not intended. More here.