"Revenge of the Spammed"!

Roll camera on attractive young woman seated in front of a computer. Small childs comes up to her and dialogue begins.

"Mommy, what happened to all that jumk email you used to get? I think it's called 'scram'."

"You mean spam, dear?"

"Yeah, that's it."

<looks thoughtful> "I really don't know. I just noticed the other day that there wasn't any. Hmm. I wonder what happened to it, now that I think of it. I used to waste a lot of time at the computer getting rid of it."

"Well, now that you don't have to spend all your time doing that anymore, can we go to the park or the zoo or...?"

<Smiles> Sure. Go get your coat.

The future contains possibilities...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4051553.stm

Now, if some light bulb around here a lot brighter than I could find out where the local denizens could download this Saver safely, We could have seats at the front of the bus!

So sorry, Swen, I don't speak Swedish.

That's a good idea indeed. All these junk machines sending crap are getting on my nerves.

Nah, I don't think it will work, since one can easily write scripts to ignore such requests and protect such servers. Not to mention that a smart spammer would actually use the opportunity to update his "mailing list" while at the same time ignoring the requests. I hope that I did not understand very well what the article says, because otherwise this "server overload" ideea is really baloney. Not to mention that it subtley adresses the spam problem in terms of "good spam"("wanted" advertising) and "bad spam"("unwanted" advertising)...

The only good spam is an unsent spam.

You have to be careful, though. Websites of spammers are frequently the target of DOS attacks from angry people. So, they do take counter measures. E.g. downloading from spammer's website can lead to infection with spyware. Also, they often include other websites not related to their advertisements in the message.

I downloaded the screensaver. It seems to work! More than 80,000 people have downloaded the screensaver so far. So a large amount of traffic is generated at the cost of the spammers.

More info here.

I just went to the site and got told off. They said they were taking my IP # and were going to turn me in to my service provider. I don't think they're feeling nice just now.

Amaranth

I've read that the site was hacked by spammers. I couldn't go to the website to report more spam urls, but the screensaver does still work.


If the spammers succeed in closing this down, maybe it would be time to start large scale DDOS attacks on spammers.

The spammers have been defeated! The site http://makelovenotspam.com is up and running again! So, you can download the screensaver and also report spam websites.

So either my work related security settings will not allow the site or it is back down?

It was back down a few hours ago, but right now I can access the site.

Spam sites have been put out of action!

Sad news. ISPs are blocking access to the server coordinating the (legitimate) DDOS attacks.

Maybe there are alternatives:

There are simple java programs that will visit websites and ask to reload the page every second. If people just run such programs when they don't use the computer, then that will have the same effect. Maybe you don't need a central server that will coordinate such attacks. Every time you receive spam messages, you can just enter the websites in the program.

This approach may be even better than the screensaver, because it is more flexible. Everytime the spammer changes the websites the attacks will change to the new websites. If millions of people participate, spam will be history. And, of course, there is no way to block such attacks.

I found this solution:

Download DDK (Disturbance Developer Kit) from:

http://www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/floodnet.html


Unzip the file. Then edit the file applet.htm (with a text editor). Change the target URL to the desired url of the spam advertisement (it is set now on www.whitehouse.gov). Then doubleclick on zaps.htm (or on index.htm and then on the link ''begin flooding''). Don't doubleclick on applet.htm, because then each automatic reload will open in a new window.

A person could do the same with a UNIX machine, GNU Wget, and GNU Bash.

Mischief managed, especially if you have a crapton of outgoing bandwidth. And they don't.