luuuurvely

BBC via Clarke Ching via alan francis:

Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.M

Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.

Update: I did start to wonder if this was for real. I mean, there are probably laws that this screensaver violates - or should. But I took a look at what it's doing. I turned on the logging on my firewall and it really does visit the sites, it makes several requests...

so, being suspicious I wondered if the domains might be bogus...

Domain Name 	 ANYSOFT.BIZ
Domain ID 	D8128287-BIZ
Sponsoring Registrar 	GANDI SARL
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID 	81
Domain Status 	ok
Registrant ID 	O-876962-GANDI
Registrant Name 	Sergey Gachichiladze
Registrant Organization 	Sergey Gachichiladze
Registrant Address1 	11, Ulan-Bator St.
Registrant City 	Moscow
Registrant Postal Code 	117142
Registrant Country 	Russian Federation
Registrant Country Code 	RU
Registrant Phone Number 	+7.0957899432
Registrant Email 	[email protected]
Administrative Contact ID 	SG1094-GANDI
Administrative Contact Name 	Sergey Gachichiladze
Administrative Contact Address1 	11, Ulan-Bator St.
Administrative Contact City 	Moscow

The screensaver appears to send junk messages such as:

<makeLOVEnotSPAM>6Ad;&o2RbS\{)Q&{q/<TN;z%?E|9uXv%%;m~C,dA}7.jGqD;|ym14Bck#N&aT[B+T</makeLOVEnotSPAM> </TN;z%?E|9uXv%%;m~C,dA}7.jGqD;|ym14Bck#N&aT[B+T</makeLOVEnotSPAM></makeLOVEnotSPAM>.

So, surprisingly, judging by Starring, the company who came up with it:

Our business concept is to

help companies do things that give them something to say.

it appears to be for real.