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Haarlem (pte041/29.11.2004/16:00) - The Internet portal Lycos http://www.lycos-europe.com has developed a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail. As the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk reports, the company is hoping to make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers rocket by keeping their servers running flat out. According to the Internet firm, if enough people sign up and download the new tool, spammers could end up having to pay to send out terabytes of data. By getting thousands of people to download and use the screensaver, Lycos hopes to get spamming websites constantly running at almost full capacity.
"We've never really solved the big problem of spam which is that it's so cheap and easy to do," said Malte Pollmann, a spokesman for Lycos Europe. "In the past we have built up the spam filtering systems for our users, but now we are going to go one step further," he added. "We've found a way to make it a much higher cost for spammers by putting a load on their servers." According to Pollmann, the screensaver had been carefully written to ensure that the amount of traffic it generated from each user did not overload the web. "Every single user will contribute three to four megabytes per day - about one MP3 file," explained Polmann.
Sites being targeted are those mentioned in spam e-mail messages, which sell the goods and services on offer. As a rule, these sites are different to those used to send out spam-email and only get a few thousand visitors per day. It is expected that the sites will slow down under the weight of data requests. Early results show that response times of some of these sites have dropped by up to 85 per cent.
The screensaver, which shows the websites that are being bothered with requests for data, is due to be launched across Europe on the 1st of December. Up to now it has only been trialled in Sweden. According to Pollmann, the screensaver had been downloaded more than 20,000 times in past four days. "There's a huge user demand to not only filter spam day-by-day but to do something more. Before now users have never had the chance to be a bit more offensive," he said.
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