Lycos has announced the release of a screensaver called "Make Love Not Spam". This, they say, will help in the fight against spam, by helping increase the costs to spammers of sending spam out.

Spam is only currently a practical business tool because the cost of sending email is so miniscule that a tiny response covers the costs of sending it - so you can see the logic behind Lycos's tool - increasing the costs of sending spam render spam impractical.

The system itself is fairly simple. A list will be maintained of URLs promoted through spam. Anyone who installs the screensaver from Lycos will then automatically visit these URLs when their computer is idle.

The idea is that with tens of thousands of people using the tool, the sites promoted through spam will end up with a large amount of extra - and completely useless - traffic. This will cost whoever runs the site money - so promoting a site or service through spam will be seen to be too costly to do so again.

However, though the idea on the face of it sounds reasonable, there is no way this can succeed at reducing spam on the internet (or even just irritating spammers).

The problems are with how the system functions. Essentially what Lycos are doing are organising a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on URLs they select themselves. They have said their intention is not to take sites down and they will limit the level of traffic sent to a domain - but that doesn't alter the fact that it is a DDoS attack, even if it fails (which is illegal in many countries, I believe - though I am not sure - perhaps someone could clarify this?). Not to mention, they cannot possibly know the capabilities of a server they are attacking - so how they can limit their attacks so they will not crash a site (and thereby execute a successful DDoS attack), and still generate enough traffic to cause a problem, I don't know.

There is a human element to the process, which introduces a risk. URLs are selected from a generated list, from sources such as SpamCop - but they are selected by Lycos employees. I see no reason to believe it will be impossible for a Lycos employee, if they wished, to add a URL to the list to be spammed that just takes their fancy.

The URL list, even if URLs are checked well and the list is well maintained, can not be trusted. If I was feeling malicious, I could sent out a few thousand emails advertising a URL. Once it was added to the Lycos system, I could then redirect traffic from that URL to another one. In no time at all, Lycos would be costing my competitors a substantial sum of money.

Assuming all URLs in the system are ones that deserve to be attacked, there is no logical indication that this kind of attack will be effective at stopping, slowing, or affecting the cost of spam. Few spammers promote their own URLs. The vast majority of spam is sent by a very small group of spammers, and they are paid vast quantities by companies to send it.

They stand to lose nothing, directly, through Lycos. They will not be paying for their clients' traffic - that would be stupid. And contrary to popular belief, spammers are not stupid. They make millions by irritating people daily, and spend huge amounts of time working on bypassing sophisticated spam filters, after all.

Some have suggested that perhaps this will have the effect of stopping a company from sending out spam email twice. Perhaps. However, why would they be spamming in the first place? To increase traffic.

Will the traffic from the "Make Love Not Spam" screensaver be in any way distinguishable from normal traffic? If it is, it can be filtered and will have no effect on any site on a half-decent host. If it is not distinguishable from normal traffic, then the spam campaign will look like it has been successful - and the company will likely repeat the exercise.

True, this traffic increase will not yield a corresponding sales increase, but any salesman capable of convincing a company to send out hundreds of thousands of commercial emails to the unsuspecting public is going to be perfectly capable of convincing the same company that they just need to word the next email a little better, or that they need to make some changes to their site, to improve their conversion rate.

It can cost some people money, though. Anyone on a shared hosting environment, where they pay for extra bandwidth by the gig, will be hit hard by this. They could end up losing hundreds, maybe thousands, of pounds. However, a very tiny percentage of people hosting sites on that scale can afford to, or want to, send out spam. Stopping them, if it worked, would not make any noticable dent in overall spam levels.

My honest belief at this point is that the Lycos "Make Love Not Spam" screensaver is nothing more than a cheap publicity stunt, aimed to raise Lycos's profile. It cannot actually stop or hinder spam, and may even increase it. It will certainly increase the level of noise on the internet (noise being basically useless traffic), and that will cost the ISPs money as they nee to upgrade machines and connections (guess where those costs are passed on to).
 

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