The crazy "make love not spam" screen saver which we wrote about here: Spray gives away free screensaver that DDoSes spam-sites is a success, 9800 downloads so far in Sweden alone, lots of gigabytes of traffic has hit the spammers servers, and now they'll take over the world with it. Lycos Europe has joined the make love not spam revolution and offers the screensaver to anyone on the planet. Comes in these flavours: Italian, Spanish, English and German.
Not everyone is so keen on the idea the Register ends their "When is a DDoS attack not a DDoS attack?" report on a concerned note:
A spokesman for Lycos in Germany told The Register he believed that the tool could generate 3.4MB in traffic on a daily basis. When 10m screensavers are downloaded and used, the numbers quickly add up, to 33TB of 'useless' IP traffic. Seems Lycos may hurt not just spammers
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at the risk of sounding like a complete fool - what on earth is a DDoS attack?
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PermalinkDistributed Denial of Service - in short, lots of computers call the same webpage/server (in this case only on port 80, ie; the http port) requesting data. Since servers are designed to answer requests for data, the target complies - by having LOTS of people making the same call, at the same time, the server can get so busy answering calls, that it can not answer any new ones, thus "denying service". Hence the name.
(was that a good explanation?)
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Permalinkyes, thanks.
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PermalinkI think there
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PermalinkSlashdot debate - Metafilter debate - BBC News about this.
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PermalinkI assumed this was a crock of shit, so filed the email sent to me under S. Apparently not, it seems.
So much for the overcrowding of the internet - this is all because the powers that be have made few serious attempts to crack down on the spammers.
Is this a China Syndrome affair or can these screensavers be deactivated at short notice? Can they be deactivated from afar? A crazy business.
Alex Romo
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PermalinkSpammers hack Lycos' anti-spam Web site
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PermalinkSo predictable! But good for Lycos, who now get more press.
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PermalinkMore press they got - but Hello..... It was a hoax!? Lycos denies attack on zombie army
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