Chan's Personal Blog

Just a short blog entry before I sleep....

I saw this article from the BBC talking about Lycos developing a screensaver that fights spammers (the jerks that send electronic junk mail). The following explanation is relatively light on computer-geek-speak, so don't worry.

How it works is, you install the screensaver on your computer. Then, Lycos finds and targets a spammer's web server (the place where the spam comes from), and your screensaver will send useless web traffic to the spammer's web server. The idea is that we want to make it expensive for spammers to spam ... so by sending useless web traffic to their servers, they have to pay for that traffic. The article says that each day, you'll waste about 5 megs of a spammer's web traffic.

Now you say, 5 megs, how's that going to make a dent against spammers? Well, the beauty of this system is that it's a distributed system. So ... lets say we had a million people running this screen saver. That's a LOT of wasted web trafffic against the spammer .

The reason why spam is such a huge problem is partially because it's relatively cheap to send out. So, lets give those spammers and expensive reminder NOT TO SPAM US!

You can download this screensaver here.

And on a tangent, here's a really funny video from The Daily Show where they interview one of the worst spammers of our time.