Lycos Goes Straight

Lycos Goes Straight
Mark Rasch, 2004-12-06

After a week of well-deserved criticism, Lycos is abandoning its scheme to launch denial-of-service attacks against spammy websites. Did the company reform in time to avoid criminal prosecution?

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Lycos Goes Straight - Mark doesn't get it 2004-12-07
Reader (3 replies)

Mark and fellow JDs clearly have let their prosecutorial histories cloud their perception of this matter. The truth is that Lycos Europe proposed the most novel approach yet to stopping spam, and it had nothing to do with a denial of service attack. As clearly stated by Lycos, a DoS attack would b...

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Lycos Goes Straight - Mark doesn't get it 2004-12-07
Anonymous (1 replies)

True, Lycos purpose was to increase the cost of spam. The problem is, the method was potentially illegal. Agreed though - in order to reduce the amount of spam in circulation, the financial reward needs to be removed - make it too expensive to continue to spam......

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Lycos Goes Straight - Mark doesn't get it 2004-12-08
Jagdwulfe (1 replies)

Lycos could alternately block the spam emails from those servers and bounce the message back to them. That could also affect the Spammers though I could see them sueing to have the blocks removed....

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Lycos Goes Straight - Mark doesn&#39;t get it 2004-12-09
Anonymous (1 replies)

There's nothing to say that a network 'has to' receive an email. There really is no legal grounds if an IP offers it's a customers an opt-in service which will automatically bounce all mail from IPs/subnets on their black list.

Let an ISP host a spammer, but also let the public know that you'll b...

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Lycos Goes Straight - Mark doesn&amp;#39;t get it 2004-12-10
Anonymous

Mark doesn't get it because if CAN-SPAM act and other legislation was more effective, e.g. requiring all emails sent from companies to have an explicit opt-in, spam might not be a problem because of the legal penalties. But since such legislation is always hamstrung by cash grabbing morons with shor...

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It's still the wrong approach 2004-12-08
Anonymous

I thought it was the dumbest idea I'd heard of in weeks. The Internet is slow enough already without generating *more* useless traffic.
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Lycos Goes Straight - Mark doesn't get it 2004-12-09
GrimRebuke

What you are proposing is that a company be allowed to commit denial of service attacks on other companies. While the suggestion that this power would only be used for 'good' is charming, it is also pathetically naive. Companies would soon be committing these attacks against competitors. And in t...

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Lycos Goes Straight 2004-12-09
Fredrik Hult

If Lycos would have continued the only effect of their efforts would be to push the spammers to use zombie hosts for more of the hosting than what is already done.

Compromised (Stolen) host resources are used to send spam and host spam sites dns and web content. Reverse proxy and dns load balanci...

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Lycos Goes Straight 2004-12-09
Anonymous

Glad to see that clearer heads prevailed on this one. This was one of the dumbest ideas I have ever heard.

Didn't your momma ever tell you that two wrongs don't make a right? I hate spam as much as anyone, but fighting spam by DOSing the spammers is not the solution. And what criteria determines...

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Lycos Goes Straight 2004-12-09
Anonymous

I think that this whole thing was a poorly planned publicity stunt. Good see they pulled their heads out....

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Lycos Goes Straight 2004-12-13
Concerned ISP

Not necessarily. While the Lycos action may force the spammers to go infecting unsuspecting hosts and using them to send out spam, it is merely a short term measure. In the long run, this action from spammers will cause the owners of compromised systems to wise up and install counter measures.

I...

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Lycos Goes Straight 2004-12-13
Anonymous

Nah, it wasn't about stopping spam, increasing the cost of spam. It was about advertising their email service.

Now the goal has been reached [tons of free publicity] it has been stopped....

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