Lycos anti-spam war: Part II
p2pnet.net News:- There’s no two ways about it: Lycos’ Make Love, not Spam, is one of the cleverest marketing / PR / advertising ploys to be seen on the Net in a long time.
Or do you believe Lycos, which has been around since the year dot, if you’ll pardon the pun, launched the site out of the goodness of its heart?
Make Love, not Spam, centred on a screensaver which fired off distributed attacks against web sites used by spammers.
For a while, a message replaced the psychadelic icon and map showing ‘covered’ countries. It expressed the view that spamming spammers was BAD.
Was this a pro-spam hacker at work? No, said Netcraft. And, “Definitely not,” a source within the Net operator community tells p2pnet..
“The site has shifted IP addresses from 83.241.136.230 to 213.115.182.123, which are both housed at the web servers of Starring, a Swedish advertising agency which is apparently working with Lycos Europe on the site,” says Netcraft.
“The message wasn’t a hack. It was a blackholing of the Client controllers by a major tier 1 ISP,” the NetOp source says. “Providers are currently implementing blackholes for their controllers globally. So it’s not the hackers that are responding.
“It’s the Internet Operator community.
“While the site is still down, it appears Lycos is reorganizing. The blackhole inside GBLX appears to be gone, probably the result of negotation about what type of traffic will be allowed to touch bredband.se, one of their now two hosting sites.
“It’s noted that has preferenced the traffic for MLNS to transit other carriers besides GBLX.
“The theory floating about now is based on solid business reasoning. A publicity stunt, probably, but they’ve got their publicity. There must be revenue involved somewhere. But where?
“In adverting. All those neatly dressed client applications are flash capable. They can be sent advertising. Imagine a world where Lycos has 65MM screensavers globally and they can target add based on country?
“Note: As well as a ‘target list’ they send an XML country list.
“That sure ain’t for spam mitigation. That’s for targeted advertising.”
Stay tuned, as Lycos suggests.
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See:-
pro-spam hacker – Spam the spammers: Lycos, p2pnet, December 2, 2004
think so – Lycos Screensaver Site Changed, Now Says “Stay Tuned”, Netcraft, December 2, 2004
