Lycos halts anti-Spam war
p2pnet.net News:- Lycos has officially confirmed the end of its anti-SPAM screensaver project, saying: "With this campaign we intended to raise a new impulse in the anti-spam discussion and therefore create awareness for the big economic and societal problems caused by spam. The campaign has reached its goal and thus will be stopped."
The idea was to spam the spammers but, "The problem with such hastily launched initiatives – both online and offline – is the message they send out when they fail," says Silicon.com.
"Each storm the spammers ride out will convince them further that they are untouchable – a Teflon tech menace. Each encouragement of this kind will likely see them raise their game.
"Many within the spamming community will have been aware of what Lycos was doing. All will be aware that it failed."
Maybe. It depends on the ultimate objective. And as Netcraft observed:
"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."
And someone else who prefers to be anonymous wonders if Lycos – which can hardly be described as an altruistic company – might have had something else in mind.
"The theory floating about now is based on solid business reasoning," he told p2pnet. "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.
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See:-
hastily launched – Leader: Has Lycos empowered the spammers?, silicon.com, December 7, 2004
Swedish advertising agency - Lycos Screensaver Site Changed, Now Says "Stay Tuned", Netcraft, December 2, 2004
revenue involved – Lycos anti-spam war: Part II, p2pnet, December 4, 2004
December 7th, 2004 at 3:15 pm
I have not. SpamFryer, a java apllication that allows you to control what sites are reverse spammed, is still available. All you need is Java virtual machine installed on your computer. It is free to use, free to modify, and free to redistribute. The sourcecode is embedded in the jar. You can get it at http://www.plaza1.net/SpamFryer.jar
I wrote this application months agao because I’m FED UP with spammers crapping in my inbox. I have tried filtering, complaining to non-resposive abuse departments, and blacklisting. These methods only work if you spend large amounts of time keeping up with the spammers’ changing methods. I have better things to do, so I paste the spamvertised URL into SpamFryer select number of visits, and click start. It takes me about 145 seconds to accomplish. I say “NO MORE!!!” to spammers.
December 7th, 2004 at 4:03 pm
Hi – I’d like to get in touch. Can you send me your email or phone number?
jon[at]p2pnet[dot]net
Cheers! And thanks …
Jon