2004-11-29 08:31 PM
2004-11-29 11:45 PM
2004-11-30 12:13 AM
2004-11-30 07:55 PM
Lycos has decided to fight spam in a different way. Instead of filtering out emails and going after spam companies, Lycos has created a screensaver that will go to these advertised sites and generate traffic on them. The idea is to get 1000's of users doing this in hopes of costing the site that paid for the spam to pay up in bandwidth fees that would make sending spam less then desirable.
As these sites rarely use advertising to offset hosting costs, the burden of high-bandwidth bills could make spam too expensive, said Mr Pollmann.
Sites will also slow down under the weight of data requests. Early results show that response times of some sites have deteriorated by up to 85%.
This screensaver is put out by Lycos Europe, but I do not see any reason why anyone could not use this as well. The site to download the screensaver is over here.