I Really Don’t Know

luuuurvely

BBC via Clarke Ching via alan francis:

Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.M

Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.

Update: I did start to wonder if this was for real. I mean, there are probably laws that this screensaver violates - or should. But I took a look at what it’s doing. I turned on the logging on my firewall and it really does visit the sites, it makes several requests…

so, being suspicious I wondered if the domains might be bogus…

Domain Name ANYSOFT.BIZ
Domain ID D8128287-BIZ
Sponsoring Registrar GANDI SARL
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID 81
Domain Status ok
Registrant ID O-876962-GANDI
Registrant Name Sergey Gachichiladze
Registrant Organization Sergey Gachichiladze
Registrant Address1 11, Ulan-Bator St.
Registrant City Moscow
Registrant Postal Code 117142
Registrant Country Russian Federation
Registrant Country Code RU
Registrant Phone Number +7.0957899432
Registrant Email whois@hqlists.com
Administrative Contact ID SG1094-GANDI
Administrative Contact Name Sergey Gachichiladze
Administrative Contact Address1 11, Ulan-Bator St.
Administrative Contact City Moscow

The screensaver appears to send junk messages such as:

<makeLOVEnotSPAM>6Ad;&o2RbS\{)Q&{q/<TN;z%?E|9uXv%%;m~C,dA}7.jGqD;|ym14Bck#N&aT[B+T</makeLOVEnotSPAM>
</TN;z%?E|9uXv%%;m~C,dA}7.jGqD;|ym14Bck#N&aT[B+T</makeLOVEnotSPAM></makeLOVEnotSPAM>.

So, surprisingly, judging by Starring, the company who came up with it:

Our business concept is to

help companies do things that give them something to say.

it appears to be for real.