Shoutbox

http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996752 (originally posted by WDZ.)

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Originally posted by newscientist.com
A controversial service enabling frustrated computer users to attack sites associated with spam has been halted.

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Damn !

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Originally posted by newscientist.com
[...]several backbone internet service providers could have blacklisted the site, refusing to route traffic to or from it.
"It's probably because they believe it's unethical or perhaps because it breaks their terms of agreement,"[...]

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Unethical ?? What's unethical, spamming innocent people to death with fucking penis enlargement mails, or pinging the companie's websites to death ? Calling this unethical is totally stupid. The definition of unethical is: "not conforming to approved standards of social or professional behavior" If these spam-companies are considered as "ethically correct", then, good night, let the spam rule the world. As distributing spam is not ethically correct, fighting the people who distribute spam can't be accused of beeing unethical from my point of view.

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Originally posted by newscientist.com
Lycos Europe maintains that their approach is legal and says the service is not designed to knock sites offline, only to slow their network capacity to 5%.

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Exactly. That's the point, it isn't designed as a DDoS attack, it just slows the sites down, increases the spammers bills and doesn't hurt anyone exept the spammer (and Lycos' servers).

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Originally posted by newscientist.com
But many experts question the ethics of the project, suggesting that it contravenes accepted protocols.

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Is spamming ethical ?? Doesn't spamming contravene with "accepted protocols" ? How can people see fucking ethics everywhere, they're just websites owned by companys that distribute huge amounts of spam all around the web and increase the amount of traffic.

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Originally posted by newscientist.com
And, by 2 December, several sites targeted by the Lycos software had crashed completely.[...]

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Who cares ??

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Originally posted by newscientist.com
"You can't fight abuse with abuse," says Steve Linford, of the UK antispam group Spamhaus. "We don't support it because, technically, it is a denial-of service attack and nobody should be doing it."

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Of course Anti-spam companies are against fighting spam, they would without spam and probably even support spammers. And, it's not meant as DDos Attack ! A DDoS attack is harmless in comparison to the fact that spamming companies use even more illegal ways to distribute their spam, e.g via worms. And, if we shouldn't fight abuse (spam) with abuse, what alternatives do we have ? None.

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Originally posted by newscientist.com
Linford says the main trouble is that targeted sites will typically share hosting services with several other sites, which are also likely to suffer from a DoS bombardment.

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Of course some webcompanies will be affected but whoever cooperates with Spammers is a half illegal subject himself. The problem is that antispam companies or providers will never act against spammers because they are a huge source of income.

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Originally posted by newscientist.com
"Attacking a spammer's website is like poking a grizzly bear sleeping in your back garden with a pointy stick,” says Graham Cluley of Sophos, an anti-virus company in the UK. "Not only is this screensaver similar in its approach to a potentially illegal distributed denial-of-service attack, but it is also in danger of turning innocent computer users into vigilantes."

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Why not try poking the grizzly to death ? Again sometimes attack is the best defence; if we just leave them, they will grow even bigger and more economical damage will be done by gigantic amounts of spam sent across the internet. And again, it is not meant to be a DDoS attack. Anti-virus / Anti-spam companies will of course never have the slightest desire to "kill" spammers, they would kill themselves. If they don't act, we have to.
I don't see anything unethical in attacking spammers. period.

this post was way too excessive