Spam the Spammers

Analysts say a new twist on the war against spammers in Europe isn't likely to spill across Unites States borders, but is rather an opening salvo more likely to fizzle than to explode.

Earlier this week, Lycos Europe launched an aggressive campaign targeting spam-related Web sites. The UK-based company took the offensive when it released a "screensaver that spams the spammers."

Downloads of the screensaver, cheekily named "MakeLoveNotSpam," allowed users a measure of revenge against intrusive Internet interlopers. While idle, computers with the screensavers bombarded targeted spamming sites with data, generating expensive bandwidth bills.

The Lycos campaign was initially a success -- a reported 90,000 downloads were recorded within the first few days -- as the program disabled several notorious sites, according to British monitoring firm Netcraft.

But the wisdom of a large, and potentially vulnerable, company directing distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks was immediately questioned. As the number of screensavers swelled, a growing chorus of industry insiders questioned the ethics of launching the same type of attacks they were fighting against.

Anne Mitchell, president and CEO of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy (ISIPP), said the Lycos action lends legitimacy to spamming and possibly escalated the war for individual users who went on the offensive.

"It is a bit like going up to a known terrorist's house and pelting it with rocks on which you've painted your home address," Mitchell said, noting that is was possible the IP addresses weren't disguised when users spammed the spammers.

The UK-based company has since removed the MakeLoveNotSpam screensaver and replaced it with the rather cryptic message: "STAY TUNED."

A Mathematician's Love Letter


Address:

De-Morgan's Law,

Binomial Avenue,

United States of Matrices.



My Dear Love,

Yesterday, I was passing by your rectangular house in

trigonometric lane. There I saw you with your cute circular face,

conical nose and spherical eyes,standing in your triangular garden.

Before seeing you my heart was a null set,

but when a vector of magnitude (likeness) from your eyes at a

deviation of theta radians made a tangent to my heart, it

differentiated.



My love for you is a quadratic equation with real roots,

which only you can solve by making good binary relation with me.

The cosine of my love for you extends to infinity.



I promise that I should not resolve you into partial functions but if

I do so, You can integrate me by applying the limits from zero to

infinity.



You are as essential to me as an element to a set.

The geometry of my life revolves around your acute personality .



My love, if you do not meet me at parabola restaurant on

date 10 at sunset, when the sun is making an angle of 160 degrees, my

heart would be like a solved polynomial of degree 10.



With love from your higher order derivatives of maxima and minima, of an

unknown function.

Yours ever

loving,

Pythagoras