More on the anti-spam screensaver

Continuing in the talk of the anti-spam screensaver that Lycos is distributing, Slashdot has more on it.

Essentially they are saying that while the software is supposed to back off and not hit a site hard enough to DDoS it (distributed denial of service), it is still doing that. Some sites are getting knocked out by this.
This is bad because it is:
1) not legal
2) rude
3) against the point of the product, which is to waste bandwidth on the server - and bandwidth can't be wasted if the server is grinding to a halt under the load (yes it does take a lot of bandwidth to reach that state, but it is going to be better in the long term if a lower rate is sustained instead of bursting huge amounts all at once)

For the sake of the other people that use the servers, I hope the spammers have a dedicated system/line and aren't sharing.

Posted by Eric at December 3, 2004 01:40 AM | TrackBack