Straight Edge Life

Lycos is taking an interesting approach to dealing with spam. They’ve released a clever screensaver which is designed to hurt the spam industry by consuming spammers bandwidth, driving up hosting prices and hopefully putting them out of business.

Personally I love the idea of fighting spam by driving up the cost of business, but it’s not the first time I’m seen this type of tactic taken to achieve specific goals. I’m from Eugene, Oregon where books like Ecodefense and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, are as common as bibles in hotel drawers. This, my friends, is an ecoterrorist’s tactic.

Both Ecodefense, a book outlining in detail how to achieve a successful campaign of monkeywrenching, as well as The Monkey Wrench Gang, a book romanticizing the act of monkeywrenching, directly state that the most effective way to win the war against those committing crimes against the environment is simply to drive up the cost of doing business. In the ecodefender’s case by whatever means necessary (so long as no people are hurt); and in Lycos’s case, by walking in the grey area of legality regarding Denial of Service attacks.

Check out the article in The Register above or check out the discussion on this topic on slashdot.