Bot!

Вот!
Originally uploaded by forgetme.

What does this have to do with this post? Not a damn thing, but blogger is ONCE AGAIN having some problems, so I'm going to try to post this through flickr.

When googling that 800 number, I ran across this :

For four months we had several mailto links on our site. When you clicked on one
of the "Make Contact" buttons, it called up a pre-addressed e-mail window making
it easy and convenient for interested people to write to us. We later discovered
that SPAMMERS have software that searches the internet for mailto links, and
then distributes these addresses widely to other SPAMMERS. After four months we
were getting hundreds of SPAMS each day. We started using Outlook's Junk Senders
List to automatically delete SPAM e-mail. It turns out that only 30-50 SPAMS
daily are from repeat addresses. The majority are from new addresses not yet on
the junk senders list. It was now taking several minutes daily to add new
SPAMMERS addresses to the junk senders list, and then delete the SPAM. Now the
junk senders list has many hundreds of addresses, and this is slowing down the
downloading of e-mail. Then we found out that Microsoft Outlook only checks the
first several letters of addresses to identify SPAM. This means that when
legitimate e-mail starts with the same characters as SPAM addresses on the junk
senders list, it is being automatically deleted also. Why Microsoft would make
outlook check only the first few characters instead of checking the whole
address for an exact match is beyond comprehension. (But then so is the
unreliability and vulnerability of the Windows operating system). We were forced
to remove all the mailto links from the site. This didn't help reduce SPAM. We
were forced to change our address. This of course wastes lots of time and
energy, especially telling important contacts about the change.
This gave us
an idea for attacking SPAMMERS. What if we have mailto links on our site
addressed to SPAMMERS ? This should result in hundreds of SPAMS being sent to
SPAMMERS by SPAMMERS. The idea is that, even if SPAMMERS don't actually receive
the SPAM because they use fictitious addresses, it will clog up their domains
and service providers to the point that they will have to be shut down, or at
least cause the sending of SPAM to be slowed down. This will also cause the
sending SPAMMERS to receive huge amounts of non-existing address notices,
further jamming up their domains. We hate to do anything that might slow down
the internet, but since the SPAMMERS are attacking us already, and since no one
is doing anything about this problem, it is our only recourse. War IS War !

Reminds me of something I used to do in the pre-blog times, when I had lots of time to waste online. I'd pick one or two of the most egregious spammers and forward all my spam to them. In fact, one of my email accounts' address book is still clogged with lots of addresses under the name "SPAM."

Don't know that it accomplished a lot, but it felt damn good.