Fuji
If you want to notify a moderator to shut down this thread by all means go ahead. Did you really think you could start a topic like this and expect people to reply with cogent, erudite, well-researched analyses of ethical values?
To answer the OP I would say that in the strictest sense of the definition of ethics, using a DoS attack on a spammer is not ethical. Then again, I’ll make another vaguely valid analogy (like my previous one about the school bully). Was it ethical to drop 2 atomic bombs on Japan, killing innocent civilians? Probably not ethical, but did it bring the war to a swift conclusion? Damned right it did.
As I said previously, a couple of days of DoS attacks on spammers and all Hell broke loose in the “spammer” community. A couple of days of abuse for them, yet they’ve been spamming us for years. You have to admit one thing - this is the first time we have heard anything from the spammers. It’s nice to see that these few days of DoS attacks were siginificant enough for the spammers to slither out from the rocks in which they were hiding.
Sounds like perfect eye-for-an-eye justice to me (of course, I think they ought to reopen Abu Ghirab for spammers, but this will do for the time being).
Nonsense. The fact that an act of self-defense is not 100.000000000000000% effective at stopping all the aggressors and sparing all the innocent bystanders is not an absolute disqualifier – if it were, self-defense would be impossible.
Given that Lycos is making a reasonably effective good-faith effort to target the guilty, I don’t see any ethical problem here.
Well Done.
And oddly relevant considering the topic at hand is a discussion of destroying an uninvited and overwhelming nuissance visitor.
Yes. Very well done indeed!
MHO? Who gives a damn about ANYONE who bombards my family’s PC with unsolicited adverts & photos of Human on Human/Human on Animal sex! ? ! If I got the equivalent telephone solicitation I could probably get someone arrested.
Seriously, if spammers want to be treated as a legitemate marketing device and afforded some measure of official protection, then they need to get organized and start behaving like something more than vandals.
If I could find a way to bounce a virus back at them and nuke their operation I’d do it in a heartbeat just to make it stop! The recklessness with which this industry has conducted itself has precluded any recourse to “justice.” If government will not regulate their behavior then why not the sickened, vocal and unwilling consumer?
Broad View
Ethical to draw attention, whatever the motivation, to a technology that could be disruptive to inoffensive computer servers? To provide another step in the evoloution of internet communications by seeking, finding, and exploiting a weakness–and targeting an offensive perpetrator by means of illustration? By providing pressure, even with potential collateral damage, on an unrepentant and unresponsive offender? Absoloutely. This technology is not only ethical, but neccessary in the continued development of internet technology as well as the development of a legal system for ensuring the safety of its use. How can that be bad?
I see vigilantism as wrong only when there exists a legal way to write the wrongs that vigilantism. So it is wrong to administor justice when there is an official capable way of administoring justice (whether it is Government or School Principal).
I don’t think there as yet exists such a system of justice for the internet w.r.t. spammers. So until there is I see the Lycos anti-spamming DDOS as a valid and ethical thing.
I disagree with vigilantism. This is not vigilantism. Vigilantism is, by definition, taking the law into one’s own hands, i.e. taking it upon oneself to carry out an activity otherwise reserved only for officials, like judging someone guilty of a crime and administering punishment.
As far as I know, sending a limited amount of data to a website is not illegal. I don’t see how it can even be construed to be unethical if one does so only in response to an unsolicited invitation to visit said website. Until now, the fact that the cost of the bandwidth to host these sites is recovered if some minimum fraction of visitors actually purchases their products is a result of 99.999999% of people who get spam deleting it, and has made spamming profitable. By reacting to spam instead of ignoring it, we’re simply changing the advertising landscape to be unfavorable to tactics we find offensive.
It’s no different than if people undertook a campaign to send back every postage prepaid envelope they get from a junk mail solicitation, or if every person who gets a telemarketing phone call talks to the person for an hour and then doesn’t buy anything. Advertisers put money into junk mail and telemarketing and spam because the fraction of people who buy stuff in response make more money than the advertising costs. This is not a divine right, though, and we as recipients of advertising do not have an ethical obligation to make sure that this balance remains profitable.
Of course it’s ethical. The spammers knowingly are 1) selling fake crap for hucksters and swindlers, 2) bothering millions of people, 3) wasting significant time and resources of millions of people… all because 4) they’ve been able to get away with it with impunity.
If the spammers honestly believed they were doing something for the public good, then I’d say it was worth a try at explaining to them the error of their ways. But they are well aware of what they’re doing. If people knew where they were physically located I’m sure they’d be lynched. They should be thankful it’s only this.
One requirement of ethics is that enough attention is paid that an ethical decision is based on knowledge, rather than gut. Gotta say this because it may be that not everyone in this thread is aware that the spammers are not being hit; their customers’ servers are being hit.
If Lycos’ effort is well designed (recipients have a mechanism to get off the list; the response is measured–burdensome rather than disastrous for instance; the targeting is competent; and so on), and as said before the spammers are fully aware their work is broadly intrusive (although usually not illegal…), and spam is burdening Internet mail to the point that this valuable resource is becoming worthless to an increasing number of users (which it is), and other considerations not listed here are not violated, I’d say it’s fairly ethical.
One little hitch is, IIR, DDoS isn’t legal in the US. Is Lycos in violation?
Ethics also involves the foreseen results of the decision. I’d expect this to reduce spamming and/or stimulate governments to write laws to reduce spam–if this is feasible.
It might either increase or reduce the tendency by governments to make the Internet a more controlled universe, which is another debatable area.
Oh, my circumstances, I have a guessable e-mail ID and get about 30 spams per day; in the last week it’s increased to over 50, and it could become unusable.
It is unethical because it does not target the companies sending the spam; it targets companies whose websites are listed in spam. Yes, right now those two are almost always linked, and the spammers’ clients are as guilty of spamming as they are.
But if the only criterion for DDOSing a website is that that website appears in spam, it will be trivially easy for spammers to start sending out a few spams with competitors’ websites in them (called a joe job). As far as I can tell, the innocent companies will have no recourse. After all, by Lycos’s definition, they’re spammers.
It has the same problems that all vigilante justice has: there’s no oversight or public feedback into the system if it starts to go wrong. Lycos has set itself up as the arbiter of taste on the internet, which it has no right to do.
I have no ethical problems with it as long as it targets spammers, and support it, and would like to see more of it. But with the realization that there is responsibility in using any sort of force, and that lies on making bloody sure you are not targeting innocent people.
Ok, it was like shooting lasers into a crowd, some of whom are holding mirrors that can deflect the attack to you, or innocents. What stupid pathetic idiots! They targeted hostnames?!?!? This turn of events should have been entirely predictable.
Unethical and stupid and ineffectual. There are defences against DDOS attacks, usually trivial ones. If you affect the target for more than an hour, then they’re doing something wrong.
In the mean time, there is a fixed amount of bandwidth on the internet. There are likely choke points in between you and the target of your attack. You’re increasing the traffic through that choke point, affecting all the innocent third parties who have to use that hop on the internet. That’s the unethical part, IMHO, not the fact that you’re attacking spammers, but the fact that you’re affecting innocent third parties to do it.
Frankly, I think it’s a brilliant, if poorly thought-out, idea. Spammers have been living off of our resources for years now, doing their very best to annoy us and yet manage to avoid the consequences of their actions.
If not this, then what? IS there any way to stop spammers? Spam accounts for over 30% of all email traffic, from what I understand- what are we to do, if not attack back?
Because the people who control the dns for the domain names used in the host names can put any IP address they choose in it. Such a change, were I the tech for that DNS, would take me less time than it did to compose this post.