Abuse ?

    Some recent studies suggest that 90% of all Internet traffic is illegitimate in some way.  That's a huge percentage.  E-mail spam and file sharing programs are obvious culprits.  Will there ever be an end to spam given the current state of affairs?  No.  Spam will never end until spammers have a direct and measurable cost to their spam.  Can spam be curtailed?  Yes.  This is where Spam Siteseer steps in.  The tool gives everyone the ability to offset the cost of a spammer sending millions of e-mail's (almost nothing) with the cost of traffic to his website (perhaps one dollar per gigabyte of data transferred).  If 1% of spam recipients used Spam Siteseer, rest assured, the amount of spam e-mail would drastically reduce.  If we all contribute to actively fighting spam, instead of passively throwing it all away, spam can be curtailed.

    Spam Siteseer does not send any sort of malformed packet request to any website.  It does not launch a "SYN Distributed Denial of Service" or anything like a D-DOS attack.  The program merely maintains current information on websites the user decides to keep updated on.  The program can thus be used to consume, over time, a spammer's only resource that has appreciable cost: his website's monthly byte allocation.  Keep in mind, an e-mail spam with a link to a website, is an invitation to visit that website.  You should feel obliged to honor the invitation. 

    There is some recent evidence that spammers have, or are starting to maintain, there own "black lists".  For them, a black list is a list of e-mail addresses they choose not to send spam to.  That is, if you click on a spammer's e-mail web link, and the link contains a web bug or web beacon,  and then Siteseer is used to monitor the site, that e-mail address could be put on the spammer's black list.  Why?  The spammer doesn't want your high level of traffic on his website.  You win!  A spammer does not want to send e-mail to a recipient that will consume his website's byte allotment.  This is strong evidence of the effectiveness of Spam Siteseer.

    What can a spammer do about targeting his byte allotment?  A spammer doesn't have much recourse.  He won't complain to ISPs about traffic.  He is already guilty of stuffing ISP's e-mail servers with huge quantities of spam.  Can't do that.  In some cases a spammer might decide to block IP addresses from accessing his website.  This is a fairly common spammer action.   But a blocked IP address is a positive sign.  He has taken a first step in dealing with (nuisance) website traffic caused by his nuisance spamming.  His second step might well be sending less spam.  Give him time to think about consequences to his actions.

    A blocked IP might look something like this in your browser.  But blocking IP addresses is not a long term solution for the spammer though.  After a few days a blocked IP address will often be removed.  The computational overhead of checking every page request he receives for a specific IP addresses is not insignificant.  Multiply that check by thousands, for other Siteseer user's IP addresses, and you have one bogged down spammer website.

    An unregistered copy of Siteseer is free for anyone to use and you are encouraged to try it.  The more spam you receive the more you are encouraged to try it.  The program gives everyone a chance at tipping the spam / website-cost balance.