Spam Vampire - Software Review
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   Written by The Goldfinger
   Wednesday, 05 October 2005

   In my never ending search through the bowels of the underground and the
   back alleys of the internet Ive found another interesting tool that can
   be used by anyone to stick it to the Man, or more aptly, the SPAM MAN.
   Thats right. I know you must be as sick of spam as I am. I get on
   average about 50-70 spam mails a day. There are lots of anti-spam sites
   and options for fighting spam available. This one is unique though
   because usually when you fight spam you attempt to block it or remove
   yourself from a spammers list, but with this program you actually
   attack the spammer! Thats right. You hit him right in the wallet! In
   the internet arms race which pits consumers against spyware, malware,
   viruss, and spam, this program puts a little offensive power back in
   your hands.

   According to the documentation on this program, their aim is to "learn
   more about spam". SV is a spam abatement tool further described as a
   image rotator on steroids. What it does is downloads images from a spam
   advertised website repeatedly which runs up the hosting costs for the
   spammer who owns the domain. Pretty clever.

   Why would you want to download images from a spammers site repeatedly?
   To what end?

   Because by doing that you cause the cost to host the site to increase.
   (dramatically)

   Most bandwidth consumers are on what is called the 95/5 plan. This is
   the way most ISPs buy their bandwidth an pass it on to their customers.

   Basically what this means is that you can make their hosting payment go
   through the roof. A website owner on this plan could be billed as if an
   entire month of 720 hours was used at a super high rate. 37 hours of
   high bandwidth utilization would cause them to be billed as an entire
   months worth was used. Meaning that in less than 2 days you could cause
   a spam site to use several hundred times more bandwidth than usual, and
   get billed for it, assuming of course they are on the 95/5 plan. ISPs
   have to pay their peer partners for this usage and so does the ISP
   customer.

   By increasing the spammers cost to send the spam you theoretically
   reduce their incentive to send it. The hope is that the spammer will
   get the message that no one wants their crap and they quit spamming.
   Most likely, this wont occur, but they might figure out that certain
   domains are protected by SpamVampire and spamming them will cost them
   money. Ultimately, they should learn to avoid the protected sites and
   you hopefully wont get more spam.

   How do you get the SpamVampire and use it?

   Visit http://thescambaiter.com/antispam/

   ..and then you can either run it off the links on that page or you can
   grab the source code and edit it yourself. You can plug in the spammers
   that are bothering you and run it right from your desktop. Even if you
   dont have a website you can still use it.

   If you're using Internet Explorer you need to make a setting change.

   Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Internet Options >
   Advanced (tab) > Multimedia > "Play animations in web pages"
   (uncheck).

   If you're using Firefox, you need to do the following:

   Start Firefox »» type "about:config" in the Address Bar »» enter or
   change the following settings to what you see below:
   browser.cache.disk.capacity | 0 (integer) browser.cache.disk.enable |
   false (boolean) browser.cache.memory.capacity | 0 (integer)
   browser.cache.memory.enable | false (boolean)

   How much data should I drain from a spam-vertised website?

   The site says it depends on how much bandwidth you want to devote to
   it, but they suggest 25GB per website per spam received. They say you
   can go for more, but 25 GB is good to start with.

   By using the SpamVampire to suck bandwidth from spammers that
   continually assault you with spam, you can now take the fight to them.
   We are annoyed by spam, it fills our inboxes with useless junk and
   stuff we have no interest in buying and we told them, many, many times
   to stop sending us this crap, but do they ever listen? Does even
   hitting the unsubscribe button ever really work or does it just verify
   to them that you are in fact, a "live one" and to continue with the
   spam assault? Maybe they will think twice when they get their sky high
   hosting bill.

   Viva la resistance!