Attack of the clones?

I was going to blog about Lycos' "Make Love, Not Spam" screensaver campaign, making use of idle system cycles in the same manner as the SETI@home project, to attack spammers. Unfortunately, Blogger was down when I had the inspiration (grumble... I've noticed lots of complaints in this regard lately. Granted, it's a free service but this isn't good for Google's reputation.) Bruce Schneier has a post that reflects my initial thoughts, followed up with an update that the spammers had retaliated.

Maybe at some point we would achieve the equivalent of MAD (mutually assured destruction) and suffer a Cold War-like period of detente? I doubt it. This was simply a bad idea.

I hate spam as much as anyone, and because I frequently post to public email lists on the W3C and OASIS, I probably get a ton of it, although I don't actually see most of it anymore. The spam filters that IBM has deployed do a pretty good job of filtering out spam to the point at which it is merely a nuisance. I maybe get 10 per day that I can usually immediately identify as spam by the sender, subject, or the fact that it is in a language/character set I can't read/understand:-) My GMail, Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts all have spam filters that do a reasonably effective job and all have a "Report Spam" button which helps to improve their filters.

Clearly, Lycos has gone a bit off the reservation with Make Love, Not Spam.