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Getting their site to ping an innocent victim with each hit would have no value though - they'd be using their own bandwidth for that, so if they wanted to annoy an innocent victim they could just do the ping en-masse without waiting for a trigger. Which is, of course, the problem with the denial-of-service approach - you'll be using your own bandwidth for it, so without millions of anti-spam programs playing along, it won't do any good, and, indeed, will resemble increased success from the spammer's point of view.

I don't think you have to pay to process invalid credit card numbers, either - you have to pay when people *cancel* a credit card transaction, but a failed validation is free. As the thing suggests, though, if your company is trying thousands of broken validations you might well get your account closed.
RavenBlack - Sun 30 Nov, 11:45:23

Ah, I was thinking more of the spammers targetting the domains of anti-spam software and people, as a threat against implementing it. Doomsday Machine.

It does seem the more promising of the two, though; if the most commonly-used spam filters start giving a checkbox option to enable it, it'd add up to a lot. The memetic "if we all do this, then X" fake-reply thing seems a bit doomed, though.
Kevan - Mon Dec 1 15:39:13

New comments have been disabled for years, now, as this blog is no longer updated. Sorry.