A couple of months ago I wrote up a hasty reply as to why I thought that one Dave Birch’s suggestion, as relayed by The Guardian newspaper, of making a screen-saver to bombard websites that might contain images of child porn was a bad idea.

It seems that while most people agreed with me on this point—other journals, personal letters to me from visitors—not everyone could put one and one together, and come up with two. A couple of week’s later, the net conglomerate known as Lycos decided to launch a screensaver that would send requests to sites that were supposedly the ultimate destination of all that spam that blocks our collective electronic mailboxes. The idea being that these requests would suck up 90% of the available bandwidth. Besides the questionable legality of such a move—something that I pointed out—[and besides the other issue of determining that you are, without any doubt, only targetting evildoers… not at all easy…] within hours, the actual Lycos server went down under a DDoS attack. That is, the very same people that these net vigilantes were going up against, pulled down the site within the first hours of operation.

Result? A flat-out and clear victory—whatever spin Lycos subsequently tried to put on it—to the spammers. If you are going to be so stupid as to do something, you should at least be prepared that your opponents are not going to take things lying down, that they aren’t waiting there for the tummy roll. You should have redundant servers waiting, be prepared to switch IP numbers very quickly, have scripts ready preventively to filter out massive bombardments. You should have at least seen enough Clint Eastwood movies to know that it helps for the good guy to have an iron plate hidden under his poncho…

Mark Pilgrim pointed out, over a year ago, that spammers weren’t urchins with dirty faces any more. That their tactics were increasingly dirty, and straying through into real life. Causing real pain and damage in their efforts to stop you stopping them.

Naïve vigilante do-gooders, whether they are fighting child porn or fighting spam, are only doing harm with their half-baked suggestions and efforts. While the harm is happening in cyberspace, the real actions are needed IRL—in real life.