Putting spyware out of buisiness

Hi,

I had an idea for putting spyware companies out of buisiness and thought I'd post it and see what everyone thinks. Mind you I am NOT proposing to do this, I personally don't have the skills and wouldn't if I did, but I am curious to know what everyone thinks of the concepts and what the up sides and down sides might be, so this is it.

My idea is to choke off the money supply to the makers of spyware, it's my understanding that spyware companies make money by harvesting the data from victims and selling it to third parties, also by displaying popup ads on the victim's computer and receiving kickbacks from the click-throughs, yada yada yada. So, what if a clever person were to reverse engineer the dozen or so spyware programs to determine the method and format of how the data is sent back and forth to the spyware companies then create a distributed computing program along the lines of "SETI@Home" or "United Devices" but instead of looking for aliens it would spend it's time sending bogus data to the spyware companies about surfing habits and click-throughs. I figure no advertizer or other buisiness will want to pay money to the spyware companies when their databases are full of bogus info or pay click-through commisions that may be highly questionable. Then hopefully the spyware companies will go out of biz and thier owners will crawl back under the rocks from whence they came.

Clever idea, but probably illegal. Reverse engineering software, and accessing a database belonging to them....

"This software may not be altered, redistributed, or retitled without consent of the comoany."

No more illegal than spyware itself so I say if you have some inventive 2600 reading type friends then they'd be heroes to all if they could do something like this.

many of these spyware programs are borderline illeagal themselves, if someone tampered with your car the way these programs tamper with internal settings of a computer they'd be dragged off to jail. The idea that the 'end user' has willingly agreed to all this is also false, or why else would spyware companies put enourmous effort into hiding these programs and making it difficult to get rid of them? They are also causing a lot of economic damage when people have to spend time or money fixing infested computers or have to sit and wait while a computer is bogged down with several spyware programs battling it out on your screen, not to mention the bandwidth being burned up transfering unwanted crap around the internet. My brother works at a $100/h computer repair company he says a huge chunk of his buisiness is clearing out spyware from computers that have become unusable because of this stuff. In the end they feel free to mess around with something that DOES NOT BELONG TO THEM, i beleive that on moral if not legal grounds we have a right to strike back.

Legal or not if someone vested the time to *effectivly* cripple anyone or anything that promotes spyware/trojans/viruses.... I'm in.