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Lycos Pulls Anti-Spam Screensaver

By Nate Mook, BetaNews

December 3, 2004, 1:55 PM

Following what the company says is unexpected demand for its screensaver that targets spam servers with bandwidth-clogging requests, Lycos Europe has pulled "Make love not spam" offline.

The software utilizes processing power from an idle PC to make repeated connections to known spam URLs in an attempt to raise bandwidth fees and make the practice too expensive for spammers. However, questions were raised after two targeted servers were apparently flooded offline by the screensaver despite claims the software has built-in measures to prevent such an event.

Analysts say Lycos Europe is treading a thin line, and its software's actions could be seen as illegal denial of service attacks - even if the victim is a disliked spammer. Leading anti-spam companies have also blasted the "Make love not spam" campaign as a bad approach to fighting the problem.

Nonetheless, the screensaver's popularity suggests users are welcoming the guerilla tactic. Lycos Europe says over 100,000 downloads of the screensaver have been logged, and promises the site will return once administration and hosting issues are worked out.

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By jofin

posted Dec 7, 2004 - 8:41 AM

Good for Lycos!
To me anything which hits back at spammers has got to be very welcome.
"Analysts say Lycos Europe is treading a thin line, and its software's actions could be seen as illegal denial of service attacks." Well what a shame. These people have the audacity to spam us without permission, I personally receive hundreds of their unwanted messages a day so if we can hit them back, I am all for it.
Well done, Lycos - I just wish I had got a copy to use before it disappeared!

Score: 0

By spiffyjeff

posted Dec 5, 2004 - 11:14 PM

I got sick of spam as well, on top of Juno e-mail discontinuing free suport of POP/SMTP, I have switched to Bluebottle.com for e-mail. There you can find excellent spam protection methods. They provide 250 MB inbox with pop/smtp, 10 MB email size for both in coming/out going mail. Also no ads are placed in outgoing mail or website.
check it out: http://www.bluebottle.com

Score: 0

By yohimbe9

posted Dec 5, 2004 - 8:07 PM

as much as i hate spam, this is just a blatent DDoS attack. i'm surprised a company like lycos even started down this road.

Score: 0

By TheRecklessWanderer

posted Dec 5, 2004 - 10:43 PM

Fight fire with fire is my motto.

Maybe is servers start crashing, the providers of that server will be less likely to harbour spammers. I wish I could download it.

Score: 0

By DigitalSin

edited Dec 5, 2004 - 9:18 PM

I'm surprised Lycos ventured down that road as well. I hope that more companies give it a shot and let people realize these spammers won't follow any sort of rules or standards. How can we deal with them? We have to deal with them like criminals. Jail time is blatant infringment on freedom, but thats how we control common criminals. Thats how the justice system works.

I have a small business and manage the email server. I would say, for 15-20 users, 90% of their email is spam. That is bandwidth I am paying for so that my employees can be advertised to. This is just plain wrong and there is no quick way to stop it. Why is it such a gray area issue for a company like Lycos to flood these spammers? Now, one argument is that Lycos is creating even more wasted network bandwidth over the 'net than the spammers themselves. I agree. However, this will balance out once we've taken down some of the major monkeys out there polluting our network environment with utter crap. It just needs some time.

Score: 0

By kmleow

posted Dec 7, 2004 - 10:57 AM

Why are Ethical Hackers useful?

Hacking is not right, but there are some cases where it is ethical.

What Lycos is doing is ethical to me, although it seems to be against the law.

49/50 emails I received are spam.
Spams waste human time!
Spams are likely to contain viruses!
Spams clog the mailbox and eats up the quota!

Score: 0

By shicaca

posted Dec 4, 2004 - 12:14 AM

I'm sorry but when I log in and get 15 new e-mails and over 1/3 of them are SPAM, I'm inclined to download something like this. Others were complaining that it sounds stupid, but if you think about all the bandwith they waste over the world, who's more stupid, the spam companies or Lycos? It's about time someone does something about it. Hopefully they make it so it's nearly perfect so those jacka**es have to pay billions in response to the billions they have cost the public in general, and hopefully those of us behind a college firewall can use it as well. I'd love the chance to stick it to them. Seek, attack, kill.