Lycos turns hippy on spam

'Make love not spam'

Lycos Europe has come up with an interesting new way for its users to feel they are getting their own back on spammers.

Lycos is encouraging its users to download a screensaver program named 'Make Love not Spam'.

When the screensaver is activated it sends HTTP requests to servers which are known to be associated with spam - the idea is that, with a large number of the screensaver programs in use, the thousands of requests to the spammers' servers will cause them to become slow and overloaded.

The servers have been pre-selected manually from various SURBLs and verified to be spammers' sites - but the idea is not to cause the servers to fall over completely. A 'health check' is run on the servers so that Lycos can decide whether to remove any from its cycle of attacks, ensuring that no server actually stops working.

The Lycos website reports the success of the campaign with a list of the domains targeted and the percentage decrease in each site's response time.

Visitors to the Lycos website are invited to download the screensaver, or simply 'annoy a spammer now' with a single click of a button.

29 November 2004

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