Screensaver tackles spam websites - Make Love, Not Spam

This is a very intresting project which was undertaken by Lycos. But as know all good things come to an end.

Initially :

Sites selling spam goods and services are being targeted. Net users are getting the chance to fight back against spam websites. Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.

Lycos hopes it will make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.

The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data.

Cost curve

"We've never really solved the big problem of spam which is that its so damn cheap and easy to do," said Malte Pollmann, spokesman for Lycos Europe.

"In the past we have built up the spam filtering systems for our users," he said, "but now we are going to go one step further."

By getting thousands of people to download and use the screensaver, Lycos hopes to get spamming websites constantly running at almost full capacity.

Mr Pollmann said there was no intention to stop the spam websites working by subjecting them with too much data to cope with.

He said the screensaver had been carefully written to ensure that the amount of traffic it generated from each user did not overload the web.

"Every single user will contribute three to four megabytes per day," he said, "about one MP3 file."

But, he said, if enough people sign up spamming websites could be force to pay for gigabytes of traffic every single day.

Lycos did not want to use e-mail to fight back, said Mr Pollmann.

"That would be fighting one bad thing with another bad thing," he said.

Slow down
The sites being targeted are those mentioned in spam e-mail messages and which sell the goods and services on offer.

Anti-spam screensaver scrapped

A contentious campaign to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers by flooding their sites with data has been dropped.

Lycos has shut down the campaign saying it had been started to stimulate debate about anti-spam measures and had now achieved this aim.

The anti-spammer screensaver came under fire for encouraging vigilante activity and skirting the edge of the law.

Sites swamped
Through the Make Love, Not Spam website, users could download a screensaver that would endlessly request data from the net sites mentioned in many junk mail messages.

More than 100,000 people are thought to have downloaded the screensaver that Lycos Europe offered.

Lycos Europe statement

The company wanted to keep the spam sites running at near total capacity to make it much less financially attractive to spammers to operate the sites.

"The idea was simply to slow spammers' sites and this was achieved by the campaign," the company said.