Lycos anti-spam screensaver proves too effective for target websites

By Alun Williams

Posted on 2 Dec 2004 at 15:10

The anti-spam action pioneered by Lycos and its 'make love not spam' campaign has been all-too successful and could make the company vulnerable to legal attack.

The screensaver, which has been downloaded 90,000 times, enables disgruntled users to contribute to denial of service attacks on identified spammers, the idea being to clog up their server's bandwidth and limit, but not fully disable, the problem at source.

The Internet monitoring firm Netcraft reports, however, that two of the targets (bokwhdok.com and printmediaprofits.biz) have been taken out completely, which is not what Lycos intended...

As we reported earlier this week - Lycos declares 'make love not spam' - or else - Lycos Europe is playing with legal fire in taking on spammers by such direct action.

While many European countries have now passed laws banning denial of service attacks - including Germany where Lycos is piloting the scheme - the company believed it could get around such charges by 'slowing down' the spammers' servers and not actually bringing them down. This, however, is what is now reported to have happened.

Certainly, spammers are not backward in coming forward to protect their livelihood, as SpamCop found when its anti-spam measures were successfully challenged in court by OptInRealBig.com - Spam king wins court restraining order on anti-spam company.