Digital Technology for Digital Living.
November 30, 2004
Make Love Not Spam.
News.com.au has the goss on a new screensaver that’s used to fight spam.
“INTERNET users fed up with spam can go on the offensive by downloading a screensaver aimed at hitting junkmailers in the pocket, net portal Lycos said.
The screensaver - “Make Love Not Spam” - available from Lycos Europe requests data from websites that are mentioned in bulk mailings.
If thousands of screensaver users sign up, the websites’ servers will be running at nearly full tilt, said Frank Legerland, a spokesman for Lycos Europe, based in Guetersloh, Germany.
The demand would slow the websites’ response and hike their bandwidth bills, yet derive no income for them because there will be no response.
Those costs may discourage the sites from hiring email spammers to advertise their wares, he said.”
Rightly the article mentions that this could also effect your internet usage. Depending on the niceness of the process used to request the web sites, either your cpu, network, or ISP could also be hit. No real details are given as to the frequency that each screensaver makes a request, but we’ll guess that it doesn’t flood the users computer or network.
Versions are available for Windows, Mac OS X and OS 9 at their website
Update : (December 1, 2004) It turns out that the spammers have turned the tables on Lycos and launched a Denial of Service Attack on their site. Details at ZDNet. Thanks Trevor!
Update : (December 2, 2004) The saga continues with Lycos claiming they weren’t hacked and that the site was not down due to a DDOS attack. More at ZDNet.
Gadgetman | | General, Software
December 1st, 2004 at 12:39 pm
The page is already down. is reporting pro-spam hackers downed the main page, replacing it with
As of now (12:30pm GMT+8) the site is inaccessible and believed to be under heavy DDoS attack.
Like they say, revenge is a dish best served with a distributed ping flood.
December 1st, 2004 at 12:41 pm
You’d think after 8 years of html i’d remeber the /’s. *sigh*
December 1st, 2004 at 12:42 pm
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/0,2000061744,39168558,00.htm
December 1st, 2004 at 6:54 pm
Dang, that’s a great idea. I wonder if they took the response into account…