Anti spam bid canned

Lycos has binned its novel anti spam deterrent after much controversy.

The screensaver launched last week appeared to be a victim of its own success after it was believed over 100,000 people downloaded it within hours of Lycos Europe putting the specially designed screensaver online.

The idea was to let people get their revenge on the spammers by using the principle of distributed computing. By downloading the screensaver to their PC, when the computer was not in use but connected to a broadband service, it generated traffic to the websites of known spammers and companies that use their services.

Although Lycos Europe said by using blacklists from anti-spam organisation Spamcop it could ensure no innocent users would be hit and no distributed denial of service attacks would be launched on the spammers' sites, the plan has backfired.

The company was accused of doing what it said it would avoid - bringing down some spammers' sites - although the company categorically denied this accusation to Computeractive earlier this week. It said while it believed two of these sites had closed down, the blame for this couldn't be blamed on the traffic generated by the screensaver.

"Contrary to some reports, the service never launched a distributed denial of service attack. Rather a centralised database ensured all known spammers' sites were left with at least five per cent of bandwidth. The idea was simply to slow spammers' sites and this was achieved by the campaign," the company followed up in a statement.

But the number of people downloading the screensaver also put strain on Lycos' bandwidth and someone also managed to post a malicious hoax message onto the site threatening to report people to their internet service provider for launching attacks on spammers' sites.

Neither was Lycos' move popular with the wider anti-spam community and software developers who accused the company of encouraging vigilantism.

Initially when the site was taken down, Lycos said it was reviewing the possibility of putting it back online. Now it has shelved this idea saying the short lived campaign had at least raised awareness about spam which it said would lead to more anti spam measures.

"Lycos has decided to close down its Make Love, Not Spam website. The aim of the campaign was to ignite a debate about anti-spam measures. We feel that we have achieved this through our activity and will now continue that debate with others in the email industry. We hope that this will lead to further new and innovative solutions to the problem of spam."