Lycos Screensaver stays in News
Lycos Europe just cannot stay out of the limelight. The site made headlines when it started an initiative called MakeLoveNotSpam and released a screensaver in public that in idle PC times accessed servers hosting spamming websites and downloaded some data. The idea was to slow down the access time of the offending servers and raise bandwidth costing for the spammers.
Some companies called the initiative illegal as it amounted to distributed DDoS attacks. Lycos continues to justify it by saying that none of the sites are hit bad enough to bring them down. However, reports from a web traffic analysis company Netcraft says that some of the Chinese sites went down and were not online for a long period possibly due to these attacks.
Even MakeLoveNotSpam website was reportedly attacked by the spammers in response and brought down. Some ISPs have blocked access to this website and usability of the screensaver. The latest is that the site and already installed screensavers only show a ‘Stay Tuned’ message.
Looks like either Lycos is making changes to the screensaver or updating their servers to handle the expected traffic. Because people seem to be liking the idea of hitting back at the spammers…
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