• by Ross Fadner , November 30, 2004

Lycos Europe debuted a new weapon in the war against unwanted e-mail Tuesday, by launching a screensaver designed to overload the Web sites featured in spam messages.

The program, dubbed "Make Love, Not Spam" (www.makelovenotspam.com), is free to download for Windows and Mac OSX or Mac OS9 users, and is compatible with any e-mail service provider.

"Spam as a marketing tool is still very lucrative," said a Lycos Europe spokesperson. He called the new software program "a way for consumers to show this is not acceptable."

When a user's computer is in screensaver mode, the "Make Love, Not Spam" software program communicates with the users' spam filter, scanning it for URLs contained in an international database of blacklisted spam sites. Once a blacklisted URL is discovered, the program then instructs the computer to continuously request information from the site. Each site on the blacklist is checked manually, said the Lycos spokesperson.

The idea is that if enough consumers download and deploy the screensaver, the program swallows enough bandwidth to significantly slow down a spammer's site--but doesn't completely shut it down. The Lycos spokesperson emphasized that the company is not launching a denial of service attack against the spam sites; rather, he said the program automatically stops requesting information once only 5 percent of its bandwidth remains.

A denial of service attack occurs when a company's server is overwhelmed with information requests to the point where no bandwidth remains to execute them, halting all operations. When the screensaver is running, the location and URL of the attacked site are displayed. Lycos manages a central database that monitors the attacked sites, ensuring that no one site is overwhelmed.

"We believe that the power of the Internet community can be mobilized to stop the spammers," Malte Pollman, Lycos Europe director of communication services, stated. "The combined effect of individual users targeting these sites will slow them down enormously, and make it more difficult for them to clutter up our inboxes with unwanted rubbish."

Lycos Europe said the screensaver received nearly 100,000 downloads its first day. The program's most successful attack limited one spam site to 25 percent bandwidth capacity, according to the Lycos Europe spokesperson. He said the screensaver program uses users' bandwidth to attack these sites-- which constitutes not more than 3.4 MB per customer per day.

Lycos Europe has roughly 40 million e-mail accounts across eight European countries, including France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and the Netherlands. It generates 2.3 billion page views per month, and 21.9 million unique visitors per month according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Lycos Europe is a separate company from the American Web portal of the same name.