Lycos Make Love Not Spam screensaver taken offline

5 December 2004 15:17 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Lycos Europe's Make Love Not Spam screensaver has been pulled from its site following a string of bad publicity.

The screensaver, which the company is saying has been too successful, uses idle processing power of the users' computer that its been downloaded to, to increase traffic to spamming websites. The idea is that the increased amount of traffic the website receives will then increase the cost spammers have to pay to keep them running.

Some experts have criticized the company, saying it has acted irresponsibly and that the campaign is nothing more than a Denial of Service attack on certain websites.

In an interview with Dan Ilett from Zdnet Steve Linford, director of Spamhaus, a nonprofit antispam organization, comments: ”You can't break into a thief's house just because he breaks into yours..We don't support this or recommend this practice. Directing traffic is part of the degradation of the Internet we are trying to stop.”

Full tags

Software, Online, Websites, Lycos