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Lycos Europe N.V. is offering Internet users a way to stick it to spammers with its new screen-saver software, called "Make Love, Not Spam."

While the online community/portal company's program saves your screen's pixels from phosphor burn-in--seldom a problem with newer monitors--it uses idle CPU time to send HTTP requests to sites that distribute advertisements via spam. These requests are what a Web browser generates when requesting a Web page. The goal is to generate an abundance of HTTP requests on spam servers, hindering their ability to respond and function. According to makelovenotspam.com, "the frequency and rate of requests are controlled by a centrally stored configuration file from where we can halt, decrease, or increase the load generated by all clients."

However, although Lycos Europe indicates that the targeted sites are only slowed and aren't shut down, that's a subtlety the law might miss. "This strikes me as a denial-of-service attack and a flagrant violation of U.S. law," says Ray Everett-Church, chief privacy officer for ePrivacyGroup.com and counsel for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail. He warns that while Lycos Europe may be procedurally immune to U.S. prosecution, any spammer in the States harmed by this program might have legal recourse.

But Lycos Europe spokesman Frank Legeland insists that the software is legal in Europe and the U.S. "Make Love, Not Spam is not a DDoS-attack because no spammer server crashes down," he wrote in an E-mail. "We don't do that as we will maintain in any case at least 5% of the remaining bandwidth. We have a technical 'health check' implemented to guarantee that we only create cost, but not crash, any spam server."

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=54201305&tid=13692

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Originally posted by Roland

I wonder how long it'll take for Lycos to hear from someone who's wrongly been targeted.

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