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Haarlem (pte016/07.12.2004/10:10) - A campaign to fight spam by Internet portal Lycos Europe http://www.lycos-europe.com has been dropped. As the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk reports, the "Make Love, Not Spam" campaign has been shut down after Lycos claimed to have achieved their aim of stimulating debate about anti-spam measures. The anti-spam screensaver, which began in late November, was heavily criticised for encouraging "spamming-type" tactics against senders of junk mail and for being on the edge of the law.
On the "Make Love, Not Spam" website, users could download a screensaver that would endlessly request data from the sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail. (newsfox reports http://www.newsfox.com/pte.mc?pte=041129041 ) It is thought that more than 100,000 people downloaded the screensaver offered by Lycos Europe. The company was hoping to make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers rocket by keeping their servers running flat out. However, some Internet service companies criticised it for encouraging vigilante activity and blocked access to the site in protest against the action.
According to monitoring firm Netcraft, the anti-spam campaign was doing its job. Response-time figures gathered by the company showed that some of the sites that the screensaver targeted were being knocked offline by the constant data requests. Lycos Europe has denied that this was its fault.
"There is nothing to suggest that "Make Love, Not Spam" has brought down any of the sites that it has targeted," Lycos Europe said. "At the time that Netcraft measured the sites it claims may have been brought down, they were not in fact part of the "Make Love, Not Spam" attack cycle," it said in a statement. According to Lycos, its centralised database ensured that traffic to the target sites left them with 5 per cent spare capacity. "The idea was simply to slow spammers' sites and this was achieved by the campaign," the company added. The closure comes only days after the campaign was suspended due to heavy criticism.
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