Make Love, not Spam!
p2pnet.net News:- Lycos Europe is now has a screen saver with a difference.
Called Make Love, not Spam, it's a program for Windows or MacOS that, "constantly visits websites for which spam has been sent," says Heise Online, quoting Lycos as saying, "The more users download and use the screen saver, the lower the performance of the sites sending out the spam, and the greater the costs for the operators."
It's apparently counting on a large number of its European users - 20 million, it claims - to download the screen saver. But users don't have to be registered with Lycos to download and use it.
"If it is activated, it shows a map indicating where the web server currently being attacked is located," says Heise. "Various permanently displayed live data show how many users are currently taking part in the attack and whether the performance of the server under attack is suffering to the extent desired."
Sites the screensaver will target are on real-time blacklists generated by organisations such as Spamcop, says the BBC, quoting Lycos Europe spokesman Malte Pollmann as saying to limit the chance of mistakes, Lycos is using people to ensure that the sites are selling spam goods.
"As these sites rarely use advertising to offset hosting costs, the burden of high-bandwidth bills could make spam too expensive," says the BBC, adding, "Sites will also slow down under the weight of data requests. Early results show that response times of some sites have deteriorated by up to 85%."
However, "According to Joerg Heidrich, a legal consultant at Heise Zeitschriften Verlag, Lycos' call on people to take matters into their own hands is questionable at best," Heise states.
"The general consensus among lawyers is that an intentional DoS attack with the aim of taking servers out of commission constitutes a manipulation of data in accordance with Section 303a as well as computer sabotage in accordance with 303b of the German Penal Code. Heidrich did, however, doubt that these laws apply if the servers under attack are not shut down, but their performance merely inhibited, as intended in the Lycos project."
Unfortunately, Make Love, not Spam only covers Italy, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK.
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Internet portal and mail-provider Lycos Europe has launched a program to increase spammers' bills by having thousands of voluntary users' computers repeatedly query websites from which spam originates. Such a tactic would increase the bandwidth costs for these websites. However, it also faces legal questions.

Spamming, the mass sending of unsolicited emails, is lucrative in part because each email can be sent for nearly insignificant costs. With such low costs, a commercial spammer needs only to have a very small number of recipients buy their product to make a profit. The goal of many anti-spam proposals has been to increase the cost of spammers sending messages. Lycos' approach is to make it more expensive to maintain servers that send spam.

Volunteers may download the screensaver from the  Lycos website for it. The program would run on a user's computer in the background and request about three megabytes (3MBs) of data every day. The screensaver shows which spam server is being targeted by the user, where the server is located, and how many others are attacking it at that moment. Target email servers are selected from blacklists from anti-spam organizations, with Lycos' own verification.

Legal issues arise over whether this can be interpreted as a denial of service attack. In such an attack, computers overwhelm a webserver with requests for data to the point where it does not have the resources to fulfill its normal function. Lycos, in explanatory material on the screensaver's dedicated website ( http://makelovenotspam.com ), claims that its technology closely monitors the screensavers' effects on targeted websites and prevents any of them from being completely shut down by information requests. 

Lycos Europe operates in Germany where, according to Joerg Heidrich of Heise Zeitschriften Verlag, less than completely shutting down a server is not clearly illegal under the penal code. It may, however, be actionable under the civil code. But Lycos may be betting that no one will file a suit, as that would require those participating in illegal spamming to reveal their identity.

The website no longer allows downloads of the screensaver, and users of the screensaver cannot connect to spam sites, but are instead given the message 'Stay Tuned'