"Make Love Not Spam" Campaign Ends

According to a report yesterday by the BBC, the Internet portal Lycos ended its campaign to "to slow spammers' Web sites significantly and to drive up operating costs for proprietors of such sites." The campaign involved a free screensaver users downloaded onto their computers that, when activated, sent requests to view Web sites operated by spammers.

The program was pulled from the Web site www.makelovenotspam.com just a week after it was launched when Internet service providers started to block access to the site. The campaign was criticized by some for the volume of requests the screensavers generated; similar to the volume of unsolicited e-mail which clutters up computer users' e-mail boxes--the very problem the screensaver was intended to mitigate.

The company denied that the screensaver campaign amounted to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, which some Web site operators claimed brought down their sites. However, Lycos officials believe that the campaign achieved it's goal of sparking a discussion of ways to limit spam.