December 7, 2004 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- According to research and analysis firm Netcraft (netcraft.com), Lycos Europe says it is taking down the MakeLoveNotSpam.com Web site and bringing its controversial MakeLoveNotSpam anti-spam campaign to an end. The company said it had achieved its objective, which was to ignite a debate about anti-spam measures.
Why use a vendor when you can choose a partner? DataPipe delivers highly customized solutions to meet your unique IT needs. World-class data centers in the U.S., London & China. DataPipe - Personal Touch, Global Reach.
Just last week, Lycos Europe launched the MakeLoveNotSpam.com screensaver, designed to fight back against spam using hacker-like tactics. The tool used idle computers to launch a flood of requests against Web sites that had been blacklisted for abusing spamming rules. According to Netcraft, three of the screensaver's targets were hit and taken offline for varying periods of time.
Lycos Europe however, said its screensaver was not responsible for outages of two spam sites that were targeted during the attacks. The company claimed its attacks on those sites had already ceased and that bringing the sites offline was never an objective. Lycos Europe told Netcraft that it intended only slow the spammer's Web sites down.
Critics of the MakeLoveNotSpam project question the ethics and legality of using DDoS attacks as a tactic, but other users, clearly fed up with the global proliferation of spam, are encouraged by the tool's potential to actually inflict a level of damage on spammers.
Lycos Europe says reports that the tool launched a "distributed denial of service attack" were incorrect. The company says the tool used a centralized database to ensure that spammers' sites were left with at least 5 percent of their bandwidth.
The screensaver tool was pulled last Thursday after more than 110,000 copies had been downloaded.
