Lycos Cans Spam

A special screensaver presents spammers with a big can of worms.

Spam websites could soon be a thing of the past thanks to a new screensaver.


Internet portal Lycos has turned the tables on spammers with a screensaver that endlessly requests data from their websites.


It could prove to be the long-awaited death knell for websites that continuously send out mass emails to irate internet users advertising their goods.


LycosÕ strategy is to make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out.


If the screensaver becomes popular enough it could eventually make the act of sending spam email prohibitively costly.


The list of sites that the screensaver will target is taken from real-time blacklists generated by organisations such as Spamcop.


Lycos says that it is being very careful not to disrupt the running of the web or accidentally target sites that are not a genuine public nuisance.


As well as making spammers pay for sending out mass emails the tool also slows down sites with its endless stream of data requests.


Early results show that response times of some sites have deteriorated by up to 85%.


Internet users wanting to join the fight against spam to not even need register with Lycos to download and use the screensaver.


Participators in the spam war also have the satisfaction of seeing regular updates of which nuisance websites are being targeted.


The screensaver has already been launched across Europe.

Andrew Zilouf