Lycos Europe suspends distribution of anti-spam program

Lycos Europe has suspended the distribution of its anti-spam program, Make Love not Spam, after an estimated 100,000 downloads. The program, which doubles as a screensaver, effectively launches a ‘Distributed Denial of Service’ attack on spamming sites, and is thought to have forced at least two of them to shut down when their servers were overloaded. Critics in the internet industry say Lycos’ program was potentially as dangerous and unethical as the spamming it was designed to combat.