The controversial attempt to attack spammers by bombarding their web sites with traffic from thousands of individual PCs is over.
After a week of heavy criticism of the company's plan to launch denial-of-service-like attacks on spammers, Lycos has thrown in the towel, lashing out at the media and Internet monitoring company NetCraft.
In a statement from the company said: "We are astonished by the enormous resonance generated by the "Make Love No Spam" campaign. With this campaign we intended to raise a new impulse in the antispam discussion and therefore create awareness for the big economic and societal problems caused by spam. The campaign has reached its goal and thus will be stopped."
The company forcefully denied it launched any denial-of-service attacks on spammers and that it took two Chinese Web sites offline.
The statement continued: "In opposition to media reports to the contrary. we did not attempt any denial-of-service. We forcefully rebut a report by Netcraft referring to two spam servers having been disabled by our screensaver. At the point of time of the Netcraft measurement on December 1st, 2004, both spam servers were not on the target list of the screensaver. Also, the screensaver's website has not been hacked as reported by F-Secure. This has been acknowledged by F-Secure itself."
This decision comes just a week after "Make Love Not Spam" was launched. The tool was taken offline last Friday, but at the time Lycos claimed that the tool would soon be back online.
"Things have changed," said a UK spokesman on Monday. He said that Lycos had reviewed "Make Love Not Spam" before deciding not to bring it back.
Lycos won huge amounts of publicity from its anti-spam tool, but also attracted a storm of criticism from experts claiming the scheme was poorly thought out and a bad idea overall.
Although the campaign was short lived, legal experts believe that the plan highlighted holes in UK laws. Earlier this year, the All Party Internet Group (APIG) recommended that parliament made it an offence to impair access to data as part of an upheaval of the Computer Misuse Act (1990). But as it stands companies may have trouble in prosecuting anyone who starts DDoS attacks.
"The Lycos thing has shown a lack of ability [in the law] to prosecute for denial-of-service attacks," said Mark Smith, solicitor for Olswang. "You would struggle under current laws to bring a case against someone. The problem is that DDoS attacks cross jurisdictions."
Talkback
I am very surprised at the resistance Lycos received for "makelovenotspam". You can argue about legality all day long, but you can't avoid the simple fact that Lycos came up with the best way (so far) to combat the problem.
The plan may not have been perfect, details needed to be ironed out, but it would have worked. In the week that the screensaver worked, it did more to combat spam than anything else has since spam had a name. Laws against spam haven't worked; filters are mediocer at best, and don't fix the root of the problem, nobody has succeded in bringing about justice.
Lycos came up with a solution. Yes, it relied on making vigilantes out of the masses, but so have many other successful revolutions in history. Think about it.
What ever the perceived faults of the Lycos plans are, I still throw my resounding support behind industry initiatives like this.
Having been in the web industry since the mid 90's I have seen the cowboy attitude of unscrupulous operators first hand. Granted the Lycos initiative may be cowboyesque in its own way, but action must be taken against the bandwidth sapping and productivity taxing SPAMMERS.
If we as an industry are to mature, and to regain the trust that we lost during the .com crash, I firmly believe that we need to self regulate more effectively.
Lycos unfortunately did not win broad based support for its initiative and perhaps should have approached the problem differently. Nonetheless, full kudos the folks at Lycos for having the guts to propose anything at all other than government legislation of an almost unlegislable industry.
Taking the spammers side against the Lycos screensaver is the same as encouraging burglars to sue for injury when they trip over your doormat. The only wrongs here are the people who send out this stuff.
It should be clear now, that our spammers are not just the 'script-kiddies', but Big Business heavily involved.
Hopefully the story won't end with the Lycos initiative.
JJ
It's totally pathetic that people should be complaining about the spam in their inbox and then not allow others to do something about it. Here was a perfectly good solution to a pain in the ass problem and it get's shot down just because a bunch of loud mouthed Doom's day prophets predict all kinds of calamity on the net, lawlessness and revenge attacks from spammers.
They need to get real. The spammers already fired the first of several shots. They already DOS attack via backdoor malware so what's the problem in hitting back legitimatley through a screensaver?
What is the problem? Are people starting a rights for spammers group now?