Lycos Europe has started to distribute a special screensaver in a controversial bid to battle spam. The program - titled Make Love Not Spam, and available for Windows and the Mac OS - sends a request to view a spam source site. When a large number of screensavers send their requests at the same time the spam web page becomes overloaded and slow.

There seems to be a group of people out there who love the idea, and another group who are screaming foul because they believe that this is a huge Ddos. Personally, ive downloaded the screensaver and am running it, seems pretty cool. I hope that the idea will take off and it will be somewhat of like seti@home.
Its goint to be intresting when hacked versions come out that allow you to specify how much bandwidth you use to ping the websites, hence overriding the 3.4mb cap.

Grab it from http://makelovenotspam.com/intl

script kiddies ahoy! why do it the old sneaky way with trojans and vulnerabilities when you can get slaves to willingly participate in the illegal activities?

last edited by WhoopAss at 14:39:13 28/Nov/04

im down with it

why do it the old sneaky way with trojans and vulnerabilities when you can get slaves to willingly participate in the illegal activities?

Care to give me some more insight? Im finding it intresting the variaty of opinions on this topic.. obviously its rather borderline for many people

pinging a site to the point of it not being able to operate is a DoS pure and simple. Getting hundreds or thousands of people to do it is a DDoS.

Sometimes the end justifies the means; but sometimes the means is a federal felony and can land you in jail for a good, long time.

i dont cant count the number of times a spamer has cause a companys servers to go down i think its time they get a taste of there own medicen pring DDOS on...im definatly dow with this :D
although come to think of it, it is illleagal but then again so is spam think as long as it doesnt attack an Australian site the law wont matter or will it? don know much about these things :S


last edited by Irhabi at 15:53:39 28/Nov/04

is the screensaver any good?

then whatabout change the screensaver to be a simple html displayer so when u load up the screensaver it loads and displays that website. perhaps updates reloads every minute or so

then its just a simple link not a ddos. and uses a lot more banthwidth

?

i think thats a good idea, but probabily lycos tried to limit the bandwidth burden on the users by only sending the fetch requests

In regards to the legal aspect, i noticed that they were very carefull to say that this program would slow the servers rather than kill them... obviously a legal loophole there.

What i dont get is that everyone on here gets the spam, yet people still have resivations about "getting back" the very people who make their inboxes full of crap

i got no reservations about getting back at them, but i want to have a career in the IT industry and a conviction of contributing in a DDOS would surely f*** me over...that why im asking about the ligality

Hellloooo legal black hole. The next few weeks will be intresting as the media gets hold of this

a pity it doesn't ping flood WOW servers as well

i got no reservations about getting back at them, but i want to have a career in the IT industry and a conviction of contributing in a DDOS would surely f*** me over...that why im asking about the ligality

ROFL.

Uhh, yeah, good luck to actually getting caught and convicted here in Australia.

f***, there's probably a billion people they could grab, the chances of you being one of them is negligable, and secondly, they wouldn't be bothered with someone overseas, too much hassle for too little.

In regards to the legal aspect, i noticed that they were very carefull to say that this program would slow the servers rather than kill them... obviously a legal loophole there.

yeah but you dont have to be a genius to know that when enough people send requests to the same server it will go down, DDOS thats what this is....doesnt matter if they say they want to slow the servers the fact is when enough paople use it it will start taking servers of line, unless im missing something

last edited by Irhabi at 17:42:23 29/Nov/04

My current screen saver is the text thing saying, "A screen saver, idiot?"

My one at work is, "This is not a screen saver."

i got no reservations about getting back at them, but i want to have a career in the IT industry and a conviction of contributing in a DDOS would surely f*** me over...that why im asking about the ligality

I detect a hint of polinurass in your post.

the registery had an article on it http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/11/26/lycos_europe_spam_blitz/

I'm running the "make love not s*** threads" screensaver.

it's not working

haha cerb is winning

**/Thread Revive\**

just found this story about the screen saver being taken down, apperently one of the spamers just forwarded all his traffic back to the makelovenotspam site

One Web site reportedly spammed by the screensaver simply forwarded its traffic back to makelovenotspam.com, according to security Latest News about Security firm F-Secure.

whole story here

last edited by Irhabi at 16:14:23 04/Dec/04

yeah I wondered why mine wasn't working :(

but lycos got owned by something so simple :P