Link: Lycos Releases Spam Fighting Screensaver.

Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail. Lycos hopes will it make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out. The net firm estimates that if enough people sign up and download the tool, spammers could end up paying to send out terabytes of data.

The list of sites that the screensaver will target is taken from real-time blacklists generated by organisations such as Spamcop. To limit the chance of mistakes being made, Lycos is using people to ensure that the sites are selling spam goods. As these sites rarely use advertising to offset hosting costs, the burden of high-bandwidth bills could make spam too expensive, said Pollmann.

"We've never really solved the big problem of spam which is that its so damn cheap and easy to do," said Malte Pollmann, spokesman for Lycos Europe. "In the past we have built up the spam filtering systems for our users," he said, "but now we are going to go one step further."

I love the vigilante nature of this. But ultimately, I don't think that fighting fire with fire in this case will ultimately be effective. But it helps. :o)

It's also super buzzworthy. This is how Lycos gets it's name on every blog from here to tumbukthree. Not a bad move. Adopt a cause everyone can get behind, then DO something about it. This is a formula for a big PR payoff. Lycos is obviously picking a fight here. They hope that the court battle payoff in PR will be greater than the cost of fighting it, and they might just be right. At least for a time.