Lycos Europe launched a free screensaver that deliberately clogs spam servers. The "Make Love Not Spam" screensaver, available in both Mac and PC formats, sends HTTP requests to a list of servers that Lycos Europe said has been hand checked to ensure that no innocent owners are affected. The program was inspired by scientific efforts to harvest spare computing capacity available on the internet. This version of "distributed computing" presents a map of the world with what looks like tiny missiles launching toward spam server locations. A Lycos Europe spokesperson said that they "cannot use this software to bring the spammers' sites down entirely as that would be illegal, but we can send a strong signal that spam is unacceptable." That launching a denial-of-service attack may be construed as legal, if true, is very likely a difference between U.S. and European laws. Swedish agency Starring invented the program.

One possible explanation for Lycos Europe's lack of caution in attacking alleged spam servers is the fact that injured parties would have to reveal their identities in order to instigate legal action - which may in fact be the ultimate objective of the project.

[Update: ClickZ reports that the www.makelovenotspam.com site experienced outages on November 30, which Lycos Europe attributed to internal testing. But MarketingVOX reader reports indicate the problem persists and involves apparent hacking from spammers, as evidenced by the insertion of pro-spamming statements on the site.]