The Register have posted a story saying Lycos have launched a screensaver which is designed to utilise the bandwidth of spammers and therefore slow down (but critically not stop as this would be a ddos and therefore illegal) the spammers networks.
It is targeted at spam sites (identified by Spamcop) Lycos claims, where the site isn’t hosting banner ads and therefore won’t benefit from hits – rather the increased network traffic will, in theory, cost them.
There are Windows and Mac OS 9 and OS X versions available.
It all sounds lovely (in a 2 wrongs DO make a right kinda way) until you look a little further and discover that the makelovenotspam.com domain is registered to Starring Ltd AB Рa Swedish Marketing company. Apparently Starring were contacted by Spray (a Lycos company in Sweden) to get more people to start using Spray’s e-mail service.
The makelovenotspam.com domain opens in a new window, even in tabbed browsers, and then loads in a page hidden behind the new window “Our offers” from Lycos. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t pushing adverts to people without their consent in an underhand fashion like this considered Spam?
So Lycos spams us to get us to run a program which would almost certainly contravene the AUP’s of our ISPs in order to rob bandwidth from spammers? I’ve lost count of how many wrongs we’re talking about here!
I didn’t get any pop-unders, I got the makelovenotspam page as a flash pop-up, while the Lycos ad opened in the original window.
I suppose it’s down to how friendly you are towards this idea, but either way it is clearly a marketing coup for Lycos’s e-mail service. Surely everyone is used to ‘ads’ for companies on websites… especially when visiting that company’s website… *roll eyes*