Lycos Pulls Vigilante Anti-spam Campaign

davidwr writes "Eweek reports that Lycos is scrapping it's anti-spam campaign: 'On Friday, Lycos Europe gave up the ghost, posting a 'Stay Tuned' note on the MakeLoveNotSpam.com Web site it was using to distribute the screensaver. The Lycos Europe home page, which heavily promoted the screensaver all week, was also scrubbed clean of any references to the screensaver.' See previous Slashdot coverage from Nov. 26, Dec. 1, and Dec. 2."

Comments

Good, it was stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe the execs at Lycos even had the balls to O.K it as a plan, let alone develop and support it. Corporate sponsored DDoS attacks? What would have been next; MPAA sponsored screen savers that attacked BitTorrant link sites? SCO sponsored screen-savers that attacked kernel.org and Slashdot?

It may not work, exactly

[mcc]

But who's to say it isn't still beneficial? Lycos probably caused some problems for spammers with this, or made them feel less secure, in the week this stunt was running. More importantly, look at all the publicity Lycos got out of this; if it wasn't for this spam thing I probably wouldn't have even thought about Lycos's existence once in the second half of this year, and probably you or most of the other people here wouldn't have either. Instead, thanks to makelovenotspam, they've been rescued for at least a moment from obscurity and irrelivance and they've been all over the headlines for a week. Meanwhile, by getting out now Lycos possibly avoids the otherwise-almost-certain legal problems from all of this.

Was makelovenotspam, in its short life, effective? Almost certainly not. Was makelovenotspam a public good? I'd bet not. Was makelovenotspam good for Lycos? ... well probably.