UPDATE: Lycos anti-spam screensaver taken offline. Read more here. (12/05/2004)

Here’s a scary thought. Imagine an army of zombie terminals launching denial-of-service attacks on any web server you choose. With the recent Make Love Not Spam screensaver project of Lycos Europe, it can be a reality. Scared? You should be.

From: TechWeb.com: Dubbed “Make Love Not Spam,” the screensaver requests pages from servers “verified to be spam advertising sites,” said Lycos. When a large number of the screensavers send requests at the same time, the spam site bogs down.

Lycos said that the screensaver was designed so that it would never completely collapse a sit –tricky legal issues there–and was also meant to chew up bandwidth and drive up spammers’ costs.

Lycos claimed that it had decreased the response time of some of the targeted sites by as much as 85 percent.

If you’ve downloaded the screensaver, please share your views.