Lycos Pulls Anti-Spam Screensaver
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Lycos has officially pulled their controversial anti-spam screensaver from their website. Lycos Europeâs website was, until early this morning, distributing an âanti-spam screensaverâ as part of its âMake Love Not Spamâ campaign.
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Lycos&#39; European anti-spam website was taken down only hours after it went live. The outage appears to be the result of a DDoS attack, most likely initiated by spammers in response to the search engine&#39;s &quot;Make
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Lycos Europe&#39;s controversial anti-spam advertising campaign has been discontinued after only three days due to charges that it promotes vigilantism.
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DECEMBER 03, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Lycos Europe NV appeared to have pulled a controversial antispam screen-saver program from its site today, after coming under fire from both security experts and the spammers themselves.
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A screensaver targeting spam-related websites appears to have been too successful.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft forced a popular alternative to Windows Update off the Internet today, sending the maker of AutoPatcher cease-and-desist e-mail. The free utility has been removed from its download site. Microsoft did not give a reason for the move, which came more than four years after AutoPatcher debuted. "Today we received an e-mail from Microsoft requesting the immediate take-down of the download page, which of course means that AutoPatcher is probably history," said Antonis Kaladis, the 20-year-old Greek college student and author of the program. "As much as we disagree, we can do very little, and although the download page is merely a collection of mirrors, we took the download page down." AutoPatcher, which was in version 5.6, let users collect Windows hotfixes and security patches from Microsoft's update services, then package them so they could be applied to multiple machines, or reused multiple times on a single PC. It was especially popular among people who frequently reformatted drives or those who did informal tech support for friends and family or in a small business. Each month, the current set of Windows' -- and as of this month, Office's as well -- updates and hotfixes would be added to the packages. The program supported Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Server 2003. This month, Kaladis and his team of volunteers added support for Office XP 2003 and 2007. The Microsoft take-down e-mail was posted to the Neowin.net forum that AutoPatcher used for its user support. "Microsoft has received information that the domain listed above [www.autopatcher.com/downloads/], which appears to be on servers under your control, is offering unlicensed copies of, or is engaged in other unauthorized activities relating to copyrighted works published by Microsoft," the e-mail read. "We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of this software via your company's network," it continued after listing various versions of Windows and Office. The e-mail was signed by a Peter Anaman, a Microsoft Internet investigator. Users of AutoPatcher were, not surprisingly, hot. "I cannot believe that Microsoft did this," Andrew Lucas said in a response to Kaladis' posting of the news. "You are providing a service Microsoft refuses to do. It has now been over 3 years since Microsoft released SP2 for XP." "The end of AutoPatcher is the end of my use of any Windows product, period," swore a user identified only as KMan. Other users -- lots of others -- literally swore at Microsoft in the comments attached to Kaladis' post or on the Neowin forum. More than a few however, took a more c'est la guerre approach to AutoPatcher's demise. "I don't get why everyone is so annoyed, I'm shocked AutoPatcher was allowed to continue for so long in the first place. Is anyone really surprised by this?" asked a user calling himself kudos in a post to Neowin. Microsoft has dealt similar cease-and-desist orders to other patch-related Web sites or services in the past. In April, it leaned on Hotfix.net, whose operator, Ethan Allen, had posted more than 100 hotfixes he expected would be part of Vista SP1. Coincidentally, Vista SP1 was talked up by Microsoft today. Allen also complied by yanking the download. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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Lycos has withdrawn its &quot;Make love not spam&quot; application after a string of negative criticism. Visitors to the Web site were presented Friday with a graphic urging them to &quot;stay tuned.
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Lycos Europe has yanked its &quot;Make Love, Not Spam&quot; anti-spam screensaver from its site, leaving only a cryptic message of &quot;Stay Tuned&quot; in its place.
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A Lycos spokesperson explained that the screen saver had been pulled while the company deals with hosting and management issues. He said it had been downloaded by over 100,000 users.
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Virus writers have begun distributing their wares in emails that pose as Lycos's abandoned "Make love not spam" screensaver.
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A plan to bump up the bandwidth bills of spammers seems to be getting out of control. Earlier this week Lycos Europe released a screensaver that bombards spam websites with data to try to increase the cost of running such sites.
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Lycos Europe this week introduced a controversial weapon in the fight against spam: a screensaver that attacks spam Web sites. Lycos&#39; &quot;Make Love, Not Spam&quot; screensaver software is designed to use a PC&#39;s spare
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Internet users fed up with spam can go on the offensive by downloading a screen saver aimed at hitting junkmailers in the pocket, according to Net portal Lycos.
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The screensaver launched last week appeared to be a victim of its own success after it was believed over 100,000 people downloaded it within hours of Lycos Europe putting the specially designed screensaver online.
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Lycos is caught in a tit-for-tat struggle with spammers, just days after releasing a free screen saver software program that uses computer down time to swamp Web sites associated with spam campaigns.
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Lycos Europe&#39;s Make Love Not Spam screensaver was unavailable Saturday following a string of bad publicity, Cnet News.com reported.
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Lycos Europe appears to have taken down its controversial MakeLoveNotSpam site - temporarily, at least.