A short-lived project by Lycos' European subsidiary to give users a method to "attack" spammers was an overall bad idea, albeit motivated by a laudable goal.

On December 1, 2004 Lycos' Europe NV offered users the ability to download a special screensaver that reportedly used the spare cycles of your computer to continuously send HTTP requests to a list of sites that Lycos has put on its "blacklist" as belonging to identified spammers. The assumption is that, if enough people download the screen saver, the "spammers" will be bombarded with tens of millions of HTTP requests, thereby slowing down their servers, and substantially impeding their ability to send spam.

By Mark Rasch at SecurityFocus.

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