Spray DDoS screensaver launches worldwide

The crazy "make love not spam" screen saver which we wrote about here: Spray gives away free screensaver that DDoSes spam-sites is a success, 9800 downloads so far in Sweden alone, lots of gigabytes of traffic has hit the spammers servers, and now they'll take over the world with it. Lycos Europe has joined the make love not spam revolution and offers the screensaver to anyone on the planet. Comes in these flavours: Italian, Spanish, English and German.
Not everyone is so keen on the idea the Register ends their "When is a DDoS attack not a DDoS attack?" report on a concerned note:

A spokesman for Lycos in Germany told The Register he believed that the tool could generate 3.4MB in traffic on a daily basis. When 10m screensavers are downloaded and used, the numbers quickly add up, to 33TB of 'useless' IP traffic. Seems Lycos may hurt not just spammers
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andromeda's picture

at the risk of sounding like a complete fool - what on earth is a DDoS attack?

Dabitch's picture

Distributed Denial of Service - in short, lots of computers call the same webpage/server (in this case only on port 80, ie; the http port) requesting data. Since servers are designed to answer requests for data, the target complies - by having LOTS of people making the same call, at the same time, the server can get so busy answering calls, that it can not answer any new ones, thus "denying service". Hence the name.
(was that a good explanation?)

andromeda's picture

yes, thanks.

deeped's picture

I think there

Dabitch's picture
AnonymousCoward's picture

I assumed this was a crock of shit, so filed the email sent to me under S. Apparently not, it seems.

So much for the overcrowding of the internet - this is all because the powers that be have made few serious attempts to crack down on the spammers.

Is this a China Syndrome affair or can these screensavers be deactivated at short notice? Can they be deactivated from afar? A crazy business.

Alex Romo

Dabitch's picture

Spammers hack Lycos' anti-spam Web site

However, within hours of the makelovenotspam.com site being launched, the original front page was replaced with a simple message:

"Yes, attacking spammers is wrong. You know this, you shouldn

Andreas-Udd's picture

So predictable! But good for Lycos, who now get more press.

Dabitch's picture

More press they got - but Hello..... It was a hoax!? Lycos denies attack on zombie army

Last night's defacement of Lycos' 'make love not spam' Web site was a hoax, the company claimed...
The company said that email reports that contained an apparent mirror image of the Web site when it was hacked were a hoax generated by the spammers.

"This is a hoax," said Malte Pollmann, director of communication services for Lycos. "We have obviously reached our goal and are getting to the spammers. On our servers we don