Lycos has invested a lot in anti-spam infrastructure for their users but spam is still a huge problem. How do you stop the spammers? Passing laws doesn't work - they just rent servers in places where there are no laws against spamming. The spammers themselves don't seem to be susceptible to anything.

But their customers are. Lycos has designed a tool to give those customers exactly what they want - traffic. Lots and lots and lots of traffic.

Lycos launches screensaver in fight against spam

Haarlem (pts) - The Internet portal Lycos http://www.lycos-europe.com has developed a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail. As the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk reports, the company is hoping to make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers rocket by keeping their servers running flat out. According to the Internet firm, if enough people sign up and download the new tool, spammers could end up having to pay to send out terabytes of data. By getting thousands of people to download and use the screensaver, Lycos hopes to get spamming websites constantly running at almost full capacity.

The individual burden isn't much (about the same as downloading an MP3 file over the course of a day) but the combined requests of thousands of trial users in Sweden have already had a dramatic effect. Response times from targeted sites have already dropped by 85 percent.

For the sites advertising through spam there are two damaging effects. First, they have performance issues. As huge numbers of requests come in their servers can't respond as quickly. Secondly, the Cialis and fetish gear merchant sites are using massive amounts of bandwidth - something they must actually pay for.

This is great. Spam is used because it is cheap. Make the use of spam expensive and people will stop using it.

Yay for Lycos!

(Tip credit to Dopple-G)

UPDATE
Kate has more, including a link to the download.