Lycos launches screensaver in fight against spam

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.