Hi folks, my first post here is a guide.

Lycos' "Make Love not Spam" Flash screensaver rapidly sends HTTP requests to sites of well-known spammers, overloading their servers when many people using the screensaver are online.

Download here

Make Love not Spam

Now, sadly it's just a screensaver that pops up when you are away from the rig from time to time, but I would rather like it to run continuously to fight spammers. That's an easy task to do.

Using Windows Explorer, browse to Documents and Setting\(Username)\Start Menu\Programs\Startup.

Right click and choose to create a new link.

Browse to C:\Windows\Lycos - make LOVE not SPAM.exe.

Finish creating the link, right-click it and choose "Properties". Select "Run minimized".

Make Love not Spam will now run on every Winodws boot, minimized to the taskbar. You might notice that when clicking the taskbar button for the first time, MLNS will pop up in a frameless windows that can't be moved; press ESC to send it back to the taskbar and click it again. Now it shows up in a normal Flash Player window that can be resized etc.

Although this may seem like a great idea at first,
it may be construed as a DDOS by those sites that
are targeted and while they may be spammers
this tool sounds like the tool of internet bad-guys
or script kiddies.

It might be prudent to get the advice of your ISP
regarding the legality of this program and whether
the user can be prosecuted or terminated if a complaint
arises from the "SPAM" targets.

when the genuises at lycos decide that two wrongs actually make a right, rocket scientists they are not.

thanks
had the screensaver but not this startup exe trick lol

Cool, thanks for that.

well it is a screen saver... and ment to be a screen saver. and a screen saver it will be

nice guide btw... but im not about to have my connection limited because im sending packets to web sites lol

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=250581

http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=25962&category=main

Nice first post, a spam post

Someone has already posted about this.

Close Thread

The amount of data sent is limited to 3.4 MB per day and client, and certain algorothms ensure that the HTTP packet bombing is not perceived as a DDoS attack by the target servers.

Thanks for the info lordtoran

cool thankx for the trick

this is a stupid idea. you can't send more than 4mb per day anyway, so what difference does leaving it on all day make??

It's the amount of screensaver users that counts. Even with a lousy 128 k of upload and eMule running MLNS does not affect my surfing ... however it seems that the 77000 users so far have made some servers in Asia lose half of their bandwidth

Thanks for the guide lordtoran I`ve done it to all my pc`s on my network.

If you work out how to make it the in the system taskbar (next to the clock), rather than the main taskbar, please let us know...

IMO, neowin should be against this kind of stuff
We do not stop war with war
yes they are spammer and they DDoS and I'm not sure that is the best solution by DDoSing
them back

so your suggestion is what?

they operate where, currently they cannot be prosecuted, thats why they do it.

This is an opportunity to return the favour of having 10`s of junk email in your inbox everyday.

I dont want spam, if they stop sending them I`ll uninstall this program.

As it is, it is a SMALL way I can get some satisfaction and cause them inconvenience, as they have done to me.

Yes, we seem to have caused them a LOT of inconvenience. As you might know, the MLNS website was attacked and possibly broken into yesterday as a reaction to the screensaver's release. Now it has gotten even stranger: When I came home from work, MLNS couldn't connect again to Lycos' "proxy", and now it is just darkened and tells me to stay tuned.

When I have time and if MLNS survives the next week or so, I will write a little Visual Basic frontend for hidden or iconized background execution.

I see it like this. Imagine a company that EVERY DAY uses an abnoxiously loud speaker system that you can hear through your entire city (hyptetically large city)... trying to scam/sell/solicit thier wares. They make money due to the fact people that are suckered to thier abnoxious advertisement typically purchase something (with high profit margins). However like this screensaver, what if you go thousands of your friends to just walk in the store, browse around and do the typical shoper thing (maybe leave one item in the wrong place) then leave. They loose money fast, thats what happens here. (No the best analogy but I think it fits well). Its also like this, you have a thousand spammers spending 40 dollars a day to spam. What if you had 100,000 angry users, that spend a dollar a day to actively stop them. We can win, but this passive stuff or "OH NOES lets not walk the grey erea" will never stop. Kinda like america and troops dying. No disrespect, matter of fact, upmost respect for those honerable soldiers. If we cant take small costs to effectively stop the larger picture, no one but the abusers win.

Note: the american example wasnt mean to start some political flamefest, please dont turn it in to such.

Hehe, brilliant idea! That'll teach the suckerz one good lesson. Someone said 'you don't stop war with war'. On the contrary, WARS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ENDED WITH MAJOR BATTLES'. Look back in history. That's how it's been done. An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth! Hehe, I wonder how the fake-Rolex vendor is doing today, hahahaha, what, zilch dollars? Nooooo, hahahahaha Thanks Lycos, you really made my day.

With all due respect, you don't even know what this thread is about

This thread is about using that screensaver all the time, using a quick little hack, he's not promoting the screen saver like those other links you gave. I'm tempted to say owned, or that you were foolish, but I shall hold my breath

Currently it sais "Stay Tuned".

The Anti-spam screensaver is still downloadable at MLNS_screensaver_en.exe

The screensaver must rely on the server.
hmm...

i'll check it out thx

yeah, lets talk to them and ask them kindly to stop

It seems Lycos has really pulled the plug. Oh, well, we're not back to square one, at least. Lycos did its part of the job and gave the coders a great idea. I hope this idea becomes an Open Source project at Sourceforge with a distributed and mirrored 'spam-sites-list'.

What makes you think they've pulled the plug?

ahh ok ok .. so all of us r getting stay tuned ... i thought my isp did something and the screensaver went belly up.

I don't remember where (it was in some site mentioned in Google News), but it said Lycos removed the spammer site list from their server, even though the screensaver which needs that list, is still downloadable.

I hope they're now working on a more feasible solution. One, that demands less upstream traffic from ISPs, I guess.

the site is down?

They could of, but we don't know this for a fact. "Stay Tuned" usually means there updating or upgrading. Not always means that their going to leave us.

If anyone wants a copy I have a download mirror...
http://home.insightbb.com/~makelovenotspam/

The spammers can run but they cant hide

well said

Exactly we need to clog the web even further.

awww common... wtf is this...... why do u sympathise the spammers .. and talking bout clogging net .. take the porn sites down.... that will free it ... but let go spammers free without doing anything is like saying let go saddam ....

Clog the web?? The traffic caused is nothing compared to overall traffic. If anyone gets clogged here it's the spammers' site the company that hosts that sort of bullsh!t. Besides, you always pay a price for remedy. Spammers do this for profit. Not all of them are juvenile hackers. Make it unprofitable, and they'll stop. Simple as that.

Apparently, we have to stay tuned because of this

If you can read German:

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/53923

And a (nastily) Google translated version:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=ht...Flanguage_tools

MLNS brought two Chinese servers down by accident.

Making this an open source project is a good idea because lycos could potentially get sued for a program like this. But with open source, there is no one to blame.

Good idea. Such a program could connect to a spammer's website via a randomly chosen anonymous proxy server (to distribute the load between them). Like MLNS, this prog should not DoS, just steal them bandwidth. The problem is to obtain SpamCops' up-to-date blacklist. Access to the list costs $1000 a year.

It would be abused if used as open source.

No matter how you look at it, its a DDoS attack. Theres no way this would have survived, and it didn't. If you read in some places, its been shut down. Tis a shame though, it was a great idea. but i bet it will be copied by someone and distributed illegally. Oh well good while it lasted.

Yeah, I'm not too trusting of Lycos. For all we know, Lycos could be run by 3 teenage prodigies hell bent on global domination after finding out that S.C. doesn't exist.

this program is the dumbest thing since bonzy buddy

How so? It's already shut down 3 major spam sending websites. Thats why its been shut down. So it worked affectively, just wasn't legal. Unless you like spam... then I guess it WAS bad idea.

hahah hey! Bonzy Buddy was cool

It was, but it was also filled with spyware

i dont like spam but i dont believe DOSing the spamers is a good solution

few things to clear up:

1) makelovenotspam is a flash animation, noting more
2) it uses an xml syndicate to get statistics to the program, located at http://backend.makelovenotspam.com (which is currently offline).. on the xml file was a list of ten out of sixty possible sites at one time (it would change depending on who they were attacking)
3) to get statistics data back to the server, it would request pages like http://backend.makelovenotspam.com/095295-...8205/05-TJ8249/ (no matter what directory you requested, the same xml file was returned, but the server could parse data from those directory requests)
4) when the service originally went down, the xml file was rewritten to have a preplanned "Stay Tuned" message display, making the client darken and display the message, but they eventually took the xml file down altogether.. that's why you see the "cannot connect to server" message now
5) and this is probably the most important one, IT WILL BE BACK once they resolve host issues (source)

I would *love* to see an opensource third party do something like this, and offer a client.. I wrote my own c/winsock client to get rid of the limitations that the screensaver imposes before it went down, but looks like I won't be using that for a while

Spammers probably couldn't agree more.

This is the first solution that got the spammers worried. Period.

If anyone who doesn't like this idea, could offer an alternative, I truly would like to listen.

Today's news say MLNS has been cancelled ... Lycos used the screensaver to revive the discussion about spam.

Source (German)

http://www.n-tv.de/5458742.html

Google translation

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=ht...Flanguage_tools

It would be OK to base an OS project on it, but within a 100% legal scope.