Agreed, but I couldn't resist giving it a quick evaluation... it certainly seemed to use a fairly modest amount of my bandwidth, but I understand the overall up take was way higher than they expected and their site allocation algorithm was too aggressive. Two days in it kept saying I wasn't connected to the Internet and so wouldn't work... turns out it was them who weren't connected (blocked by backbone providers).
I think the Lycos experiment was brave and worthwhile. They implemented an idea that's been discussed online for sometime and have shown there is clearly a strong public mood for vengeance against spammers. However they have also shown the fallacy of taking such vengeance into one's own hands - the escalation of tactics implicit in this kind of war is simply not the way to address the issue.
OTOH, unless the lawmakers and technologist find a solution PDQ, we could see the Lycos experiment go the way of P2P in that it will re-appear in a much more diffuse and less blockable fashion.
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Dom
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