Lycos Europe was a

pan-European Pan-European can refer to: * Pan-European identity * Pan-European corridors ** Pan-European Corridor X ** Pan-European Corridor Xa * Pan European Game Information * Pan-European Institute * Pan-European nationalism * Pan-European Oil Pipeline ...

network of websites, offering services including communication tools,

online communities An online community, also called an internet community or web community, is a community whose members interact with each other primarily via the Internet. Members of the community usually share common interests. For many, online communities may fe ...

web search Web most often refers to: * Spider web, a silken structure created by the animal * World Wide Web or the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system Web, WEB, or the Web may also refer to: Computing * WEB, a literate programming system created by ...

e-commerce E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain manageme ...

web hosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing we ...

homepage A home page (or homepage) is the main web page of a website. The term may also refer to the start page shown in a web browser when the application first opens. Usually, the home page is located at the root of the website's domain or subdomain ...

building and

Internet access Internet access is the ability of individuals and organizations to connect to the Internet using computer terminals, computers, and other devices; and to access services such as email and the World Wide Web. Internet access is sold by Internet ...

. It was an independent corporation, sharing no corporate structure with Lycos, Inc. (USA) other than the licensed use of their name in Europe, but Lycos Europe was formed as a joint-venture between

Bertelsmann Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA () is a German private multinational conglomerate corporation based in Gütersloh, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is one of the world's largest media conglomerates, and is also active in the service sector and ...

and Telefonica, who owned Lycos Inc. through

Terra Lycos Terra is a Spanish Internet multinational company owned by Telefónica, with headquarters in Spain and offices in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, the United States and Peru. Part of Telefónica Group (the former Spanish public telephone monop ...

. On 26 November 2008, Lycos Europe announced that it was to shut down and sell its remaining assets.

The Winding up of Lycos Europe

In November 2008, Lycos Europe announced that shareholders had called for its liquidation. Over the following months, it sold as many of its assets as possible and liquidated. Sold assets included the sale of the Danish portal

Jubii Jubii is a webportal based in Copenhagen. Jubii provides a search engine and other services, including e-mail. Jubii was originally created in the summer 1995 by Jakob Faarvang later incorporated by the Cybernet founders Kasper Larsen, Henrik Sor ...

, the

Lycos Chat Lycos, Inc., is a web search engine and web portal established in 1994, spun out of Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos also encompasses a network of email, web hosting, social networking, and entertainment websites. The company is based in Walt ...

(which at the time was both the Lycos &

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

Chat in Europe) was transferred to a new operator on March 9, 2009, and for a short while rebranded as the

Noesis Chat Noesis is a philosophical term, referring to the activity of the intellect or nous. Noesis may also refer to: Philosophy * Noesis (phenomenology), technical term in the Brentano–Husserl "philosophy of intentionality" tradition * Noetics, a bran ...

. The

now forms part of Lycos, Inc. (USA) collection of sites, Love@Lycos was sold to a Swedish company. Lycos Europe sold further businesses: the news search Paperball was taken over by Paperball GmbH, Munich. The search engine Fireball now belongs to Ambrosia AG, Zug (Switzerland). Trademark and domains of the French Email-Service Caramail were taken over by

United Internet United Internet AG is a global Internet services company headquartered in Montabaur, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. The company is structured in two business areas, ''Access'' and ''Applications,'' and has a total of 16 brands and numerous subsid ...

AG, Montabaur. Conversis hosting GmbH continues the free hosting service MultiMania. Since liquidation, Lycos Inc withdrew the right for Lycos Europe to use their name and therefore, Lycos Europe are still partially trading under the name Jubii Europe.

Make Love Not Spam

In November 2004, Lycos Europe introduced a

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and

Mac OS Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...

screensaver A screensaver (or screen saver) is a computer program that blanks the display screen or fills it with moving images or patterns when the computer has been idle for a designated time. The original purpose of screensavers was to prevent phosphor ...

program called ''Make Love Not Spam''. It was introduced as both marketing for the then-new Lycos email service Spray Mail, and as a way for users to fight

spam Spam may refer to: * Spam (food), a canned pork meat product * Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages ** Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages ** Messaging spam, spam targeting users of instant messaging ( ...

in a collective manner. The program worked using users' computers to perform a

DDOS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connec ...

attack on the

web servers A web server is computer software and underlying hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiates ...

of known spammers. The computers worked in the same way as a

botnet A botnet is a group of Internet-connected devices, each of which runs one or more bots. Botnets can be used to perform Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, steal data, send spam, and allow the attacker to access the device and its conn ...

except the users were aware of the software and were able to decide if they wished to be involved in the scheme. On the December 21, 2004 Lycos Europe stopped distributing the program whilst simultaneously 'turning off' the programs on computers that had downloaded it. The decision was made under heavy criticism from Internet and security experts. It is also believed Lycos was subject to large scale counterattacks believed to be from spammers in retaliation. The distribution website was replaced with the words "Stay Tuned".Anti-spam screensaver scrapped

BBC News Online BBC News Online is the website of BBC News, the division of the BBC responsible for newsgathering and production. It is one of the most popular news websites, with 1.2 billion website visits in April 2021, as well as being used by 60% of the U ...

. 6 December 2004

References

External links

Lycos UK

Lycos, Inc. (USA)

Lycos Chat (UK)
{{Coord, 51.9061, N, 8.3875, E, source:wikidata, display=title Screensavers Joint ventures Companies based in the London Borough of Merton fi:Makelovenotspam.com