Lycos Europe appears to have taken down its controversial MakeLoveNotSpam site - temporarily, at least. The site now displays a graphic and the words “STAY TUNED.”

References to the site have also been removed from the Lycos Europe home page, where it was prominently featured, monitoring firm Netcraft reports.

Lycos this week released a screen saver that bombards spam websites with data to increase their cost of running such sites.

But according to Netcraft the campaign has already knocked out some sites completely.

Lycos so far maintains that it has been careful to avoid completely shutting down the sites it targets as such distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) are considered illegal in many European countries and the US.

Lycos has also shifted IP addresses from 83.241.136.230 to 213.115.182.123, which are both hosted by Starring, a Swedish advertising agency which is apparently working with Lycos Europe on the site. The IP transfer is almost certainly the result of spammers redirecting traffic back to www.makelovenotspam.com, which means Lycos unintentionally launches a denial-of-service attack against its own anti-spam campaign web site.

Source: Security Focus

IBM is reportedly in talks to sell its personal computer business in a deal that could be worth up to $2 billion and would cap a gradual withdrawal from the business it helped to pioneer in 1981.

IBM, now the No. 3 PC maker behind Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard, is likely to include all of its desktop, laptop and notebook computers in the sale, which could earn it between $1 billion and $2 billion, The New York Times reported on Friday, citing people close to the negotiations.

Hong Kong-based Lenovo Group Ltd. China’s top PC maker, and at least one other company are said to be in talks with International Business Machines Corp., the Times reported.

IBM declined to comment. “It’s IBM’s practice not to comment on rumor or speculation,” company spokesman Ed Barbini said.

Officials of Lenovo in Hong Kong and Beijing could not be reached for comment.

Source: Reuters