It looks as though their site has already been hacked.
www.makelovenotspam.com
Thanks for the link, I took the opportunity to actually go visit the site which appears to be up and running. Based on comments made by most on this list they too have not actually visited the site to see how the screensaver works so allow me to shed a little light.
The traffic being generated and directed at the spammer sites will not, by design, actually kill either the server or even its connection, like a "full-scale" DDOS attack would do. Rather it appears the intention is to saturate their connection to "almost" full capacity. The effect is then not to shut down the spammers site but rather to raise the cost of doing business if he is paying for his bandwidth on a usage basis. For spammers that have their own high-speed lines to their own servers (like the guy who was recently convicted in Virginia) as opposed to being hosted on someone elses server farm they will not be affected in the pocket-book.
"...The servers used by the screensaver have been manually selected from various SURBL's and verified to be spam advertising sites. To balance the request load generated by the thousands of screensavers, the SPAM targets are selected via a "health check" and it is decided which should be retracted and which should be kept in the cycle of attacks therefore we can ensure no server completely stops working.
The screensaver's engine generates HTTP requests similar to the ones produced by any given browser. The frequency and rate of the requests are controlled by a centrally stored configuration file from where we can halt, decrease of increase the load generated by all clients..."
As their Disclaimer says on the download page.
"...3. When a large number of screensavers send their requests at the same time to SPAM-pages becomes overloaded and slow. (They're not disabled completely)
Also interesting to note their claims that 38% of all email from the US is SPAM and that 99% of all spam originates from five countries.
It is also pretty cool that they show on their page some of the sites that they are directing traffic to and you can click on the site to see how much traffic is being directed and how much bandwidth remains. In the US it looks like the spammers are located in San Jose, Chicago and NY. Plus three in the former Soviet Union and one on South America. If you click on the link on their page called "Annoy a spammer now" you see their map send a request to a site.
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