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Thu, 28 Feb 2008 14:01:21 +0000
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Fighting Comment Spams - There Gotta Be A Better Way
Sat, 07 Jun 2008 21:35:21 +1000
People usually associate spams with unsolicited commercial emails that try to either sell you the “little blue pill”, or Nigerians phishing for your bank account details. There are many techniques fighting email spams, either at the server side or at your email client. However if you run a blog or a forum on the Internet, you would also have experienced fighting comment spams (unless, of course, that you run a spam blog yourself :). I have been blogging since 2001 and have employed various techniques to keep the spams at bay. Some of them worked well — at the beginning — but sooner or later spammers got smartened up and they can almost slip in a few spammy comments.
When I launched this blog 2 years ago, it was running Akismet for Drupal, and recently changed to Mollom, one of Dries’ startup company/project. It has been effective (except for the last few days). Mollom is sort-of similar to Akismet that it (1) uses a classifier to determine the likeliness of incoming comment being a spam (2) acts as a centralised database to collaboratively identify spams. Mollom does a few extra things when the comment is in a “not-so-sure” state, but discussing this would be beyond the scope of this blog post.
Another interesting feature for Mollom is its Flex based statistics panel, showing the number of spams verses the number of legitimate comments. This is mine over the last 12 days:
As you can see the ratio between noise and signal is huge — there are many more spams than real comments. By the way, even for many real comments I am still not so sure about their legitimacy especially those one liner generic comments. As you can see there was a big jump today, because quite a few spams slipped through.
Although the ratio seems to be inline with most studies online, it still surprises me, when I compare it with the SNR of my email spams. I am running my main MTA at home with Postfix 2.4, and spams are filtered with DSPAM, a fast and light-weight email classification system that yields pretty good result (99.12% currently for my account). Here is the analysis graph over the same period of time (generated by dspam-web).
As you can see from the graph — there are only around 20% more email spams than legitimate emails! Not huge difference in the case of this blog’s comment vs. spams.
Now, do we actually get relatively less email spams than comment spams? Not really. But what we do have is better email-spam fighting techniques that block out most email spams before they reach the classifying system (DSPAM in this case). Therefore what DSPAM gets is already a filtered subset of all the incoming email spams. A few techniques deployed:
- Greylisting (see my previous article on this subject). I actually don’t put greylisting on my primary MX anymore due to undesirable delay. However I found by putting greylisting on my secondary MX it is just about as effective, as most spambots pick the last MX entry in DNS to send spam to.
- DNS-related filtering. For example ensuring sender has a FQDN, and a valid hostname, etc. I am surprised to see how many spams are actually filled with invalid sender addresses.
That’s about it, but many people I know also employ RBL, domain-key, etc. At least in my case they have effectively reduced the work for the classifier, which also result less spam getting into my INBOX at the end.
There gotta be a better way to fight comment spams — something between the web server and the actual application that filters out the obvious spams. Bad-Behavior? Mod_Security? They also increase undesirable false negatives though.
Any more thoughts?
Uptime Institute Says Power to Cost 300-2250% More Than Server Hardware; What Does This Mean?Sun, 11 Mar 2007 22:31:00 -0400
I came across Uptime Institute founder Ken Brill's CIO Magazine article via 3tera VP Marketing Bert Armijo's blog.
Ken says while hardware prices are falling, total cost of data center ownership is headed through the roof. 5 years from now, the purchase price for a rack of servers will drop 27.5% from $138K today to just $103K. But while it only takes 15 kilowatts to power that rack right now, the energy requirement will rise to 22 - 170 kilowatts by 2012. It could cost as much as $2.3 million to power/cool $103K worth of gear throughout its 3-year lifespan.
(I'm not sure if this figure includes switches and routers and such. A recent Cisco/APC/Emerson study shows that servers/storage/cooling consume 76% of data center power, with 11% going to networking equipment, 3% lighting, and 10% power conversion losses. If Uptime's calculations didn't take the other 24% into account, Ken's $2.3M becomes over $3M!)
I've been thinking about Ken's stats and trying to understand what they mean. As a point of reference, I was looking at Dell's website, which advertises the 4U PowerEdge 6950 dual core, dual processor Opteron server for about $9K. Is Ken saying that:
(a) This particular machine will cost 27.5% less 5 years from now?
(b) 2012's late model machines will sell for 27.5% less than what's on the market today?
(c) The amount of server hardware that fills up 4U of space will be available for $6500 in 2012?
If we assume he means (c), and we accept Sun's claim that "server performance, power and space efficiencies are improving at up to 40% annually on average, and could double every 2 years", then 4U of space may be able to accommodate not one but 4 servers that each feature 4x more processing power and 4x greater energy efficiency.
In other words, $6,500 could buy you 16x more computing resources than that dual Opteron! If that's the case, you might even be able to afford $1M per rack per year in electricity. But only if you virtualize like crazy. No more leasing data center space per square foot or per rack. No more dedicated servers, either. The average customer won't need 4x more processing power in 5 years, which means you won't be able to justify turning on a whole entire server just for them.
You'd also have to replace hardware early and often. Sun recently announced a refresh service for swapping out your servers at least 3 times over 42 months. At first I thought that sounded wasteful, but if server power efficiency is improving at 40% per year, holding on to old gear might end up costing you more. Again, virtualization would be a must. You wouldn't want customer apps to become attached to machines that will be phased out before long.
Bert from 3tera says changes in data center economics will make it increasingly difficult for enterprise CIOs to justify operating their own facilities. But they won't outsource to traditional colo or dedicated server providers. Instead, he agrees with Cassatt CEO Bill Coleman that in the near-ish future, you'll be "paying for data center horsepower the same way you pay for electricity or gas". I think so too. How about you?
PS - On a somewhat related note, eWeek says Intel will release its "Clovertown" chips today. The quad core processors have a 50 watt thermal envelope, versus 80-120 watts on earlier models. That's a 38-60% drop.
PPS - Also, speaking of the Uptime Institute, check out this SearchDataCenter.com interview on how they've helped The Planet save $10K/month on electricity. The Planet, the article says, is looking to expand beyond Texas into the Midwest.
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