An interesting report by ICF International and McAfee has been released today about spam and CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. According to the report over 62 trillion spam emails are sent each year, and dealing with these additional emails results in an extra 17 million tons of CO2 being released into the atmosphere.

For the same amount of emissions you could drive an average car around the Earth 1.6 million times; while spam filtering saves 135 terawatt hours of electricity per year, equivalent to taking 2.3 million cars off the road.

When McColo was taken offline in November 2008 spam volume dropped by around 70%. The report estimates this drop in traffic equated to taking 2.2 million cars off the road, a staggering amount for what could be classed as a trivial problem.

Of course, this report doesn’t detail the type of spam we are interested in; however it does show that by attempting to stop the spammers we can in turn go some way to reducing our emissions into the atmosphere.

If you have the time I can recommend reading the report fully; you will need to register to get the download but it is well worth having a read through to realise how huge the spam problem is we currently face.

A quick follow up to last month’s blog post where we discussed CAPTCHAs, how they work as well as benefits and drawbacks of using them.

It appears that YUNiTi, a social networking site, has been working on a new style of CAPTCHA based on 3D images. Three 3D images are shown and the user has to pick the correct option from a list provided (see the screenshot below for more information or try it out yourself on the registration page)

Of course, this seems like a great idea for us humans who are required to sort through the often complex and hard to read CAPTCHAs, and I’m sure it will keep the bots out for a while until they develop the technology to get through this new style.

However, Dog Cow raised an interesting point that I hadn’t addressed in my previous blog about CAPTCHAs; What about those that are hard of sight and aren’t able to read or even see the CAPTCHA? This new style doesn’t solve that fundamental issue, and it won’t be solved until we have a situation where we no longer need CAPTCHAs.

An interesting debate, as always let us know what you think by commenting below.

As you may be aware following a recent increase in the amount of spam hitting phpBB3 boards, the default CAPTCHA used by phpBB3 has been “cracked”. In this post we will be looking at CAPTCHA technology; both in terms of why it is good and why it is also somewhat flawed. Read the rest of this entry »

Want to contribute to bbProtection but don’t know how to? If you have a board online or are running a honey pot system we want to hear from you…

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The true cost of spam can be hard to quantify. There is the cost of the time spent cleaning up spam, which I recently wrote about on another blog. (In that post I determined that a few simple anti-spam measures had saved me $20,000 worth of time after just over a year.) Another cost of spam could be lost members or advertisers because of the inappropriate content that gets posted on your board. Still another cost of spam could be an entire board. How is this possible?

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If you are wondering why the idea of bbProtection was conceived then this is the post for you. Dave and I have been running some honeypots to catch spammers, their trends and their general behaviour for a few months now and its time to give a general idea on how things are going and just why we are running them.

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One of many podcasts that I currently subscribe to is the Geek News Central podcast by Todd Cochrane, which runs alongside his successful site at geeknewscentral.com.

I noticed a post by him citing a new type of comment spam that he and others had started to see happening on blogs that they own and manage. This new style is working to try and hide the links that spammers are attempting to push onto sites, mostly by linking them via a single character on the comment, so that it isn’t obvious when just browsing through the comment itself. Todd’s post also goes into some detail about how spammers try and gain a sense of trust before starting to put links into their posts. I’d recommend reading the article, it’s certainly interesting to hear his thoughts on the spam issue and new trends that he and others are seeing.

Bots are relative easy to beat but if spammers are using real people to leave relevant comments linking to their spam sites this will be a bigger challenge.

This quote was of interest to me because it goes a long way in summing up what bbProtection is and just why it works. When checking and filtering spam you need to actually check what is being submitted rather than who is submitting it. Of course, certain checks on a particular spammers IP range or other details relating to the submission can prove useful when checking if a post is spam or not but if a system is checking the actual content of the post then spammers are going to find it increasingly difficult to get their posts and registrations through the system.

bbProtection is designed with the bulletin board in mind but we would of course welcome anyone to use our open API to design a system that works for different blog packages as well. However, more about that in a later post .

For those of you who aren’t aware, Londonvasion 2008 was phpBB’s first conference style event. Our very own Dave Rathbun presented about the spam problem facing board owners and his attempts to try and prevent it.

The presentation is well worth a watch and is also downloadable from the Londonvasion page, under the [08] phpBB Spam header.

Dave explains a little more about the content of the presentation over at his blog, so go and check it out .