http://blog.heluna.com Antispam, the Internet, and General Commentary. Sun, 31 Jan 2010 12:34:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en With the release of Firefox 3, there are going to be a lot of articles written (this one included!) about how Firefox stacks up against Safari. (Heluna is, first and foremost, a Mac shop, having learned long ago about Internet Explorer's propensity towards attracting spyware.)Many, many of those articles are ... http://blog.heluna.com/2008/01/17/firefox-3-vs-safari/ We recently migrated our architecture to a new, faster cluster, and we thought we'd mention just what was required to make the transition. First: get the operating systems online, and hardened for security. When you're dealing with spam, virus writers, etc, you simply can't be too careful. Also, as we pass ... http://blog.heluna.com/2008/01/12/new-heluna-architecture/ Greylisting and the Temporality of E-mail In the past few years, as spam has increased to be over 90% of all e-mail sent on the Internet, several solutions have been created to help deal with the problem. At Heluna, we're proud of our filtering system, and we're constantly looking at ... http://blog.heluna.com/2008/01/12/reducing-spam-greylisting-and-the-temporality-of-e-mail/ Here at Heluna, we stop quite a few spam messages from getting to their intended destination. To get into the holiday spirit, then, we present to you: the 12 days of spam-mas, a list of keywords and the number of times those keywords have shown up in the sender ... http://blog.heluna.com/2007/12/17/the-12-days-of-spam-mas/ Note: this is the second in a series of articles on achieving a faster application response and scalability for small businesses, concentrating upon free or inexpensive solutions that are easy to implement. One of the rising stars in the open source world is memcached, billed out as "a high-performance, distributed memory ... http://blog.heluna.com/2007/11/29/java-scalability-101-page-fragment-caching/ Amazon's Elastic Cloud Computing utility service has the capability to drastically change how Internet services are deployed, but it has some weaknesses that developers should consider before switching their applications to use EC2 functionality. Today, Amazon rolled out their EC2 computing-as-a-utility cloud as an "unlimited beta", which essentially means "anyone can ... http://blog.heluna.com/2007/10/16/amazon-ec2-limitations/ A quick, easy way to help reduce the amount of spam attempts to your domain is in the use of "bad" MX records. With the correct MX setup, properly-formatted mail servers will still send e-mail to you, while a large portion of spammers will bypass your domain. First, a quick ... http://blog.heluna.com/2007/10/11/reducing-spam-mx-records/ Note: this is the first in a series of articles on achieving better application response and scalability for small businesses, without having to spend an enormous amount of money on hardware. Many application developers tend to eschew a web server for the built-in solution that comes with most popular application servers ... http://blog.heluna.com/2007/09/21/java-scalability-101-volume-1-web-servers/ Panda Software has created a site "Infected or Not" which allows you to quickly scan your PC for well-known virus and spyware infections, and also shows an interesting set of statistics of the people who used their software. According to their counter, currently 15% of the PCs that run their software ... http://blog.heluna.com/2007/08/28/online-virus-and-spyware-checker/ The latest Consumer Reports survey states that US Consumers have lost more than $7 billion in the past two years due to viruses, spyware, and phishing e-mails. From Consumer Reports: Based on survey projections, computer virus infections prompted an estimated 1.8 million households to replace their computers in the past two years ... http://blog.heluna.com/2007/08/25/consumer-reports-7-billion-lost-to-online-threats/