geek: December 2007 Archives

Virgin Media's DNS servers threw a wobbly earlier this week meaning I was locked out of the Internet. When they eventually settled back down and let me in again I decided to try OpenDNS as an alternative. It's good: fast, regular and provides convenient filtering based on the phishtank anti-phishing sites lists.

Worth looking at, even if you just make a note of their servers' IP Addresses, just in case your main provider falls over:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

It occurs to me that such a thing would be very useful under the right circumstances. It would essentially be directory of known spam sources that anyone could refer to. Some notes:

• Follow the phishtank model of allowing anyone to partake in the confirmation process and trusting users based on performance compared to other trusted users
• Provide service for email and comment spam as well as phish URLs
• Needs a clean API to enable many applications to use it
• Needs resilience from attack
• Push option as well as the normal pull methods
  

Sharing opinions on whether an entity, e.g. an IP Address, is a source of spam could give people the choice of blocking them automatically and before they come into contact with that entity at all. For instance, if a blog commenter is considered by enough people to be a spammer you could block their IP Address automatically, before they even post on your blog.

I need to think this through and ask around for better ideas. If you have any, or want to help, let me know.