CloudCamp 2010 schedule
March 1, 2010 – 10:41 am
Today we announced our 2010 CloudCamp schedule for the North of England and Ireland. The events are:
I hope that we have not taken on too much!
CloudComputing Congress Europe
February 15, 2010 – 10:02 amI am looking forward to attending the Cloud Computing Congress Europe event at Olympia in London on March 15 & 16th.
I attend quite a few CloudCamp events every year and they are a great way to meet other developers in the CloudComputing space, but events like the CloudComputing Congress allow me to meet with some of the business leaders…both users and innovators.
Have a look at the impressive line up of speakers…they include top execs from Rackspace, CA, Royal Mail and a few public sector people too.
CloudSeminar — Sponsored by NorthernNet
February 9, 2010 – 6:32 pmI was not able to attend the CloudSeminar event in Teesside last month but SuperMondays recorded the event on video, these are here:
Steve Caughey from Arjuna:
Andy from Onyx:
The event was sponsored by NorthernNet. So, who are NorthernNet? Well, they run a collection of of pay-as-you-go use of Media Access Bureaus which are basedin convenient locations across the North. These MAB’s are available for rent by freelancers and small businesses. Why did they set these up? Well, the North didn’t have the speed and capacity for data storage and transmission in the past. NorthernNet have built the MAB’s to change that and for the first time the North West, Yorkshire and the North East will have a single high speed, digital network that connects the region’s creative and digital industry sectors and customers.
Viral marketing tactics
February 5, 2010 – 11:04 amWhen is email spam or ham?
We all send silly emails to our friends and colluges…but last December one young London woman got the fright of her life when she found that her email had suddenly gone viral!
Holly Leam-Taylor, a trainee at the London office of Deloitte planned an awards ceremony to name the most attractive men in her office. Thinking this would be a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun, she emailed a small number of her colleagues at the City accountancy firm asking them to vote. With nine categories such as “Fittest body” and “Boy most likely to sleep his way to the top”, her message certainly grabbed attention. To Holly’s amazement the email was forwarded around the world, spreading like wildfire over the internet. Soon millions of people had read it. But it wasn’t such a laughing matter for her managers and less than 24 hours after sending the email, Ms Leam-Taylor felt obliged to resign.
Speaking from the Surrey home where she lives with her parents, the 22-year-old said, “It was just a lighthearted joke to celebrate Christmas. It’s a complete shock that one email could spread like this and who would think it could get so far out of hand? In retrospect, it was a stupid thing to do but there wasn’t anything controversial or sexist in there. But if I could take it back I would and I will be so, so careful about sending any emails in future.” She hit the send button on her Christmas Awards email on Tuesday, December 8, and when she arrived at her office the next day found her inbox full.
While her email was certainly not work related, I wonder was it spam or ham? Arguments could be made for both sides, regardless, spam filters should have stopped it and prevented its spread around the world!
Upscaling servers makes sense, but upscaling a system is better.
January 30, 2010 – 2:34 pm
One of the great problems that any system manager has to deal with is capacity. In a strange way we all aspire to have capacity problems…in my opinion capacity problems come hand in hand with success and it is very rare that you have one without the other.
If you work for an enterprise then the problem is rather academic…you simply throw money at the problem. Well, we don’t live in the perfect world. I run a small business and our system has evolved over a period of two years under my ‘bootstrap and transition’ business plan so we have a very diverse network full of equipment from various brands and technologies….when we think of the emailcloud network we don’t think of homogeny 
So, how does a system designer / manager deal with capacity issues? Well…there are a few rules:
- Downtime is unacceptable
- 7 P’s (Prior Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance)
- Listen to your friends but emulate your peers
All too often we make strategic infrastructure or technology decisions on a whim or on the advice of well intentioned friends or colleagues….often these are the first steps down a very long dead end.
In our case we deliberated for months about how to add capacity to our infrastructure. After years of buying bulk equipment on ebay and cabling it up by the cabinet load we came to a number of pinch points:
- Power. The average age of our infrastructure components were 3.4 years old. With the advances of new power units we felt that we could save on our power bills significantly by replacing some of our equipment. But, buying new servers is expensive, event if you use the new Carbon Trust 0% loans
- Upscaling servers makes sense, initially. Well, buy being more specific about what servers you buy you could have an investment strategy to upscale them over a period by adding components…for example adding more RAM or upgrading the disk drives to faster models etc. These changes can be made very easily, but it is expensive and very soon you reach the limit of the hardware.
- Re-design the infrastructure / system….this is a never ending process.
I believe the answer to adding more capacity (on a budget) is to use all of the above, the mantra should be ‘upscaling the system’ rather than ‘upscaling servers’ makes sense.
Ps. I hope that this article kicks the ass of the other GoogleGroope hopefuls
Top 50 Spamvertised Websites
January 27, 2010 – 11:01 amThe emailcloud network processes plenty of data every day. Over the past few months we have been trying to make some of this data public so that other people can use it and last year we published some of this data in the form of a map of worldwide spam locations. This map has proven to be very popular.
Our next data set to make public is our fresh list of ’spamvertised’ websites. A Spamvertised website is one that has been advertised in a spam email. We get this data by looking into the content of spam emails that we stop on our network and striping out all of the website addresses. This data is very important as it allows us to expose the relationships between spammers and website owners.
We have given this data in a live feed to the ReportSpammers.net website. You can see it here:
http://www.reportspammers.net/what-is-spam/top-50-spamvertised-websites/
It all started with ‘Downtime is Unacceptable’, Announcing Google Grope!
January 26, 2010 – 10:24 am
A few weeks ago I wrote a simple article about why I think that ‘Downtime is Unacceptable‘ when you run an IT service. I noticed that after around 15 seconds that my article was number one on Google.com for the search phrase! Being really surprised I posted a really quick post on Twitter.
Ling saw my tweet and immediately wrote a blog post on her LingsCars.com site which took the top position on Google a few moments later. As you can guess, this started a war and over the next 48 hours I won and lost the top position several times.
So, after a bit of messing around we came up with the idea of running a weekly competition that is open to developers all around the world. We passed the idea to Jamie and he got working on the concept.
Yesterday, as a result we launched GoogleGrope at the SuperMondays event. This is a weekly competition that allows search engine and SEO experts around the world to compete for a prize. The aim is simple…the person with the top search position for a random phrase after 48 hours is the winner. Check out the website and register!
Anti-spam law needs to target the Advertiser and the Sender equally.
January 4, 2010 – 2:47 pm
Alleged spammer Lance Atkinson (left) and his lawyer Darrell Kake (right) leave the Federal Court in Brisbane after the trial. Photo: Scott Casey
Almost every country in the world has drafted legislation that penalises spammers. We feel that these laws are not strong enough as they focus on the spammers and not the actual advertisers…these are almost always different people.
Spammers make their money by selling all sorts of pills and cheap consumer products through spam emails that they send out in massive quantities. A medium sized spam operation can send out around 10 billion messages a day. The spammer does not actually sell the products, they just drive traffic to advertisers who process the sale and then pay a commission to the spammer. Current spam legislation focuses on penalizing the spammer…but before you can do this you need to locate them. This is a very lengthy and expensive exercise…we feel that it is easier to target the advertisers.
After nearly a ten year case US and Australian courts have put an end to the illegal activities of Lance Thomas Atkinson and Jody Smith. The couple ran a huge spam delivery system that spanned several countries and sent out billions of emails a day.
This case was first taken up by BBC reporter Simon Cox in 2000. He got angry when he received an advertisement for some herbal remedy tablets in a spam email. By using a variety of tricks he was able to follow the spammer from Florida, China, India and ultimately to New Zealand. He passed on the details to SpamHaus and they took up the chase.
Spamhaus, which tracks the world’s biggest spam operations, said HerbalKing was the “number one worst spam gang on the internet” during 2007-08. At one point during its operation, HerbalKing may have accounted for over one third of all spam emails. SpamHaus then went on to work with the organizations:
- New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs
- Australian Communications and Media Authority
- U.S. FDA
- Office of Generic Drugs and Division of Pharmaceutical Analysis
- Chicago-based National Association of Boards of Pharmacy
- CastleCops, a non-profit group focused on Internet safety
- Marshall Software (NZ) Ltd.
In 2008 and after three million complaints to the US FTC the US courts issued a temporary injunction prohibiting Atkins and Smith from spamming and making false product claims, and also froze their assets pending a trial. That trial led to a $16m fine. In December 2009 the Australian Federal court issued a $210,000 penalty and in New Zealand he was fined a further $92,715.
After all this hard work very little will be achieved. Atkinson and Smith will not have to pay the US fines unless they travel to the US and the Australian and New Zealand fines could be paid from around one month revenue of their network. They will be back up online very soon and the process will have to start again to stop them.
This case helps to highlight the problem with current anti-spam laws. These try to locate and penalise the spammer. As this case proves, that is a lengthy and expensive job that takes the co-operation of several organisations. We feel that spam laws need to penalise the advertiser too. This is because while it is hard to find spammers such as the Atkinson and Smith, it is much easier to locate the advertisers that use spam. This is because the spam itself almost always has information on how to contact the advertiser. If the advertisers who use spam to advertise were penalised, then spam will be, if not stopped, then greatly reduced. Since much of spam advertises fraudulent products, the advertisers themselves can be prosecuted for fraud.
Advance Fee Fraud turned on it’s head by Mother London
January 4, 2010 – 11:20 amWe have all heard about the Advance Fee Fraud scam emails that have been going around for the past 10 years. This scam has been around for generations…I remember getting a fax version of it over 15 years ago!
The Scam operates as follows: the target receives an unsolicited fax, email, or letter often concerning Nigeria or another West African nation containing either a money laundering or other illegal proposal. Common variations on the Scam include:
- a “bequest” left you in a will
- “spoof banks” where there is supposedly money in your name already on deposit
- fake lottery winnings
If you have an active email address it is probably safe to say that you have received one of these over the past few years.
Well, Mother have turned this scam on it’s head and done it for real! Seriously! Check the video out:
Resellers are the core of our business
December 14, 2009 – 1:31 pm
We released emailcloud in September 2007. At that time we were using only a few virtual servers on the Amazon AWS network. Since then we have grown our own network by co-locating lorry loads of servers in data centres in Newcastle, Liverpool, Dublin and the USA.
The route to market for emailcloud has always been to trade through resellers exclusively, they are the core of our business and our reseller relationships are our strongest and most prised assets.
This month, 27 months after we released emailcloud we are getting ready to celebrate our 1,300′eth customer. This is a huge success and we are very grateful to our resellers and partners for making this possible….some of our highest performing partners are:
United Kingdom
- Wyenet
- Custom Computer Services
- Cyberware
- Sussex Internet
- Nomis
- Message Shield
- Eskdale Solutions
- Fusebox Design
- Madefor Computer Services Ltd
- Qruse
Ireland
We look forward to continued growth in 2010!
