Because I obviously need more things to spend time on I recently agreed to help out with, of all things, a Chicago Cubs blog! Now being that I am a veritable genius about all things baseball some of you may be thinking that I'm there imparting my wisdom about the failures of their pitching staff and how Dusty Baker should be sacked. But you'd be wrong, 'cause I didn't have a clue about that until I started reading the self same blog.
I'm actually a little bit hooked. The Cubs seem to fulfill the standard attributes I look for when considering sports supporting. They're a team with a rather cool history but when it comes to actually winning stuff they kinda suck. There's also the Blues Brothers reference to give them added cool points. Apparently they even played their very first night game on my 10th birthday (although not officially since rain stopped play early - how can I resist a team that had a washout on my birthday?)
But I'm drifting from the point here. The point is, one of the things they wanted help with was that they were getting pounded with comment spam. Now they weren't doing bad at keeping the site fairly clean, but there was a lot of work involved and such. So I dived right in - and I've been having such fun!
I probably shouldn't but I really get a kick out of spotting the patterns used and such. It's great fun seeing that these spammers have been having to adapt, and how much they're struggling. I won't pretend nothing gets through now, but after only a couple of weeks a couple of them have either given up trying or they just can't figure out why I'm ahead of them yet.
Yet I'm still far from the point I was going to make so I'll try to control this post a little more. As a list admin for one of the two biggest URI blacklists around I have a little bit of power - a fairly standard SpamAssassin install will usually block a message if it mentions a domain we list. So earlier today when I noticed I'd added the 390th domain for a certain company it dawned on me that with an average cost of around $10 they had around $3,900 of fairly useless assets.
Then I took it further! It looks like we list around 50,000 domains each month - so we're making around $500,000 worth of assets almost worthless. Each month. That's $6,000,000 in the course of a year. Except it's not because way too many of those are compromised machines hosting phishs and the like so we're actually quite a bit below that, but for now I'm just puffing out my chest in pride at the fact that I'm part of a team who make sending spam a lot more expensive.