Blackhole DNS

At my last job as a sysadmin in a university, I worked on a project to setup a blackhole dns server for the campus. The goal of this project was to find a way to reduce the amount of traffic going over our internet link that was destined for sites hosting malware botnet irc servers. After we got this setup, we were extremely pleased with the amount of spyware/malware that could no longer communicate with their hosting servers.

The real problem with this project was that it blocked too many sites. When a known malware site was blocked, sometimes the hosting company for that site would get blocked as well. This meant that thousands of sites, completely unrelated, would get blocked. Almost all of the unintentionally blocked sites were perfectly safe to use.

In the end, we found, as many other people have found, that maintaining a blacklist of sites is difficult and very time-consuming. It is also easily error-prone. So, although so much malware was blocked, the cost was too high and we had to stop blacklisting sites and let the traffic through.

using mint.com

I've been using mint.com recently. The site holds a lot of promise. It claims to help make it easy to see where my money is, where my money is going, and how I'm doing on my budget. I've been on it for about 3 weeks now. I found the site to be really well designed and easy to use. It added all of my accounts with no trouble. I found over the past few weeks is that mint doesn't really have "stickiness". Meaning that it shows cool information and charts, but it doesn't really *do* anything for me. I found that I didn't use the alerting features at all because I already knew what my account balance was. I didn't get a lot out of seeing the account balances and recent transactions because it didn't really have the latest information. It seems to always be about a day behind all of my bank accounts. Not very useful. Seeing the pie charts of where my money went was nice. I got a visual representation of what stores most of my money went to. But this didn't really help with anything since I pretty much already knew which stores we went to the most.

I'm not going to say that mint is a bad site with nothing useful. However, I will say that as of right now, it is limited in its usefulness, and I can only hope that they add a lot of features going forward.

Playing with FriendFeed

Been playing around with FriendFeed for the past couple of days. The first thing that that really struck my eye is that it can track *so* many services. The second thing I loved is the imaginary friends feature. With these two features combined, it is possible to track updates from most online people even though they may have never heard of FriendFeed. I don't like that I have to leave the friendfeed site to act on the information I see.