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Aktueller Anstieg bei Betrügereien und Erpressungen die Bitcoin Zahlung fordern

In einem kurzen Abstand von nur wenigen Minuten haben wir gestern folgende vier unten stehende E-Mails erhalten. Ganz offensichtlich geht in es in den E-Mails um Erpressung mit dem Ziel eine Bitcoin-Bezahlung (umgerechnet in Euro) zu erzwingen. Die Erpressung geschieht auf Basis falscher Aussagen, welche für viele Betroffene Empfänger als peinlich und beschämend empfunden wird. Natürlich ist der Inhalt der Emails kompletter Schwachsinn und dient einzig und allein dazu, den Empfänger einzuschüchtern. Aber was tut am besten dagegen?

Meine Empfehlung: E-Mails einfach ignorieren und/oder sogar als SPAM zu markieren.

Aber schauen wir uns die E-Mails mal etwas genauer an. Interessant ist erst einmal, dass die E-Mails mindestens den Anschein machen sollen, dass sie aus China verschickt wurden. Chinesischen Hackern traut man ja anscheinend sehr viel zu.

Des Weiteren ist zu bemerken, dass mit jeder E-Mail der Preis für das sogenannte Freikaufen nach oben geht. Erst sind €333, dann €350, dann €555 und letztendlich sogar schlappe €999. Das ist schon echt dreist und erzeugt beim Empfänger schon so etwas wie Panik. Nach dem Motto: “Wenn ich jetzt nicht zahle, dann wirds bald bestimmt noch teurer.”

Da Bitcoin ja auf Basis eines öffentlichen Transaktionsverzeichnisses operiert, kann man sich ganz einfach jede der angegebenen Bitcoin-Adressen anschauen, ob denn schon Zahlungen dort eingegangen sind:

  1. 18yeC7HGmFnvVBPrQHmuuW49AtiWGT9CsW (0.00 BTC)
  2. 1N4goukLBQKCGYBStoiXgJ8UaBpNZM7UMp (0.23171041 BTC)
  3. 1DQqZVUFopQ6v1rMC8GeCZNKnrEQt2guha (0.00 BTC)
  4. 1H52PeH3bWvv9szypvpWyh9rqeTajf7H1E (0.00 BTC)
Erpresser’s Ziel-Adresse mit 0,23 BTC Saldo

Ich hätte ja erwartet, dass alle Adressen komplett leer sind. Drei der vier Adressen haben auch keinen Saldo, aber die Adresse Nummer 2 hat tatsächlich ganze 0.23171041 BTC drauf, was in etwa €1.303  nach aktuellem Kurs entspricht. Der Betrag ist wohl mit einer einzigen Transaktion eingegangen. Sprich, die Betrugsemail Nummer 2 hat mindestens ein mal funktioniert.

Da man ja einfach so oft wie man will Bitcoin Adressen erzeugen kann, war ich eigentlich davon ausgegangen, dass die Schurken diese Empfangsadressen für jede einzelne E-Mail je eine neue Adresse erstellen. Das würde es noch schwerer machen, herauszufinden, ob diese Masche überhaupt funktioniert. Nun ja, die Scharlatane scheinen also nicht ganz so clever zu sein.

Quell-Adresse wo die 0,23 BTC herkamen

Es kann nun natürlich sein, dass die Quelle wo die 0.23 BTC-Zahlung her kam auch den Schurken gehört und diese die Transaktion zum Zwecke der “Legitimation” gemacht haben, damit die zu Betrügenden sehen: Aha, da zahlen wirklich Leute, also muss hinter der Drohung ja was stecken.

Transaktions-Verlauf der Quell-Adresse von den 0,23 BTC

Sehr interessant ist außerdem, dass diese Quell-Adresse bisher ganze 8.550 BTC (ca. €48 Millionen) empfangen hat. Es könnte allerdings auch sein, dass die nur ab und zu hin- und hergeschoben wurden. Wie dem auch sei, die Betrüger finden ab und zu ein paar arme Opfer, die dann einen Zahlung machen, um ggf. zu veröffentlichendes Material und Informationen zu verhindern. Dabei habe ich schon eine Menge anderer Themen gesehen: Es ging z.B. mal um Passwörter oder darum, den Inhalt der Festplatte zu verschlüsseln und ggf. zu löschen, und und und. Natürlich kann es auch Erpressungen geben, die ernst gemeint sind — das habe ich auch schon (mit)erlebt. Da muss man dann differenzieren und schauen, wie man am besten vorgeht.

In diesem Fall hier, ist es ein klarer Betrug im Bereich Phishing. Die Betrüger stochern also im Dunkeln, schicken E-Mails ins Blaue wahllos heraus, und hoffen, dass es ein paar Leute gibt, die darauf herein fallen. Also wenn jemand eine derartige E-Mail erhält, hier nochmal mein rat:

E-Mails einfach ignorieren und/oder sogar als SPAM zu markieren.

Hinweis zu Bitcoin: Ich möchte hier nochmal ganz konkret darauf hinweisen, dass an diesen Betrügereien nicht die neuen Krypto-Währungen wie eben Bitcoin verantwortlich sind. Derartige Sachen, werden von Betrügern initiiert, die Menschen sind. Es ist nicht “die Maschine” die hier ihr Unwesen treibt, sondern einfache Menschen, denen das Handwerk gelegt werden muss. Sie nutzen in dem Fall halt einfach nur Bitcoin als einfache und unumkehrbare Bezahlmöglichkeit. Vor 10 Jahren haben sie PayPal o.ä. genutzt. Heutzutage nutzen derartige Betrüger allerdings beim “Enkeltrick” auch noch traditionelle Zahlungen wie Bargeld, Schmuck oder Banktransfers.

Nachfolgend nun die eigentlichen E-Mails, um die es geht.

E-Mail 1 (22:05 Uhr, 5. November 2018)

Titel:
I’ve collected some very interesting content about you.

Inhalt:
Hi
Dо not mind оn my illitеrасy, I am frоm China.
This is your last chance to save your life.

I uрlоаded thе maliсiоus рrоgrаm on your systеm. Sinсе thаt mоment I рilfеrеd аll privy bасkgrоund frоm yоur systеm. Аdditiоnаlly I hаve somе mоrе соmрromising еvidеnсе. Thе mоst interеsting evidenсе thаt I stоlе- its а vidеоtаре with your mаsturbatiоn. I adjustеd virus оn а pоrn web sitе аnd аftеr yоu loаdеd it. Whеn yоu dесidеd with thе videо аnd taррed on а plаy buttоn, my dеlеtеriоus sоft at оncе sеt up оn yоur systеm. Аfter аdjusting, yоur саmеrа shoоt the vidеоtаре with you self-abusing, in аddition it sаvеd рrесisеly the рorn video yоu mаsturbаtеd оn. In nеxt fеw dаys my mаlwаrе сollесtеd аll yоur sоciаl and wоrk сontacts.

If you wаnt to dеlеtе the rесords- раy me 333 euro in BTC(сryрtocurrenсy). I provide you my Btc number – 18yeC7HGmFnvVBPrQHmuuW49AtiWGT9CsW
You hаvе 24 hours aftеr rеading. Whеn I get transfеr I will dеstroy thе videоtаpe evеrmorе. If you need 48h just Open the calculator on your desktop and press +++

Оthеr wаy I will sеnd the tape to аll your collеаgues and friends.

 

E-Mail 2 (00:28 Uhr, 6. November 2018)

Titel:
I’ve collected some very interesting content about you.

Inhalt:
Hello
Dо not mind оn my illitеrасy, I аm frоm China.
This is your last chance to save your life.

I uрlоaded thе maliciоus рrоgrаm оn your systеm. Sinсе thаt mоment I рilfеrеd аll рrivy backgrоund frоm yоur systеm. Аdditiоnаlly I havе somе mоrе соmрromising еvidеnсе. Thе mоst interеsting evidenсе thаt I stоlе- its a vidеоtаре with yоur mаsturbаtiоn. I аdjustеd virus оn а роrn wеb sitе аnd аftеr yоu lоаdеd it. Whеn yоu dесidеd with thе video аnd taрpеd on a рlаy buttоn, my dеlеtеrious sоft аt оnсе sеt uр on your systеm. Аfter аdjusting, yоur саmеra shoоt thе vidеоtаpе with you self-abusing, in аdditiоn it saved рreсisеly the роrn video you mаsturbаtеd оn. In next fеw dаys my mаlwаre cоllесtеd аll your sociаl and wоrk сontасts.

If yоu want to delete thе rесоrds- pаy mе 350 euro in BTC(сryptосurrenсy).
I prоvidе yоu my Btс numbеr – 1N4goukLBQKCGYBStoiXgJ8UaBpNZM7UMp
You hаve 24 hours after rеading. Whеn I get transfеr I will destrоy the videоtapе evermоre.

If you need 50 hours just Open the calculator on your desktop and press +++
Оther way I will sеnd thе tаpe tо all your сolleаguеs and friends.

E-Mail 3 (02:11 Uhr, 6. November 2018)

Titel: 
You’re my victim

Inhalt: 
Good day
Do not mind оn my illitеrасy, I аm frоm China.
This is your last chance to save your life.

I uрlоаdеd thе mаliciоus рrоgrаm оn yоur systеm. Sincе thаt mоment I рilfеrеd аll рrivy baсkgrоund frоm yоur system. Аdditiоnally I hаve some morе соmрromising еvidеnсе. The mоst interеsting еvidеnсе thаt I stоlе- its а videоtаpe with your mаsturbatiоn. I аdjustеd virus оn а pоrn wеb sitе аnd аftеr yоu lоadеd it. Whеn yоu dесidеd with thе vidеo аnd taрреd оn а plаy buttоn, my dеlеtеrious sоft аt оnсе sеt uр оn yоur systеm. Аfter adjusting, yоur саmera shооt thе vidеоtаре with you self-аbusing, in аddition it savеd рreсisеly the роrn vidеo you mаsturbаtеd оn. In next fеw dаys my mаlwаrе сollеctеd аll your sоciаl and wоrk соntаcts.

If yоu want tо delеte the records- раy mе 555 еurо in BTС(сryрtocurrency).
I рrovide yоu my Btс numbеr – 1DQqZVUFopQ6v1rMC8GeCZNKnrEQt2guha
You havе 24 hоurs after rеading. When I gеt trаnsfеr I will dеstrоy the vidеotaрe еvеrmоrе. If you need 48h just Open the calculator on your desktop and press +++

Other way I will sеnd the tаpе to аll your соllеаgues and friends.

E-Mail 4 (02:39 Uhr, 6. November 2018)

Titel:
Concentrate and don’t get angry, everything is in your hands.

Inhalt:
Hi
Dо nоt mind оn my illitеrасy, I аm frоm China.
This is your last chance to save your life.

I uрlоadеd thе mаliciоus рrоgrаm оn yоur systеm. Sinсе thаt mоmеnt I рilfеrеd аll privy baсkgrоund frоm yоur systеm. Аdditiоnаlly I have somе morе соmрromising еvidеnсе. The mоst interеsting evidеnсе thаt I stоlе- its а vidеоtаpе with your mаsturbatiоn. I аdjustеd virus оn a pоrn web sitе аnd аftеr yоu lоadеd it. Whеn yоu dесidеd with thе video аnd tаррed оn а plаy buttоn, my dеlеtеrious sоft аt оncе sеt uр on your systеm. Аfter аdjusting, yоur саmеrа shoоt the vidеоtаpе with you self-аbusing, in аdditiоn it saved рreсisеly thе рorn vidео yоu mаsturbаtеd оn. In next fеw dаys my mаlwаrе collеctеd аll yоur sосiаl and wоrk сontаcts.

If you want tо dеlеtе the rесords- раy me 999 euro in BTС(сryptосurrеnсy).
I рrоvide you my Btс number – 1H52PeH3bWvv9szypvpWyh9rqeTajf7H1E
You hаvе 24 hours after reаding. Whеn I get transfеr I will destrоy thе videotaре еvеrmоre.

If you need 48 hours just Open the calculator on your desktop and press +++
Оthеr wаy I will send thе tаpе tо all yоur cоllеagues and friends.

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Aphrodite.ai Updated with Mr. Trump

We recently updated our Aphrodite.AI website with a new model for Mr. Trump and also with a couple of other user interface improvements. A while back I wrote about our first test version that went online back then. We’ve made some improvements (mostly under-the-hood) and the entire system runs more smoothly now.

My smile is indeed quite OK when it’s not my face, isn’t it?

As you might notice, Mr. Trump is not in the screen shots of me. It turns out, the face swapping with Mr. Trump’s face is not working as well as it should be. It always turns out quite smudged in the end. Not sure whether that’s due to my face or the target face? Hmm …

Aphrodite.AI recently got some great coverage on Y Combinator’s Hacker News and also made it onto Product Hunt. Even in Japan some folks found it real fun to try our service. Have a look here: aphrodite.ai 凄いな。

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New productivity app to reschedule tasks with fixed time spans

We recently launched this new app called ARS, which stands for Auto-Re-Schedule. It is a very niche productivity app for people who have tasks that need to be done at fixed time spans — starting from the time the task was completed.

Traditional productivity apps like Apple’s “Reminder” app, Google Calendar or the like, usually pre-schedule tasks for a certain date/time. For example, every Monday morning 8:00 am “Bring child to kindergarten”. Just an example, not that I would forget that 🙂 So technically, all future tasks of that one thing to do, are scheduled in advance for every Monday morning. There was simply no need for us to create another app that can do exactly the same.

Download & Full Announcement: ARS – Auto-Re-Schedule Launched – Reschedule Tasks with Fixed Time Spans

ARS is different. At ARS you can schedule a task for Monday 9:30am as “Pick up mail from postbox” and you can set a fixed time span, for example 7 days. So when you complete this task, it will automatically re-schedule itself 7 days after you have completed that task.

Early Completion. So if you pick up your mail early, say on Thursday morning 9:30am, you can mark your task as completed. It will automatically be re-scheduled for the next Thursday 9:30am, i.e. 7 days later.

Late Completion. Should you miss your time and complete the task two days late: Wednesday 9:30am; then you mark the task as “done” and it will automatically re-schedule itself for the following Wednesday at 9:30am, i.e. 7 days later.

Again, ARS works differently in that sense. Of course, you could keep using the existing Calendar/Reminder app and will work just as fine — as long as you manually edit the next alert time if you’ve completed your task early or late.

Use Cases. ARS only makes sense for very specific tasks, like emptying the postbox here in Germany. I have a maximum of 7 days I can keep my mail there before the post office ladies will send it back to the sender. So I’d like to make sure I pick up my mail on time. Same counts for pre-paid SIM cards in certain countries. In Hong Kong at Smartone for example, pre-paid SIM cards can be topped up and from the time of last top-up the card is valid for 180 days. If you top up early, that 180 day counter resets. So you got to make sure your SIM card is topped up on time and if you top up early, that fixed time span is being kept and the reminder to top up is being set properly.

ARS can be downloaded for free. Your first 3 reminders are free. If you’d like to use more, you can purchase the upgrade through the app for $0.99.

Download ARS here

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Migration: WordPress + MariaDB (MySQL) + PHP + EC2 + CoudFront

I previously wrote about how and why I was migrating away from Hosteurope to Amazon AWS. The basics steps sounded very simple:

  1. Backup databases and data directories on the old server
  2. Set up the new server including all software & services needed
  3. Restore all backups to the new server
  4. Change DNS setting to apply changes to all visitors

Sounds easy, right?

Everyone who’s done that kind of thing before, knows it’s never quite that easy. Doing the first step is quite straight forward. Not a big deal. For the second step I ended up using a combination of howtos to get everything set up properly:

  1. Official AWS EC2: Linux+Apache+MySQL/MariaDB+PHP
    Tutorial: Install a LAMP Web Server on Amazon Linux 2
  2. Official AWS EC2: WordPress
    Tutorial: Hosting a WordPress Blog with Amazon Linux
  3. Working CloudFront Config for WordPress:
    Setting up WordPress behind Amazon CloudFront
  4. General WordPress on t2.nano Instance:
    How I made a tiny t2.nano EC2 instance handle thousands of monthly visitors using CloudFront

My main goal was to run the smallest instance AWS has (currently t3.nano) which costs around $3.75 per month. It turned out, MariaDB (and for that also MySQL) does not start up properly at the nano instance with just 512MB of RAM. Therefore, I had to go at minimum with the t3.micro instance.

To ensure that load spikes are being handled properly and the server will not go offline during these peak times, a content distribution network (CDN) comes in handy. The great thing about AWS is that they’ve thought of all these scenarios and of course they’ve got a CDN solution ready to deploy. It’s called CloudFront. The tricky part here is, to have CloudFront kick in at the right time, because it caches content to deliver it from its own edge locations across the globe, but at the same time WordPress generates websites dynamically. So CloudFront needs to be able to work in that environment. Setting up CloudFront properly was the part that cost most time, but it works great now.

CloudFront Network Map

I have now deployed CloudFront with multiple sites all running on the same t3.micro instance. One by one I activated for CloudFront distribution and over the past couple of days the traffic handled by CloudFront is going up continuously.

CloudFront Cache Statistics

To run massive load tests I used Apache JMeter for the first time. It’s a monster when it comes to load testing and it took me about an hour to get it running the first time. You can literally configure everything on there.

As it is when you’re setting up new things, you’ll have many “new things” you’re working with. In my case, it was the first time I used MariaDB, which is a fork from MySQL. It was also the first time I worked with php-fpm, which “is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites”.

So far I’m quite happy with the current set up. Let’s see how this performs over time. My sites are constantly under attack from bots who are trying to figure out passwords and gain access otherwise to those sites. Yet, every site and server can and will eventually go down under just enough Denial of Service attacks. At the current attack level we’re doing OK, but let’s see how long this lasts and what adjustments I’ll have to deploy.

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Migration – Bye Bye Hosteurope – Hello Amazon AWS

I recently moved this blog from one old server to a new one. This is my first blog post on this new server. Let’s hope nothing explodes.

For many years I have been a more or less happy customer of Hosteurope. It is a hosting company headquartered in Germany (with hosting sites in other European countries). Many years ago I chose to sign up with Hosteurope for one of their so called “VPS” aka Virtual Private Server. That’s basically a virtual server running on one of their larger server clusters.

About a year ago I realized that my annual bill for that Hosteurope server was about €156 per year. That’s not a huge amount, but as I’ve been involved in cloud-hosting for many of our projects, I knew there are many other options that offer a way better price / value ratio.

Being lazy as humans are, I didn’t want to migrate my server away. In fact, it would have been enough for me if Hosteurope would have lowered my service charge to the price of the currently available equivalent VPS they are selling. Over the years, hardware has gotten cheaper and so has hosting gotten cheaper. In short: Newer VPS products of Hosteurope now cost less and provide more power.

I simply love attractive cost/value ratios.

So last year I reached out to Hosteurope and asked them wether they can offer me my old VPS for the new price (~€4 less per month or so). It’s not that much of a difference, but for the principle of it: I just like to be treated fairly. They did not agree to that and simply said: “You have to stick to your old product, or you may also terminate your contract.” Last year I missed that deadline — again, that wasn’t really a priority for me — and therefore, the contract renewed for another year. This year, though, I remembered and terminated on time.

AWS has almost unlimited capabilities

For over 10 years our businesses are now customers at Amazon Web Services. We’ve been with them from almost their first service. So I’ve been working with AWS for a long long time. We even had an incident where we literally spent $4000 USD in minutes — accidentally. That can happen if you “overdo” extreme automation 🙂

However, when using AWS properly, it can be very useful and cost-efficient. Especially, when we’re talking about hosting my small blog kozen.de as well as some other sites I run on this server.

AWS has some great services I was able to use for this move. That includes their S3 Simple Storage, EC2 Elastic Cloud, CloudFront Content Delivery Network, CloudWatch Monitoring Service and many others well.

AWS’s own Amazon Linux 2 is also a great Linux distribution I’ve grown to like and I’m quite confident it keeps getting maintained for the next 10 years. The old Debian that was running on my Hosteurope server wasn’t being maintained by Hosteurope – especially as they had some funky customizations and source settings in there, which for the past years seem to not have gotten the love they deserved. Hence, I ended up with an outdated system.

I’m confident this will be better now. And besides, instead of paying €156 I’m expecting to pay at most €60 per year. That’s a fluffy 60% savings and I haven’t even factored in discounts at Reserved Instance costs.

Let’s see how this goes. For now, I’d be happy if nothing crashes in the next few days after this migration 😂

 

P.S.: Monitoring capabilities are also quite neat. I can monitor the performance at all times. Have a look:

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Earning Money by Blogging: +1,000% Ad Income

From time to time I get to hear some criticism about having ads on my blog here. I can understand the dislike of advertising and I myself do click ads away or try to close them where ever possible and most importantly if they’re annoying. Yet at the same time, I do also have ads on my blog.

Having ads on kozen.de is in part an experiment to see myself if I can somehow be able to finance the hosting costs for this blog through such ads. Sure, I’ll have to create content that is interesting to people to come here, have a read and get some value out of it. While I believe there is an audience out there that might find my content useful, I am also sure that there is a rather large audience that finds my content not useful at all. And that is entirely fine with me.

Today when I logged onto my Google AdSense account to check on this blog’s recent performance, I noticed this little notification at the top right and after opening it, it showed me that my ad income performance went up by 1,000% per cent. Granted, I have started from low levels. This blog had not been updated for several years before I took up blogging again.

I’m not even constantly blogging right now. As you might have noticed (or not noticed :)) there are some weeks when no blog post is being published. There are just some weeks when I don’t really have a topic to talk about or when I simply don’t feel like blogging. More often though, I am just not in the mood to blog. It is a great luxury to have that choice, though.

Perhaps some day, I will be able to simply cover server hosting fees just through advertising income on this blog. Hopefully, some of my content will be valuable enough to my readers to keep coming back from time to time and be timeless enough that it is not outdated in the second it was posted here.

There’s a long way to go and blogging helps to get through that process.

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Spam is getting more – Why?

While back I wrote about this anti-spam plugin I’m using on kozen.de. In recent weeks the number of spam comments that plugin is flagging every day has increased dramatically. Have a look:

Spam comments flagged by Antispam Bee

I find this quite interesting and am wondering why that number goes up? Is it because my blog gets more and more indexed by search engines and therefore more spambots are finding it? For sure, the number of visits per day on kozen.de has not increased significantly.

Perhaps there are a bunch of people who don’t like what I write and they’ve submitted this site to spam databases. Yes that kind a thing exists. Or is it perhaps that the WordPress version I have installed is by a 0.0.1 version below the latest WordPress version. Thus, spam bots are finding it as an attractive target to leave their spam comments?

By the way: Most spam comments are detected as “honeypots“. So just in case one of such comments gets through: Before clicking on a link, please double-check that link in your browser’s status bar (when hovering over the link with your mouse) to ensure it’s the right destination you want to go to.

 

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Machine Learning to Stream “DeepFake” Videos in Real-Time

Machine learning is one of the major goals of the more general term of artificial intelligence. Earlier this year I read about so called “DeepFake” videos on the popular German computer science news service Heise. While the entire topic in that article is a bit sleazy, I was intrigued by the possibilities of that technology.

Basically, the “DeepFake” technology uses existing machine learning / deep learning algorithms to create models that can manipulate data in a certain quite predictable way. If you input a headshot photo of a random person, that “model” can make that person look like a very specific person. That sounds very abstract.

An example:

If I take a photo of myself, the “Nicholas Cage” model can make me look like Nicholas Cage!

In the case of those DeepFake videos, an entire video scene was processed by a certain model and basically made the actor look like a very specific different actor. So as a result, you would get a video where the actor looks very different from the one who was shot in the original film.

Real-Time is Key

For quite some years we’ve been working with streaming video for our Sky Drone products, which come in many different flavors. As a result, we have a bit of experience on how to stream video real-time. Then we thought further on how that technology of “deep faking” could work with real-time video chat. As a result, we used all the technology knowledge at hand and created a small web service that allows you to video chat with yourself. Yet, you won’t see your face, but the one of a person you choose to be. This is how it looks like:

The small website is not fancy nor is it easy to use. It just works — if you use it the right way. If you’d like to try it yourself, you can follow the instructions we posted on Reddit.

TRY HERE: Reddit – Video Live-Stream DeepFake Testing

Here is a video of a user in India who gave it a try:

How it works

You can see yourself through the webcam of your computer. That video is being streamed to a cloud computing cluster we operate. On that cluster, the “AI model” for the selected person is being applied. The resulting video is then being streamed back to your computer and shown on the screen. As a result, your face looks quite different from your actual face.

You can try to smile for example, and the model will modify the smile to a smile that celebrity would do. This includes the kind of teeth that celebrity has, the mouth and lip shape, etc.

For example, this is how it looks like when we smile while being Nicolas Cage:

Of course, a photo of a computer screen is not that nice and it does especially not show how movement in the video shows you as a “different person”. Yet, it can at least give you an idea on how that might be. Feel free to give it a try yourself.

The Future

We have some ideas on how this can be used in future – for legitimate purposes, of course. As I don’t want to spoil your thoughts … What do you think this can be used for?

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Fighting SPAM on kozen.de

I recently re-launched this blog and for quite some years I have been having problems with spam. This blog is powered by WordPress — probably the most popular blog software out there. It is a popular target for spammers and other attachers who want to spread their “news”. Since the inception of this blog 13+ years ago, I’ve been receiving a lot of spam comments.

Spam Comments on kozen.de

To fight off that spam, I’ve installed a plug-in called “Spam Karma” many years ago. It was working quite well, but for some reason it has stopped working. That’s probably related to the fact that the developer stopped maintaining it quite some years ago.

WordPress has its own spam fighting plug-in, which ships with WordPress by default. However, that’s built on top of an online service that you need to subscribe to. To have any significant spam fighting result, that subscription costs money. I can understand why they’re charging for their service as it keeps its database up-to-date with all the typical spam phrases, keywords, methods, etc. that those really creative spammers come up with.  Yet, I believe there are a lot of other techniques that can be deployed before having to look at those real-time databases to catch the latest spam.

In fact, almost all spam I receive is always the same kind of stuff. There’s pharmaceutical products, health product, online products/services/websites, etc. To the naked eye comments relating such topics can be easily identified as spam. It’s not just the content, but also the way how these comments are composed, how their authors are called, what their backlink links to, etc.

So I ended up using a different anti-spam plug-in called “Antispam Bee” and as a form of saying “Thank you” to the author, I’m writing this blog post. I hope they are getting more people using their plug-in. It seems to work fine for me so far. The chart above shows the number of spam my antispam bee is collecting by day. It’s not that many at the moment, but if you add this up over the year, I would end up with thousands of spam comments, which I simply don’t have the time to process manually.

So again, a special thanks to the developers of Antispam Bee. Great job!

If someone of you is in the need of a spam fighting plug-in. Give the Antispam Bee a try. It works well for me.

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Storing Large Amounts of Video Data Efficiently, Redundantly and Quickly Accessible

I am writing this down because I read about 50 blog articles and how tos on the web regarding this topic. Yet, I couldn’t find any good advise that fit my video data storage issue.

Like I mentioned before, I am also involved in Slate Takes Limited – a boutique video production company based out of Hong Kong. Slate Takes is currently finishing up the last touches of a 42 webisode travel series for The Vagabond Project (more info and the official trailer at their Vagabond Blog), working with clients like Red Bull at events, assisting in shooting movies, and helping international brands to turn their vision onto moving pictures. As all of our work is done at least in Full HD, you can imagine that there is a lot of data that needs to be handled, stored and backed up.

In matter of cost efficiency, nothing beats magnetic drives — still. The difference is not as big as it was some years ago, but it is still there. However, such “tapes” don’t really perform that well. Working video projects is not just about saving the final video somewhere. It is all about storing the “raw data” that comes from the camera consistently and easily accessible. If you need one day to find a tape, copy data from that tape to your computer, and then find out that the tape was damaged towards the end of it, you are f***ed. Yes, tapes do definitely provide a longer durability than hard drives or CDs, but in order to achieve redundancy, you would need to have at least two copies of each tape. We don’t even want to think about the speed if you need to access data quickly and get things done.

I have always been a fan of hard drives and RAID systems in general (about 8 years ago I had a server with 1 TB storage at home — I thought I’d never get that filled up!). We have been using a 4-bay Synology NAS loaded with 4x 2TB hard drives for about a year now. Running in RAID 5 they provide some data protection in case one hard drive has an hardware defect. On top of that, the system comes with a 1 GB/s LAN connection which allows fairly quick access. In fact, it is possible to edit videos using Final Cut Pro 7 on Mac connected to the NAS via a GigaBit switch — of course not as fast as accessing the data on a local hard drive nor on a local SSD drive; but it works. If that’s not fast enough, the GB/s connection allows quick data transfer to your local machine.

Now, one year after its incarnation, we had to look into expanding our storage again. 8 TB were filled up (from which about 6 TB were usable due to RAID5) and data kept flying in. All options were on the table, but I decided to stick with Synology and only upgrade to a 12-bay NAS which can easily be extended by another 12 bays to store up to 72 TB. Synology’s “DiskStation” software is easy to use, yet quite feature rich and low in maintenance. Furthermore, the same partitions that had been created on the first 4 TB could be kept; making the transition easier. The new setup looks like this:

The great thing is: this unit even has 2x 1 GB/s LAN connections which allows more than one user to access files with maximum data transfer rates. Two additional 2 GB hard drives were installed to increase our storage by 50%. The transition to the new system was pretty straight forward if you follow Synology’s Migration How To. This setup allows us now to expand the NAS by up to 6 hard drives at any time without worrying about needing to expand it to fit more drives. Now the “expansion process” is running and from the progress it shows so far, it might run for a while.

In case you are looking for a similar setup, here a quick wrap-up of the costs:

We will see how long this setup will last. At least for now, it comforts me that there is gonna be at least a year or two until we have to think about an alternative storage system. For now, this should be sufficient and price-wise it was well, required.

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