Following an investigation by Brian Kreb at Washington Post that exposed the web hosting firm McColo as one of the main originator of spam on the Internet, the ISPs providing Internet access to the firm pulled the plug on them (effectively shutting them down).

The effect this had on the world’s spam levels was amazing. The amount of spam immediately dropped by between 66-75%, depending if you look at numbers from spam trackers IronPort (66%) or Spamcop (75%). A pretty amazing number no matter which one you pick.

100 spammers behind 80% of all spam

One really interesting thing about all of this is that if shutting down a single web host can cut the levels of spam to that degree, there can’t be all that many sources that send out spam in the first place. There are actually reports that indicate that about 80% of all spam is sent by just around 100 spammers.

Just a temporary setback for spammers

Sadly enough, the decline in spam after the shutdown of McColo is just temporary. According to Nilesh Bhandari at IronPort the “recovery” has already started as the spammers find other places to host their servers:

Bhandari said he expects the spam volume to recover to normal levels in about a week, as the spam operations that were previously hosted at McColo move to a new home.

“We’re seeing a slow recovery,” Bhandari. “We fully expect this to recover completely, and to go into the highest ever spam period during the upcoming holiday season.”

So, in just a week things may be back to normal. But for now, let’s enjoy this little break.

Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.

From the App Engine status page:

On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.

What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.

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We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.

Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.

In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.

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If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.

Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.

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Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.

Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!

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Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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