Winning the War
JAVA TECH
Against Spam
WITH JAVA
ABOUT US
Mollom eliminates unwanted postings from Websites worldwide.
BY DAVID BAUM AND ED BAUM
Got spam? Who doesn’t! But if you think finding and delet- ing a few hundred spam messages from your inbox or Website is a challenge, try deleting a few hundred million. That’s the volume that leading spam-fighters such as Dries Buytaert battle each day. As cocreator of Mollom, a Java-
based technology that processes hundreds of requests per second
to keep the invading horde at bay, Buytaert is continually confronted
with the “dark side” of the internet: it has become a petri dish of sorts,
breeding countless unsolicited automated messages and comments
like invasive bacteria. This infestation weakens worldwide productivity
and threatens to compromise the way the Web works. The battle for
the internet is raging, and it’s us against the spambots.
Dries Buytaert,
Mollom cocreator, at the
company’s Burlington,
Massachusetts, office
blog
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DAVE BRADLEY
