Spybot Christmas Presents, Part 3: Distributed Testing
Our second present is one to us as well as to our users. One of the downsides of our tripple-layered testing of updates is that it takes 8 to 14 days for a newly written detection to get to you. Participating in beta reduces that to 1 to 7 days, but of course we want to deliver well-tested updates to everyone as fast as possible.
Just increasing the number of local machines to test is not really improving things too much, as all those software installation combination in the wild are a very dynamic thing. So we thought about a different, more community-like, approach: we've decided to implement a distributed computing concept.
You may know existing distributed computing projects: Seti@home for example uses the power of a huge community to look for extra-terrestrial live, Folding@home uses a huge community as well to possibly find more understanding about dieseases like cancer. Spybot-S&D Distributed Testing (SDDT) isn't helping you to make phone calls to Alpha Centauri, nor does it cure diseases, but then, it's also not really taking that much processing time away from those if you would use them. It uses the same community power though: the results of the scans of many real live machines, maybe including yours, will help us make safer and even faster updates available!
Download: http://forums.spybot.info/downloads.php?id=19
Once installed, this'll run as a system service (thus only on NT/2000/XP/Vista, though a stand-alone version for 9x/ME is included); you'll probably never notice it since it scans with the lowest available process priority, and it doesn't fix anything. But if you want to take a look at what it does in the background, you can always open the console window:
http://www.safer-networking.org/imag.../sdistest1.png
Technical background - for those who're interested
Ok, didn't want to annoy you with too much text, so I split the technical details into a second post that you don't need to read if you're just interested in helping and not in exactly how it works ;)
Still reading? Ok, so here we go: whenever our detectives have finished some parts of work on new detections, this gets immediately uploaded into SDDT (Spybot-S&D Distributed Testing), where the SDDT client installed on your machine downloads any new test sets from. This client uses a special, read-only (to prevent F/Ps causing any problems) version of the command line scanner to do these scans - much like you know from Spybot-S&D itself, only that it happens with a very small detections file only (much faster obviously, only a few seconds per file), totally invisible to you, and with idle priority, meaning it won't reduce computing power for any other running application. The results of the scan are then sent back, and usually our detectives can see within an hour or two that their work doesn't cause any false positives.
In the long run, this should allow us to spend more time on writing new detections, while at the same time allowing us to make updates available faster, since your help offers a much broader range of system configurations to test on. And since the client is read-only, don't be afraid of F/Ps in the background - they're the whole purpose - doing no harm to your system and informing us to get them fixed before the official update is out!