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:
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