2008, in short (aka whats happened and whats in store)

2008 has seen the second anniversary of my taking over the hpHosts project from hpGuru, which took place way back when in October 2006. Much has taken place in that time, not all of it hpHosts related.

First and foremost, the hpHosts project has expanded into a much larger project than it was originally, resulting in it's being used in products by such well known vendors such as FireTrust, Emsisoft and WoT (Web of Trust), along with it's being referenced by Aditya Kapoor over at McAfee (PDF: msj_adware_spyware.pdf). I am extremely proud of this fact, but have to recognize the help I've had over the years, by the dedicated volunteers that have spent their priceless time and effort, sending me hundreds of thousands of domains for both inclusion, and removal. For this and more, I offer a huge thank you to everyone involved.

hpHosts itself has allowed me to take a front seat as it were, in the ongoing and ever increasing, battle against the "bad guys". My time running hpHosts, has seen fantastic results with bad guys being taken down, to hillarious and somewhat confusing results, such as those that have e-mailed me to ask about programs I've sold them (err .... I don't sell anything, nor have I ever done).

Unfortunately, not all of the results have been pleasant. I've also had some frankly disturbing results, such as the recent case of a take down gone wrong, that resulted in the bad guys taking down my sites and a site I was hosting for a friend, and posting my personal information online in relatiation (a very valuable lesson learned and not a mistake I'll be making again).

I have been provided with some frankly entertaining reads however, such as the idiots that have seen fit to post reviews on sites such as SiteAdvisor (1, 2, 3) and OpenDNS (1, 2), claiming my sites are malicious (no doubt due to my denying their removal request).

vURL Online has also expanded considerably, resulting in more results being displayed (though some of it still needs cleaned up), as has the sURL service. Whilst some of the others programs I've written have been left to their own devices (for now at least) such as Index.dat Suite, others have been developed due to either a request or my own needs, including hpObserver and Outlook Export, with one or two still to come. I've even started expanding into writing PHP scripts, such as Check Spammers, which started life as a simple script written by someone else.

So what does the future hold? This is something I still cannot answer at present as my offline life is taking alot of my time at the moment, but some of the things I'd very much like to do is get the sGB service and hpHosts forums back online again, along with expanding hpHosts even more (though I'm unsure as to how at the moment, so if you've got ideas, let me know).