Posted on: October 30, 2024, 11:23 am

I’m happy to announce RBLProxy, a public DNSBL proxy available at rblproxy.clientnshosting.net. RBLProxy acts as a DNSBL scoring system—a feature missing from most email software. RBLProxy can be used as a single, streamlined solution, replacing the need for multiple individual DNSBLs in your configuration.

Here’s how it works:

When you query rblproxy.clientnshosting.net with an IP address (in reverse format), RBLProxy checks the IP against several reputable DNSBLs like Spamhaus, Spamcop and others. If multiple lists flag the IP, indicating a high-risk consensus, RBLProxy will block it by returning an A record of 127.0.0.2 and a TXT record stating, “IP is blacklisted due to presence on multiple RBLs”. If the IP doesn’t meet the high-risk threshold, the response will show NXDOMAIN, meaning the IP is likely safe.

This scoring approach ensures that only IPs flagged by multiple sources are blocked, which drastically reduces false positives while maintaining strong protection against spam. RBLProxy is free and open for integration with low volume email servers, spam filters, or custom security scripts. It’s super easy to use and highly effective — try it out, and feel free to share your feedback!

This is a personal project I developed and am sharing to help make the internet a safer place. It’s provided openly and, of course, as-is.

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Updates - November 4, 2024:

Implemented validation checks and scoring for PTR hostnames.

Integrated domain blacklist checks and scoring on PTR hostnames.

Added a scoring mechanism for spammy TLDs (Top-Level Domains) associated with PTR hostnames.

These updates provide more robust filtering and improve the accuracy.

Posted on: August 28, 2024, 3:30 am

Fynd has reached its first short-term milestone of 10 million pages indexed—a great accomplishment since starting the project several months ago.

Yesterday, I also overcame a major hurdle in performance scaling. The most glaring problem search engines face is scale, being able to index hundreds of millions of web pages or more to a database while maintaining speed. I am now confident that Fynd can scale to meet performance needs.

Going forward, I foresee handling spam sites as the most glaring issue. I cannot stress how easy it is to spot web pages, sites, and link farms built to try and game the system from a search engine perspective. I don’t know why people waste their time and money; it’s futile.

The next milestone is 20 million pages, where we hope to release a public beta so people can get accustomed to Fynd.

Posted on: August 18, 2024, 5:10 am

For the last few months, I've been working on Fynd, a search engine that is solving the issue of bias and algorithmic bubbles found in current mainstream search engines.

It's been amazing how everything has just fallen together and doesn't feel forced. I've found that Fynd does not need hundreds or thousands of ranking factors. In fact, Fynd does not use ranking factors at all in its code.

Fynd has 9 million pages currently indexed, and the results are outstanding. It provides a broad view of the internet instead of a small subset.

Site owners should like Fynd because it does not try to be an answer engine and steal their content and traffic; it just returns results based on the closest matching web page, more like a classic search engine.

I plan to make fynd available to the public in an experimental state when it reaches 15-20 million pages indexed. It currently indexes about 140,000 pages a day.

Posted on: August 14, 2024, 2:23 am

As I’m developing the code for this site I’m conflicted 😐 about a comment section.

One reason being I doubt it would be used very much and two because of abuse by spam bots. Working in the hosting industry means I already spend a large portion of time dealing with abuse issues and I don’t to want to bring all that over here. So at least for now I don’t plan to implement comments.

However, if you want to interact I prefer X (Twitter) so feel free to share the post links there and tag me (@brinetX).

Posted on: August 13, 2024, 12:52 am

Hey, I'm Brian, welcome to BRINet!

I wanted to create my own simple website to post my random thoughts, but before I did, I wanted to develop my own CMS platform to manage my content. WordPress and other content platforms are just so bloated and slow out of the box that I wanted something different, I prefer the KISS method (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

Here we are with my first post on my own CMS. Still some features and additions I'd like to make, but we're off to a great start, I'm pleased.