Future of the mwcollect Alliance

Tonight, I finally managed to fix the bug in the G.O.T.E.K. submission architecture for the mwcollect Alliance. It was caused by a threading dead-lock; the buggy code was accidently installed on the Alliance server when recompiling gotekd from SVN due to the upgrade from libmysqlclient14 to libmysqlclient15. Binaries are now flowing again.

The initial idea was to migrate to our new backend (featured by Postgres) as soon as possible, but as I learned at Blackhat 2006, some companies are now really relying on the service we offer (for free, as a hobby). This means our tiny little `we share what we have' project now evolved to a real business case.

Eventhough some developers now would go like `Ka-Ching!' and try to sell this, we are going to keep this service free. This has the obvious positive side that researchers can freely use our binaries, but the backside of this is that the service provided is not guaranteed to be constant or whatever. However, some companies now offered us to support us by monetary means to allow us to focus our work on this (as we all have real jobs with higher priority).

We hope to migrate to the new backend soon, an inofficial and pre-beta preview may be found at the new Alliance page. The roadmap is to be finished soon; whenever this is, speaking as a lazy .org.