February, 2023: Monthly Report

We are mCaptcha. We build kickass CAPTCHA systems that give (DDoS) attackers a run for their money. And we do all of this without tracking your users. Oh and did I mention our UX is great?

Hello and welcome to the (August 2022 to) February, 2023 monthly report!

TL;DR

Gusted and I secured funding from NLnet to work on mCaptcha in 2023, we suffered an outage from 15 January to February 6, polyfill benchmarking support in mCaptcha

We have funding!

Gusted and I applied and secured funding through 2023 development is funded through the NGI0 Entrust Fund, via NLnet.

The full list of tasks that we’ll be working on in the period is is available here.

Infrastructure outage: 15 January, 2023 to February 6, 2023

A hard disk on of the servers hosting mCaptcha infrastructure failed, which caused the outage. Fixing the hard disk lead to additional problems, the fan on that server was failing and we couldn’t get spares sooner.

We had current backups, so there was no data loss.

Going forward, we are planning to create Infrastructure-as-Code to fully restore all mCaptcha infrastructure, so that in the even of an outage, we could restore our infrastructure in much shorter duration.

mCaptcha/survey now includes polyfill benchmarking

mCaptcha/survey runs benchmarks with mCaptcha’s PoW algorithm to collect statistics on how mCaptcha performs on various browsers and devices. So far, we’ve only been running benchmarks with the WebAssembly implementation. This pull request added support for running benchmarks with the JavaScript polyfill implementation on browsers without WebAssembly support.