Archive for: website
- September 21, 2010 2:15 pm
The interwebs were ablaze this morning over a malicious, cross-site scripting security hole in Twitter.com that took over countless accounts and filled millions more with meaningless spam and porn. Perfect way to wake up, eh? By early this afternoon, Twitter PR issued a statement saying that everything was patched, and that it was safe to return to using Twitter.com directly. What Twitter didn’t mention, however, is that they tossed in a couple of new features to boot — “Reply to all” and “Auto-complete”.
Replay to All will now include all @users in replies. For those who simply want to reply to one — it looks like you’ll have to manually delete them from here on out. +1 for some users, -4 for others. You win some and you lose some. The auto-complete feature looks more neutral though. Now when you’re on Twitter.com and start typing the “@” symbol and a letter, the people you most frequently reply to will now pop up.
If you only use 3rd party services to access Twitter, you’ve no doubt had the aforementioned features for some time now. But for those who still call Twitter.com home, it’s a nice little surprise. Thoughts?
Ever dreamed of looking at a relatively organized image showcasing the top 1,000,000 websites using nothing more than their favicons? You’re in luck. The dirty work was done by nmap earlier this year (2010 for those of you who’ve forgotten…). Specifically, they used Alexa ratings to hone in on the top 1,000,000 sites and then ran two separate search queries for icons of any sort to give said websites a face. Per nmap’s words:
A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine.
We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below.
The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons–those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach–are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440
Google walks away with the top spot, holding an icon that is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels on it’s own. The entire image if expanded would equal 37,440 x 37,440. Any browser and pretty much any machine short of a supercomputer would vomit up ever organ…err…piece of silicon inside their aluminum and plastic bodies. So smaller, pannable/zoomable images ftw!
With that said, head on over to nmap’s site to tinker around with a slightly smaller, but pannable version of the image above, complete with search box (to make it easier) and all.
Site owners: where do you stand?
**For the record, Gadgetsteria’s icon is 32 x 32 — we’re not in last place. Wo0t!!!
Looking for a new host to provide your website with hosting service? Avoid BurstNet like the plague. BurstNet is the hosting company that hosts did host Blogetery. Blogetery was a collection of WordPress sites, covering some 73,000+ separate entities. Apparently, something ran against the law as BurstNet is citing “law enforcement requests” as the reason the Blogetery was taken down. If that isn’t a knee jerk reaction, I don’t know what is. I don’t care how bad a website is or the content they cater to, instantly shutting down 73,000+ sites because of a few bad ones (the word is that it’s copyright/IP infringement related) is a gross over reaction.
I know if I were a legitimate Blogetery customer, having my site knocked out with no explanation as to why or a time frame on when it would be back up would end my relationship with them immediately. Adding insult to injury, BurstNet is claiming they’re sworn to secrecy and that the data from the downed sites cannot be retrieved. One vital piece of information that’s lost — the Blogetery owner’s contact information, which I’m sure some 73,000 site owners are probably looking for right now.
There really is no excuse to go to such great lengths over IP/copyright infringement claims. If the content is really so bad, why not blacklist/shutdown/delete the infringing sites’ accounts? Why take down 73,000+? If this is what we can expect from the U.S. government’s new tougher stance on IP infringement and digital laws in general, the future does not look bright. It appears due process is utterly useless now. If this does turn out to be IP/copyright related, we can all assume that since the “fight against piracy” is utter bullshit, the government is simply resorting to shutting down the entire internet small bits at a time.
Stay tuned…
Today marks the 25th anniversary of the first ever registered DOTcom. Symbolics.com, back in 1985 goes down in history as the very first URL every created. This is definetely something to take note of, here we are, 2010 and there are soooo many different urls it’s disgusting, and of course, with fat finger syndrome, we have the all to familar mistyped dotcom, which usually lands us on those douchebags that feed off of the clumsy.
I know a lot of you probably don’t even give a darn, but I just thought it was something neat to know.
- December 16, 2009 3:20 pm
Once again the argument and ideology of “saving the kiddies” from harmful pornographic material and all kinds of icky human parts is ruining a grand part of the internet — individually owned websites/domain names. Before we go any further, it’s worth noting that this crackdown is a China only crackdown. Whew!
A statement made by The China Internet Network Information Centre, starting this week only businesses, businessmen, and organizations will be able to register and own personal domain names. Even then, several hoops will have to be navigated and jumped through. New registrants will need to have written applications, copies of various licenses, and/or other certificates — for a goddamn domain name.
Those Chinese whom already own and run their own websites and own said domains may not be not be out of the woods. According to various site owners located abroad in Jiangsu, Shanghai, Henan, Zhejiang and Jiangxi no “grandfather rule” is being applied. That simply means that if current site owners with private domains could find their site dead, gone, and digital buried. A sad realization for the countless numbers of private site owners who have no doubt invested copious amounts of blood, sweat, and tears in their websites.
As mentioned above, the China Internet Network Information Centre is using the excuse reasoning that too much porn has popped up on private sites. Logical solution: erase them from existence. Great idea.
If you ever needed a reason not to move to/start a Chinese native website, this would illustrate a perfectly logical reason not to do so. As hard as I may try to keep personal politics out of this, I can’t help but feel sadness for the countess Chinese site owners — especially the nerdy ones — who have spent so much time on their websites, some spending many years, to now have it all hanging by a thread. Not to mention I can’t even begin fathom how any single one of the idiots who hold a seat in the Chinese government can even begin to think this is a reasonable or perfectly logical solution.
I’m sure there’s plenty of opinions out there. Let’s hear ‘em.
The Next Web
[Image Source]
- September 9, 2009 6:14 am
Well this is bound to make a few people upset. It seems the $100 discount applied towards a shiny new Palm Pre was nothing but a fluke. An error. A screw up. According to an email sent to Alley Insider by a Sprint Rep:
After further internal review today, the offer of a port-in service credit of $100 to new customers who buy the Palm Pre has been pulled, because it was put into the system in error
It’s pretty straight forward folks. They don’t want your money that bad yet. Were you planning on going out after work to pick up a newly discounted Palm Pre only to find out that no such promotion existed? Here’s to hoping the next promotion lasts a little longer than a few hours…
**Update:It seems they’re going to try this whole discount thing again — Since the Pixie’s announcement mere hours ago, Sprint is now giving new Pre owners a chance at $50 before the rebate. So even if you forget to fumble with pesky MIR, you’ll at least get a Pre $50 cheaper than your friends.
Source: Alley Insider, All Things D, Image Source
Mobile BlackBerry bloggers take note, if you haven’t upgraded your BlackBerry WordPress app, now is the time to do so. The new update, 0.9.0.140 brings with it several enhancements and new features including:
- Improved response time and UI navigation slugishness
- Removed photo manipulation options in app (already available in camera app)
- Prompt added when clicking back button after composing/editing post
- Fixed issue with private posts not being published correctly
While the aforementioned features are great and all, the best part is that the WordPress team is working with RIM to include BIS-B support. So far the team involved with this app is making steady headway. Hopefully in the final incarnation it turns out to be a very compelling and worthwhile app. For those of you who have already upgraded, how’s it going for you?
Source: Berry Review, Image Source
