Archive for the 'Internet Tips' Category

Rapidshare is a popular free/premium file sharing service. There are a lot of files available on Rapidshare and not all of them are legal. But what many don’t know is that there are two different sites which run with the Rapidshare logo. The original one is rapidshare.de and the new recently started site is rapidshare.com. Same people are behind both these sites.

But unfortunately if you take an account on rapidshare.com, it WON’T WORK on rapidshare.de and vice versa! Even the account pricing is different between these two sites. For example, rapidshare.de charges 9.90 euro for one month’s service while rapidshare.com charges 6.99 euro for one month.

So before you signup to rapidshare, decide which one you need. If you are looking for a lot of old files, rapidshare.de account is the one you need. But rapidshare.com is where all the new files are added!

Rapidshare claims that they have 220gigabit/s bandwidth and can host upto 5 petabytes of data!

Due to obvious reasons(rapidshare doesn’t support file meta data to avoid copyright issues), rapidshare doesn’t provide any search facility. But there are a couple of third party sites which allows rapidshare search. These sites store the meta data related to rapidshare uploaded files separately. Following are some of the tools you can use to search rapidshare file database.

Rapidshare search engine - This is a web crawler which collects rapidshare links. Not perfect, but useful enough for most searches. Supports ajax search.

RapidLibrary - This is much more precise than rapidshare search engine. Files are indexed from user submissions and also from web crawling.

I recently came across a high speed domain search called 10xwhois. This service shows the domain availability as soon as you type in the domain name. You can also save a list of favorite domain extensions and can also bookmark favorite domain searches.

From the author’s site,

10xwhois has support for keyboard shortcuts and you can also save your domain searches in a favorite list. This tool is a Java web application and is hosted on a dedicated server. It is designed to handle high volume requests and is probably the fastest domain search service on internet.

I am still working on a couple of enhancements such as domain suggest and 10xwhois widgets…

This tool also is a demonstration of the effectiveness of Ajax Web paradigm.

A new virus called Trojan.Mebroot has been infecting windows computers recently. What makes this virus unique is that it uses Master Boot Record (MBR) to hide itself. MBR contains operating system loading code which is executed first.

A machine gets infected when the user of the system accesses Websites intended to spread the virus (such as warez or illegal downloads). Mebroot uses Internet Explorer vulnerability to write directly to the Master Boot Record of the machine! The trojan itself is around 450kb in size and is stored in the last sectors of the harddisk. It then creates a backdoor on the machine.

Once the backdoor has been established, the program looks for any user access to internet banking sites. It then sends the captured banking userid/password etc. to a thirdparty site! Pretty impressive, eh?

It is estimated that over 5000 machines are affected by this virus.

The easiest way to remove this virus is to run “fixmbr” command from Windows recovery console. This overwrites the virus entry on MBR. Also some of the latest BIOS setting allows you to make MBR readonly. Any modification to MBR will throw a BIOS warning! So enable MBR protection today.

Lastly never visit any Website which offers warez, cracks, serials or free downloads. The real purpose of most of these sites are to spread keyloggers and other types of viruses. If you really want to check those sites, create a virtual pc using vmware or windows virtual pc exclusively for that purpose.

Want to host your own Instant Messenger? Then you should try out Ajax im. This is very compact custom instant messenger which is based on PHP and AJAX. The complete download is less than 300kb! In order to host this on your server, you need a MySQL database and PHP support.

Since this is AJAX based, you can integrate this within your existing site. You can also host this as part of your intranet. It is not as sophisticated as any of the commercial ones, but still is good enough as supporting tool to your site.  You can try out a sample implementation here.

Consider this scenario. You have been running one or more blogs/sites on free hosting providers such as blogspot. One day you decide to move your sites to a professional Web hosting provider. But the problem is which one to use?

Web hosting is a very competitive business and hence choosing one is not easy. Hosting providers do all kinds of gimmicks to lure you in. They have even gone to the extend of promoting sites which write negative reviews of other service providers! In this post, I will look at the key factors you should consider before purchasing your Web hosting.

Note that Web hosting is different from domain registration. It is possible to register domain somewhere else than the hosting provider. In certain cases it is better and cheaper to register your site with a different company.

1. What is your traffic requirements? - This is something which you must evaluate carefully. Some Web hosts offer terabytes of data transfer per month, while some others offer only a few gigabytes. If your intention is to host a personal blog and you don’t plan to be an A-list blogger, few gigabytes per month is ok. But if you think you may have more than 1000 visitors per day, go with a service which gives you atleast 1 terabyte transfer per month. Another important factor to keep in mind is that this limit includes your uploads, downloads and user access to the site.

2. Do you need shell access? - Not all Web hosts provide shell access. In fact, very few provide shell access. But for certain things, shell access is a must. For example, consider a case where you want to configure your cron settings or sometimes you may want to install custom software on your server. But even when you have shell access, you may not be able to run all the applications. This is because there could be resource usage limits on CPU, memory etc. For example, Dreamhost provides shell access, but Godaddy doesn’t.

3. Dedicated virtual server or shared hosting? - Web hosting comes in different varieties. You can have shared hosting, dedicated virtual server or dedicated physical server. Dedicated physical server means you have a dedicated machine for your site. This gives maximum flexibility, but is very costly as well. Dedicated physical servers are needed when you have large Web applications which are resource intensive. Dedicated virtual server hosting provides a virtual machine which for all practical purposes behaves like a separate machine. This service used to be costly, but these days it is becoming comparable to shared hosting. Dedicated virtual server protects your site from other sites that are running on the hosting providers network. In shared hosting, resources such as memory and CPU are shared with other customers. Hence depending on the behavior of your neighbors, your site may go down!

4. Unlimited Emails, Unlimited Databases, Unlimited Domains? - These days a lot of Web hosts provide unlimited email accounts, databases and domains. For most us, unlimited doesn’t mean much since we probably need a few databases and domains. But before you purchase hosting, do check these. This is important since some of the providers charge you for additional domain hosting!

5. Server uptime requirements? - It is rare that you have 100% uptime for shared hosting. But some providers do achieve over 99.99% of uptime. If your site is critical enought that you can’t have even a minute of downtime, go with a provider who offers 100% uptime. But that is rare and in my opinion, go with a provider who is honest when something goes wrong (for example - dreamhost).

6. Server software requirements? - Some hosts don’t allow custom software installation. In that case ensure that the software they have on their server is what you need! For example, not all hosts provide Ruby on Rails support. It may not be easy to find out the server software versions from the hosting providers site, but take that extra effort to find it out!

7. Stick with direct hosting providers - A lot of Web hosting providers out there are resellers. This means that you get really cheap hosting service at the cost of reduced price. But I don’t recommend it. For example, I have seen 100MB bandwidth per month offered for $3/month. This is not worth it as you soon run out of bandwidth! So my advice is to stick with well known direct Web hosting providers.

8. Server robustness - This is the ability of the hosting server to survive sudden increase in traffic. This is very common when you get noticed at slashdot, digg or reddit. Some servers go down under this traffic, while some don’t. It is not easy to find this out beforehand. Research on the Web hosting providers if you think you might get a lot of attention among social bookmarkers!

Now even after evaluating all these parameters, you might end up with a Web host which is unreliable. In such a case, switch as early as possible and you may even be able to get a refund. This is another important reason why you should register your domain separately with a well known domin registrar (like godaddy or enom).

Also after you have decided on a host, look for deals. Sometimes deals can be found on the homepage, sometimes you will have to hunt for the coupon codes on internet. For example, if you use my coupon WEBSTUFFSCAN when you sign up with Dreamhost, you get a discount of $40!!

Here are some of the good web hosts I am aware of,

Godaddy
DreamHost (Recommended)
Globat
Hostgator

Happy Web Hosting!

Gmail is one of the most popular email services out there. In a short time it has overthrown hotmail, yahoo etc. Why did this happen? Simple - Gmail is very user friendly and offers unmatched feature set.

Organizing mails with Gmail is easy. Google provides a couple of features for this.

1. Use filters/labels - I use filtering and labels to organize mails in virtual folders. This way I ensure that only critical mails end up in my inbox.

2. Use POP3 access - You can configure Outlook or other email clients by enabling POP3 access. This is useful when you need offline access to your mails.

3. Use Gmail Mail Fetcher - This is the most useful feature I found. Using this, you can aggregate mails from other sources such as your official mail. For this to work, your mail provider also must support POP3 access.

Gmail mail fetcher can be configured from Settings->Accounts->Get mail from other accounts. Following is a sample screenshot. You need to know the username, password and POP3 server address to configure your external account.

Please note that this is of no use with accounts such as Yahoo mail which doesn’t support POP3 access.

It is almost 10 months since I started this blog. When I chose Globat as my host, I was a bit skeptical about their service. But after 10 months, I can say that Globat has one of the best network backbones out there. In this post, I will look at some of the best features of Globat hosting.

1. Amazing uptime - As far as I know there was no downtime in last 10 months! It sound unbelievable, but I think downtime is extremely rare with Globat.

2. Super strong network - This blog was digged and stumbled. But even with 80K+ visitors on a single day, this site was up and running! This site uses WP-cache plugin, but still it is very impressive!

3. Excellent support - I normally use the online chat for support requests. Most of the time queries were answered in 1 minute! When they are unable to resolve the problem, they raise a ticket for you and it gets resolved in few hours!

The above 3 features alone makes Globat irresistable! The downside is that some of the one click installs are not upto date. But then you can install them manually. Also there is no shell access, which in turn ensures that there aren’t many shared hosting problems that you encounter.

I recently came across NanoScan, an online antivirus by Panda Software. What makes this different from other online virus scanners is the ease of use and the speed with which scanning is completed. On my system it took about 10 seconds to download the scanning engine (an activex control) and another 40 seconds to scan the system.

According to their blog, the scanning software is merely 400K and can detect over 800,000 known malware samples! Now that would make it the fastest and smallest antivirus out there. Do give it a try, you have nothing to loose if it doesn’t find any virus!

Please note that NanoScan is only a detection tool, it cannot remove viruses. For that you will have to use other online antivirus tools such as ActiveScan or TrendMicro . Following diagram shows the NanoScan capabilities.

It was not long ago that major internet players Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! agreed on a common sitemap protocol. This allowed webmasters to provide an XML file indicating the structure of the Website.

One of the problems with sitemaps was that you needed to submit it to each search engine separately. For Google, this meant creating your own Webmaster tools account and then adding your sitemap XML there. With so many search engines out there it was a chore.

But not anymore! Google, Microsoft, Ask and Yahoo! again joined hands to enable something called auto discovery of sitemaps. You just need to add a reference to the sitemap in robots.txt and all the search engines will automatically pick that up! Now that is what I call a cool idea!

In your robots.txt file, just add
Sitemap: http://www.yousitedomainname.com/sitemap.xml

Is your Wireless network secure? If your answer is “Yes, I use WEP encryption”, then probably you need to think again. I have been using WEP encryption for sometime and hence was not amused when I saw this news!

Code breakers have discovered a technique for extracting a 104-bit Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) key in under a minute.

Under a minute? Basically RC4 stream cipher used by WEP(Wired Equivalent Privacy) has cryptographic weakness which is exploited by WiFi crackers. You can checkout more details of the WiFi exploit here.

We were able to extend Klein’s attack and optimize it for usage against WEP. Using our version, it is possible to recover a 104 bit WEP key with probability 50% using just 40,000 captured packets. For 60,000 available data packets, the success probability is about 80% and for 85,000 data packets about 95%. Using active techniques like deauth and ARP re-injection, 40,000 packets can be captured in less than one minute under good condition.

It is time for me to switch to WPA which is supposed to be much more secure. I mean, till it is cracked by somebody else!

But in a world where there are so many insecure WiFi networks, WEP weakness is probably the last thing you worry about!

Today (April 05) is the official CSS naked day. Don’t be confused, you are not getting naked. Instead you need to remove all of your CSS files (design) in your blog/website and leave just the content in place.

The idea is to promote Web standards. If your site conforms to Web standards, things should look just fine. You can check out more details here. More than 1500 Websites are taking part in this “prank”.

No, I have no plans of getting naked. Frankly I don’t know how it will look (It will not be pretty for sure!). Do you have any plans for getting naked?

One of the frequent mails I get these days are from people asking how to access Myspace when it is blocked by firewall at office or school.

Here is the big disclaimer: If it is blocked, it means that you are not supposed to access the Website. Especially at work, if you use one of the methods listed here and get caught, you might loose your job!

Now admins employ two types for firewall blocks.

The first type actually blocks a fixed set of sites. In this case you can use any proxy sites available on the net and surf. Or you can setup your own proxy by getting a hosting account.

The second type actually blocks sites based on the content it has. Things are pretty hard in such a case since even when you go through the proxy, the content still gets filtered.

Now if you are really desperate, you can checkout my Top 10 ways to access banned Websites. Some recent proxy servers are given in the comments section.

Recently I came across InstaCalc, an online calculator. Initially I thought - “what the heck, who will start a site on a calculator?” But after using it for sometime I quickly realized that it is infact a brilliant idea!

Here are a couple of things that makes this unique,

1. Ultra fast calculator with immediate preview of results. You can also create and use equations.

2. You can create complex calculations and share them. For example, check out the Youtube Analysis.

3. You can embed calculations to a blog/site. InstaCalc can also generate charts and graphs. Embed feature is not yet available for graphs.

For more details on this cool tool, check out the InstaCalc feature tour.

Are you too busy to read books? Then here is a perfect solution for you. Read the books as email! We do spent a lot of time reading emails right? So the guys at Dailylit has provided over 250 free books which can be read as emails

You can subscribe to a book in 3 easy steps.

• Find a book you want to read
• Enter your email address
• Click subscribe

Here is a bit of history behind this idea,

We got the idea for DailyLit after the New York Times serialized a few classic works in special supplements a few summers ago. We wound up reading books that we had always meant to simply by virtue of making them part of our daily routine of reading the newspaper. The only thing we do more consistenly than read the paper is read email. Bingo! We put together a first version and began reading “War of the Worlds” and “Pride and Prejudice”. We showed it to friends, added more books at their request, and launched the site publicly in September of 2006.

Did you know that www.think.com is the 3rd oldest domain registration that is still active? Well, here is the list of 10 oldest domain registrations. Man, Why didn’t anyone think of registering www.sex.com then?

Rank - Date - Domain
1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM

You can see the complete list of 100 oldest domain registrations here.