Archive for the 'Website Scan' 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.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited by Columbia University for a Q&A session recently. Check out the videos of this session below.

Ahmadinejad may not be a very nice person, but he sure is intelligent. He even raises some valid points during the Q&A (on capital punishment and nuclear weapons) and did a small blunder in proclaiming that there are no gays in Iran!

Zavikon Island probably has the smallest international bridge in the world. It is only thirty-two feet long and connects a Canadian island and an American island. The boundary agreement in 1793 between the American and Canadian governments decided that no island would be split in two. Two-thirds of the islands are in Canadian territory, but the total area of the Canadian and American islands is roughly equal.

Theoretically the second island is in US, but both are considered to be part of canada. Local guides and tour operators definitely want this to be known as “shortest international bridge”

Found via deputy dog..

Many popular Websites use captchas to prevent automated signups. The idea is to have a test which only humans can answer. Almost all captchas used now are image based. The user is asked to type in a word displayed on the screen. These days many of these sites offer alternate mechanisms such as audio for people with visual disability.

This week I was on vacation and I thought I will just go through the captchas of most popular Websites. What I found was a wide range of visual captchas. Some of these are difficult even for a human! These are listed in alphabetical order.

The following sites were selected from the list of Top 500 Websites by Alexa.

alibaba.com - This is a simple captcha and I think it will be easy to write a program to decode this!

bebo.com - Another simple captcha with plain background. Note that some letters are incomplete, but still readable.

craigslist.com - A captcha easy for humans, difficult for programs.

del.icio.us - Simple captcha with dizzying background.

digg.com - This is a tough one even for humans. Well, a lot of guys will be trying to break this!

facebook.com - Can it be more difficult than this? Tough for humans and machines.

fotolog.com - Note how the background makes automatic detection almost impossible. Good one.

friendster.com - Huh? Fun even in captchas? Nice one.

gmail.com - The captcha looks very simple. The trick is that they use different fonts and styles for every pageload!

icq.com - Interesting background! Note that some letters are grouped while others are not.

livejournal.com - Another tough one, even for humans! Note that typing in ‘Audio’ enables an audio test!

lycos.com - What the? can you read it? They even have their site name on the captcha!

metacafe.com - Ugly, but very effective.

live.com - Typical microsoft stuff. Lot of bells and whistles, but difficult to read!

netlog.com - Note how the thickness variation makes it difficult even for humans.

piratebay.org - Even the pirates have got a nice captcha with a threatening black background.

reddit.com - Another difficult captcha. Sometime almost impossible to read.

rediff.com - A simple captcha which is easier to read, but I guess can be cracked with code.

xanga.com - Clever one with random lines connecting letters.

yahoo.com - Another captcha using the random lines connecting letters.

A strange mix of souvenir and photography!

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.

Vidipedia is a video encyclopedia that anyone can edit. It is similar to Wikipedia and hosts only videos. But it is hard to see how it can replace Youtube or Google videos. But I think Vidipedia can be a great site if it is able to properly categorize and organize videos. It should also be able to filter out the junk videos all too common in Youtube.

Uploading a video or editing a page requires registration. Also the site is in the early stage and there are only a handful of videos available under each category. Just like youtube, vidipedia allows for embedding videos outside the site.

Check out this interesting video about Web 2.0 see on Vidipedia,

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.

There are plenty of image hosting sites out there. You need them mainly for posting images to Web forums such as phpBB. The free bandwidth provided by these sites are also increasing all the time. In this post, I will look at some of the best free image hosting Websites. I only consider those sites which allow direct linking.

Flickr! - Yes, this is probably the most widely used service now. There are important terms of use - You are supposed to use it only for personal use and that you must provide a link back to Flickr if the image is hosted on a different site. Also free accounts has a bandwidth limitation of 100MB per month.

Picasa Web Album - Similar to Flickr. The free service provides 250GB of web space.

ImageShack - This is intended for hot linking of images and is quite popular. Allows 100MB of transfer per image for an hour. There is no upload limit.

Photobucket - The free service has a limit on the size of the photo (1024×768). You get 1GB of space and 10GB of total bandwidth per month. If you don’t use your account for 90 days, it gets deleted!

xs.to - If you are looking for quick and dirty image hosting, this is ideal! Allows you to host image instantly without registration. Also allows for hotlinking. Maximum of 500 files per user can be uploaded.

Yeah, I know there are more photo hosting sites. But I think one of the above 5 will suffice. But in case you want to check out more, see the following(I haven’t reviewed all of them!). But I did verify that the sites are up and running!

Alphabetical list of free image hosting sites

http://app02.bonpoo.com/file.htm
http://www.filehost.to
http://www.fotopic.net
http://www.freeimagelibrary.com
http://www.imagecave.com/
http://www.imageheap.com
http://www.imagevenue.com/
http://www.imagexoom.com
http://www.myimagebuddy.com
http://www.myimagehosting.com
http://www.myonlineimages.com/
http://www.photoserver.us
http://www.picsplace.to
http://www.realimagehost.com
http://www.simpload.com
http://www.solisstyle.com/ims/
http://www.thefreeimagehosting.com
http://www.thepicturebin.com
http://www.tinypic.com
http://www.watotron.com/watupload/
http://www.yesalbum.com/
http://www.YourUpload.com (NSFW - damn popups)

Breathing earth shows carbon dioxide emissions of every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates. It is an interesting display created using flash by David Bleja. But I don’t think that the death and birth rates are influenced by Carbon dioxide alone!

Yeah, the emission volume looks frightening! What is more interesting is the non stop birth animation on India! This is one area where no one can beat us

The background music, if left on for a few minutes will drive you nuts!

Ever wondered what Mount Everest looks like when seen from outer space? Well, you don’t need to be astronaut to see it! NASA provides an interactive tutorial on finding Mount Everest from space!

Following is one of the best photos of Everest (according to the site) taken from outer space. Check out the NASA site for more Mount Everest photos.

Photo credit: NASA

I recently came across this cool Flash game site called Kongregate. This is a Web 2.0 style site with no annoying popup or ads. It is still in alpha stage. You need to register using mail address to start playing, but that is a quick process.

From the site,

Kongregate operates with an understanding of how difficult it can be for talented game developers - from the aspiring gamesmith to the independent studio - to get the recognition and compensation that they deserve. That’s why Kongregate shares microtransaction and advertising revenue with contributing developers, who retain the full rights to their games.

I found some of the games featured very addictive! For example, Scribble. Also the site gives a community feeling by attaching a chat window to the game you are playing. This allows you to contact people with similar interests and is pretty cool. So if you like playing games on the Web, do give this a try.

Scribble game on Kongregate - The idea is to connect the dots using the mouse.

Check out the Web site of Presentation higher secondary school, Kerala, India. It is designed by Sreelakshmi Suresh, an eight year old student of the school. This probably qualifies her as the Youngest Web designer of the World.

The Web site is simple and elegant (It is a static Web site, but still impressive for her age) . No wonder that it has also won a lot of awards, including American Association Of Webmasters Merit Award. She is also the youngest member of the association. She was also interviewed in the local media giving her celebrity status here!

Many times when you visit Web sites and try to register you find that signup process requires a valid US postal address or a credit card number. You may not have a US address or may not want to take the risk of exposing your credit card number. Now there is a solution! You can use the Fake Name Generator!

This service currently supports 17 countries and can generate names based on ethnicity! It also generates random credit card numbers (which doesn’t exist, but syntactically correct) and can even generate US social security numbers! This site also supports creation of bulk data (test data for websites).

Following is a sample generated from the site,

Dennis J. Jones
1469 Swick Hill Street
Kenner, LA 70062
Email Address: Dennis.J.Jones@dodgeit.com
Phone: 985-249-9716
Mother’s maiden name: Howard
Birthday: May 5, 1942
Visa: 4716 2065 1389 5383
Expires: 1/2008
SSN: 435-98-2930