Chad's News

In this age of Twitter and its 140-character limit on tweets, the most important aspect of URL shorteners is how many characters they use up. But don’t forget to take into account the likelihood of the site staying in business. Libya is the home of the .ly top-level domain, and is the parent of the highly-popular bit.ly URL shortener and others. These domains, however, fall under Libyan law which is based on Islamic law and is more restrictive than the United States concerning what’s objectionable. Take the case of vb.ly, an adult-friendly shortening service shut down by Libyan authorities because its home page included a picture of co-founder Violet Blue, scantily-clad and holding a bottle in her hand. The linked article has more details.

Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we always go with tinyurl.com because it’s a fairly safe bet.

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Slashdot)

You don’t have to be a hard-core geek to know how some websites use cookies to identify your computer and track your internet browsing habits. But it’s just too easy to disable and/or delete browser cookies, so the organizations involved have been looking for better methods. The goal is to save information across page visits and browser sessions, and there are quite a few ways to accomplish this. Flash cookies use the local storage capabilities of the Adobe Flash Player. These have given rise to zombie cookies, where a deleted browser cookie is recreated from the Flash cookie. HTML 5 has a client-side database storage capability that makes me wonder just what they were thinking when they developed the standard. And finally there’s the Evercookie, which uses every trick in the book and is quite hard to remove. My favorite is how it encodes the cookie data as an image file, which is stored in the browser’s cache to be later read back and decoded.

Update: Ars Technica tells us that it’s technically possible to kill the Evercookie.

For those who value their online privacy, the linked article has tips on how to delete your online presence.

Link: http://www.wikihow.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

One of the things I dislike about Google Reader is that it takes up a lot of space with nonessential items. Until recently, I used the “minimalistic” skin in the Better GReader Firefox extension to make the most use of my screen space. But now Google has built in a similar feature. I’ve been using it for about a month or so, and the verdict’s still out on which version I prefer.

Link: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Google recently unveiled a new feature for its search engine: search results are displayed as you type. The expectation that it will accurately predict what it is you’re typing and display the appropriate results well before you finish, thus saving two to five seconds per search. Here at Chad’s News, however, we must be typing too fast, because we find the rapidly changing screen text to be very annoying. This is one feature that got disabled immediately.

Note that this behavior is different than the old Google, where it displayed suggested search strings—you actually get the search results as you type.

Link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/…
(via Ars Technica)

If you’d had a spare $16 million sitting around, you could have purchased insure.com back in 2009. The linked article has the top 10 most expensive domain name sales. And surprisingly, only two of them are related to pornography. The lowest spot goes to toys.com at $5.1 million.

Link: http://most-expensive.net/…

Several national governments are taking exception to the high level of security provided to Blackberry users. These governments want to be able to intercept and read messages from their citizens, but the Blackberry security protocols are just too good. And the manufacturer, Research In Motion (RIM), isn’t willing to degrade the security. As a result, the United Arab Emirates has decided to suspend several Blackberry services within its borders, and other countries are considering following suit, including India and Lebanon. An imminent shutoff in Saudi Arabia was averted only after RIM agreed to set up a local server in that country.

All I can say is that I’m grateful the founders of our country insisted on the First Amendment.

Link #1: http://arstechnica.com/…

Link #2: http://dailycaller.com/…

Update #1: Looks like everything’s going to be okay after all.

Update #2: RIM has come to an agreement with India, where they hand over the encryption keys and an infrastructure was created to intercept Blackberry messages.

Nearly had me ROTFL. So true, especially for Facebook.

Link: http://www.neatorama.com/…

As any web designer will tell you, the current state of web fonts is deplorable. Google is coming to the rescue, however, with 18 free fonts and an API to make them work correctly.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Here’s an interesting trick. Many web browsers support the entry of IP addresses as hexadecimal or octal numbers with or without the dots. For instance, the cloman.com server (normally 75.127.110.43) can be entered as 0x4B7F6E2B, and Google is 0x4A7D9B6A in hex or 011237315552 in octal.

Link: http://www.securelist.com/…
(via Slashdot)

I really don’t think you can get URLs much smaller than with the TO./ URL Shortener. I had to do some research to understand how it was even possible. Note that the period after the “to” is vital.

Link: http://to./
(via Lifehacker)

In Internet-speak, a proxy is a server that takes your request, sends it to a destination server as if it were coming from the proxy itself, and then sends the response back to you. It acts as a proxy in much the same way that you can use a lawyer as an intermediary or designate someone else to cast your vote at a stockholder meeting. Internet proxies can be used for a variety of purposes, one of which is anonymous browsing.

An anonymous proxy keeps no permanent record of which users have connected to which websites. And since the page request comes from the proxy itself, there is no easy way to track who is actually making the request. (In reality the use of multiple, chained proxies is recommended.) This anonymity is quite beneficial for whistle blowers and victims of political oppression, as well as the privacy- and security-conscious. But it also works for organized crime, terrorists, and other criminals.

Another popular use of proxies (not necessarily anonymous ones) is to circumvent corporate/government filters. The destination website may be blocked, but the proxy server is not—thus allowing the user to view prohibited websites.

Here are additional resources:

• Anonymouse.org and the associated Firefox add-on
• Anonymous Internet Surfing HOWTO
• Public CGI (Web, PHP) anonymous proxy free list
• Tor (warning: Tor is not secure, and don’t even think about hosting a Tor node)

Thanks to Josh for this topic and the links.