News and other tidbits that Chad Cloman finds interesting enough to share
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.
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/…
Nearly had me ROTFL. So true, especially for Facebook.
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:
Thanks to Josh for this topic and the links.
I just did a Google search on my name and was pleased to see that my personal website, www.cloman.com came up as the number-one result. The remaining nine results were all profile information from various websites that I belong to. In the past, my cloman.com page has been eclipsed by these other sites. The linked article, however, gives a simple piece of HTML code that tells Google which web page you consider to be the primary source of information about yourself. The trick is to add this attribute to the appropriate link(s): rel="me"
Link: http://marshallk.com/…
(via Lifehacker)
Back in the day, companies would advertise their AOL keywords in print and television. But AOL has been in decline for years now, and having an “aol.com” email address is a sign of being behind the times. In the linked article, the writer discusses how she feels about using her AOL email in a professional capacity, and I have to agree with her. I’ve had the cloman.com domain since 1999 and simply forward its messages to whatever mail client I’m currently using—in this case, gmail. This gives me a certain amount of portability, as well as some tech world street cred.
Link: http://www.chicagotribune.com/…
(via Slashdot)
There are advantages to using cloud computing services such as Google Docs, but there are also some definite disadvantages. Chief among these are the potential loss of access to your data, and getting what you pay for.
Link: http://it.slashdot.org/…
Amazon has added MySQL database functionality to its growing list of cloud-based web services. This could be useful, as you wouldn’t have to migrate your database when you move to a new web hosting company, and upgrading database servers would be a thing of the past. I’m not sure how well it works performance-wise, and there are potential security issues if you’re storing sensitive information. Also, there’s always the possibility that the service will suffer outages that could bring down your operations. So I’m not sure this service will be heavily utilized.
Link: http://aws.amazon.com/…
(via Slashdot)
Some of the most promising new features in upcoming web standards are being sabotaged by licensing, copyright, and patent issues. About a month ago Chad’s News wrote about the HTML 5 <video> tag. Since then, it came to light that the major browser vendors have irreconcilable differences over which video codecs should be used, mainly because of licensing and patent problems. The editor of the HTML 5 specification has given up and decided to remove the portions of the document that identify standard audio and video codecs. This is a significant blow to the advantages of having a <video> tag, and make the tag much less useful.
Then there’s the @font-face attribute in CSS 3. Currently, web sites are very limited in regards to which fonts they can use, because the fonts must be installed on the user’s computer. Microsoft addressed this problem in 1996 by creating 10 core web fonts that could be freely used by all browsers. You may not realize this, but nearly every web site in the world uses these fonts.
CSS 3 adds the @font-face attribute, which allows the web site designer to specify a font that’s physically located elsewhere on the internet. The problem here is licensing and copyright. The people who create fonts don’t give them out for free—they want to be paid for their work. The potential for font piracy is huge. Fortunately there appears to be some potential solutions. But if this issue cannot be resolved, then we’re back to the 10 core fonts.
The <video> tag, the <audio> tag, and the @font-face attribute were all created to address deficiencies in the current HTML and CSS standards. Unfortunately, they may be crippled from the start by licensing, patent, and copyright issues.
