Many websites these days ask you to provide some form of verification when you want to sign up to a service. This includes most things like shopping sites, email accounts, discussion forums, gaming services, blogs, social media and etc. Basic forms of verification are just supplying an email address or perhaps solving a captcha to confirm you are a real person and not a spam bot.

Other forms of verification can try to be a bit more secure by requiring you to enter more personal information like a name, address or zip code. Another method to try and identify you are a legitimate user is phone verification which usually comes in the form of an SMS message with a code sent to your mobile phone. The problem with that is not everyone can or wants to hand over their own phone number.

Some important services might use more secure two factor authentication where it would make more sense to use your real phone number. But for other things that are not so important or just require a one time verification, using a number that is not tied to your own phone might be preferable. Thankfully, there are websites that offer services where you can get a text message sent to another phone number.

Using an online SMS receive service is easy, simply note down the number provided and give it to the service or individual that requires a number to send the message. After a short period of time, the message you are waiting for should appear. Do note that these messages are not private or secure and can be seen by anyone, so make sure no personal information is going to be received.

Here we list 10 websites that offer a free SMS message receiving service which allows you to get text messages sent to you without using a real phone.
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Skype is integrated into Outlook.com webmail and allows chatting with contacts without installing the Skype desktop client. Other than sending instant messages, files and photos, you can also make video or voice calls by installing the Skype web plugin for your web browser. To access Skype from Outlook.com, just click on the conversation icon at the top right of your browser screen. You’ll be automatically signed in with your contacts shown in a few seconds. Clicking on your profile icon allows you to change your status from available to away, do not disturb, or invisible.

This feature is certainly useful for you to quickly get online in Skype, especially on a public computer that prevents installation of third party applications. It can also be annoying because every time you sign in to your Outlook.com webmail, you’re also automatically logged in to your Skype account without even clicking on the Skype conversation icon. There are times when you just want to check your emails and don’t want your contacts to know that you’re online in Skype. Unfortunately, there is no option to disable Skype in Outlook.com.

From our research, we found that Outlook.com automatically connects to a number of Skype hostnames and obviously blocking all of them will prevent you from connecting to Skype in Outlook. We’ve narrowed it down to just 1 hostname and blocking that will effectively disable the web based Skype from connecting. The browser pulls a JavaScript file (SkypeBootstrap.min.js) from Skype’s content delivery network (CDN) server (swx.cdn.skype.com). The JavaScript starts to perform authentication from one of two hosts, which are a.config.skype.com or b.config.skype.com.

Here we’ll show you 5 different ways to prevent Skype from automatically signing in when you’re logged in to your Outlook.com webmail.
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If you’ve submitted a form or registered for an account on the Internet, you will have stumbled upon a CAPTCHA. There are various types of CAPTCHA including typing in the shown words or numbers, doing some simple maths, solving a visual puzzle, identifying objects, and etc. Basically, the intention of a CAPTCHA is to prevent spam from robots but they also cause inconvenience to real users especially blind and visually impaired people.

Some CAPTCHAs can be very hard to read, even for people with good vision. Other CAPTCHAs can be really annoying to encounter, such as Google’s reCAPTCHA. Not content with you having to solve one visual puzzle, ReCAPTCHA sometimes requires you to solve four or five puzzles in a row. And if you type in the wrong characters or click the wrong button, you have to keep going until you get it right.

Something to help in dealing with a CAPTCHA is using a browser extension that can solve it for you. This can be useful if you can’t see the CAPTCHAs very well, you make a lot of mistakes or you just encounter loads of them all the time. Here we show you some browser extensions and their related CAPTCHA solving services that can help get around the problem.
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I have a few friends who are real hard core downloaders. Their computer is turned on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and they never stop downloading. Whether it is movies, TV episodes, music or software, they’ll download it to their computer as long as it is downloadable. They actually have multiple bay hard drives which isn’t cheap to store all of the downloaded data. Two of the common methods used by most downloaders today are either bittorrent or from file sharing sites (cyberlocker) such as Rapidshare. However, there is actually another method called Usenet which is a great source to download files.

You may have heard of Usenet, tried it and gave up due to the complexity of Usenet or probably most of the popular ones such as Giganews cost money for an account. Good news is recently I read from TorrentFreak that there is a website called UsenetStorm offering a very unique service where anyone can download from Usenet for free without a newsreader client. All you need to do is search for the files you want to download from Usenet search engine, download the NZB file and upload it to UsenetStorm. UsenetStorm servers will then grab the file for you and offer you to download once they’ve finished downloading the files to their servers.
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With more services and freebies being geographically restricted, there is a frequent need to change our IP address to a specific country so that we are able to bypass the country or region restriction. There are two common ways of changing our IP address which is either through open proxy or VPN. Basically when connecting to a proxy or VPN, the internet traffic from our computer is encrypted and sent to the VPN/proxy servers to be decrypted and they will relay it to the destination. The below image would give you a better idea on how a VPN or proxy works.

Open proxies are mostly unstable, slow, don’t last for a long time and require manual configuration of the specific software to use the proxy. VPN would be a better choice because it is stable, fast and would automatically redirect all of your connections from your computer to the VPN without changing any settings. However, most of the VPNs out there are paid services that are commonly being used to protect the users data from being intercepted or hijacked at public WiFi hotspots through encryption. They too offer money back guarantee which means you will have make payment first via Paypal or credit/debit card and inform them within the guarantee period that you’re unhappy with their services.

The good news is, we have searched for VPN companies that offer free VPN trial accounts without making an upfront payment and briefly tested them to make sure that it is working. Most of the time you will just need to sign up for a free account, verify it by clicking on the activation link from your email and follow the given instructions to connect to their VPN for free. If you’re only using the VPN for a short period it’s best to use a temporary email address. Hopefully this will be a great resource for people who want to quickly use a VPN to change their IP address without wasting time in searching and testing.
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Ever since Google rolling out the Panda update which targets low quality sites, it has caused many webmasters to lose massive traffic and revenue as well. Many has claimed that they’re innocent and should not have been affected by the Panda but I strongly believe that they’ve unknowingly violated some guidelines that caused the penalty. One of the violation that is categorized as high risk is Cloaking. In simple terms, cloaking means showing different content to users than GoogleBot. This can be easily done by checking the Googlebot IP address or user-agent and feeding with different content. Many webmasters does not realize using some forum plugins that forces the users to register or login to view the content can be a cloaking violation.

For example, you searched for a keyword in Google and visited one of the webpage from the results. Then you are presented with annoying messages that restricts you from viewing the content.

Sorry, but you do not have permission to use this feature. If you are not logged in, you may do so using the form below if available.

Guests cannot see links. Registration or Login is required.

Now you have to go through the process of signing up in some forums that you would probably never visit again and you may even lose track of the origin URL at the end. The user will definitely start to blame Google on indexing useless restricted pages but the truth is, the forum has actually implemented some cloaking techniques where different contents are being presented to Googlebot and users. There are proper guidelines provided by Google on the correct implementation method for registration/subscription sites so a webmaster should definitely refer to it if they’re running such service on their website.
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A valid e-mail address is very important as it is the first line of communication on the Internet. If you haven’t noticed, your email address is almost always being requested when you sign up for any online account such as Facebook, or even when you submit a web form. This is logical because it allows the website operator to be able to contact/identify the person who submitted the form or registered for the account.

Most of the time there is already a verification process built into a registration system. The person who registered the account will have to login to the email provided during the registration and click on a unique link to complete the sign up process. While this method seems to work, there is always a chance that the user submitted the wrong email address due to misspelling or a spammer using a disposable temporary email address. If you’re into online marketing, maintaining a list of valid email address is important to avoid over spending in sending newsletters to bad email addresses.

A manual way of testing if an email address is valid or not is by sending an email to the recipient. Receiving an automated soft or hard bounce reply from the mail server shows that the email is invalid. Even if you don’t receive a reply, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the email address exist because some mail servers are configured as catch-all to receive both correct and incorrect email addresses. For a more robust and automated email verification, here are 10 sites that are able to perform deep level SMTP verification for free without even the need to send an email to the address.
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Webmasters loves their readers to help them share articles so that they are able to get more traffic which only means more money from advertisement. Now you know why there are requirements to like, share, tweet, digg, +1, stumble and etc just to enter a giveaway draw. I’ve never installed any social buttons until one of my reader requested it so that he is able to share interesting stories more easily. Well it makes sense as good things should be shared. There are a couple of ways to implement these social buttons. If you are using WordPress, there are a dozen of free plugins which allows you to easily add the social buttons but they require maintenance and updating.

Another option is to use a hosted share button such as ShareThis, AddThis, Lockers (AddToAny), Tell-a-Friend, SmartAddon and etc. All you need to do is select the look of the button and insert a small piece of code to the page that you want the button to appear. Upon hovering or clicking the button, normally a popup will appear listing tons of social websites to share and also the option to email the article to your friends. I am not going into details of the social buttons but rather the performance. Adding social buttons to your webpage will definitely decrease the performance of your website and increase the load time. Remember that Google has taken website performance into consideration of rankings so we don’t want to install and use a social button that slows down your website.
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Websites and web pages are constantly growing in size and today it’s not unusual for the average page to be a few Megabyte in size. There are even websites around with single pages in the tens of Megabytes. While this might not be a major issue for people with a fast or unlimited internet, there’s still a huge proportion of people that don’t have a reasonable speed internet connection. If you include people using mobile broadband dongles or metered internet connections it becomes a major issue and a drain on bandwidth when pages are not properly optimized.

Optimizing a web page can be as simple as compressing images and using HTML code and scripts that have no unnecessary code. The page will load faster for everybody especially for those on slower connections because less data needs to be downloaded. Below is the same web page in its original form (top) and after optimization (bottom). As you can see, optimization reduced the amount of data downloaded and therefore the time to load the page by a sizable amount.

You can of course do several things yourself to help reduce the amount of data that needs to be downloaded. Blocking images, blocking flash videos, blocking scripts and blocking ads can reduce bandwidth usage. Those methods all have an effect on the page though and at best you are not seeing the whole page as intended, at worst the page can break. Fortunately there’s something you can do instead of disabling page elements which is to have the page automatically optimized before viewing it.

Poorly optimized pages get the benefit of code, script and image compression which reduces bandwidth usage, while the page itself looks unchanged. Here are 7 options for you to try which are either built into the browser itself or available via an extension.
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Everyone knows or has at least heard of YouTube. If not, YouTube is the most popular video hosting website today and has been running since 2005. After YouTube being launched just for over a year, it was already one of the fastest growing websites on the Internet and that attracted Google to purchase YouTube for a whopping US$1.65 billion! The exact amount of videos hosted on YouTube is unknown but it is estimated that 300 hours of videos being uploaded to YouTube every minute so you can practically find videos related to any topics.

If you have a video to share, uploading videos to YouTube might be the best option but will require signing in with a Google account which can be registered for free. After logging in to YouTube, click at the Upload button, select the privacy option whether you want the uploaded video to be public, unlisted or private, then you can browse for the video file to upload.

If you see the following dreaded message saying “This video has been removed because it is too long. Sorry about that” after uploading the video to YouTube, it is because the uploaded video file exceeded the video length limit.

This video length limit in YouTube only applies to unverified users to prevent spam. As you know anyone can sign up for a free Google account which makes you a registered user, but to be a verified user, you’ll need to go through an additional step via automated phone verification. After completing the automated phone verification, your Google account status in YouTube will be upgraded to verified and that automatically removes the 15 minutes video length limit.

Here we will show you the detailed steps on how to verify your YouTube account and reactivate the rejected video because the length of the video is too long without possibly spending hours to re-upload the same video again.
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Sometimes a piece of software being the most popular in its category doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best. However when it comes to LastPass, it is currently the most popular password manager and undeniably the best in the industry. While KeePass is an excellent open source offline password manager that is very flexible and extensible, it does require the user to be experienced in computers to be able to set it up and also to use it correctly.

LastPass has additional advantages over KeePass which include online cloud storage that allows you to access your password from anywhere as long as there is an Internet connection. It is also easier to setup and use if compared to KeePass. An important thing in using a password manager that a lot of people aren’t aware of is their role in keeping their password management account safe. Most people would only think that it is the company’s responsibility in keeping their encrypted password safe on their servers and very quickly to put the blame on LastPass when their account got compromised.

The 2 major security breaches in LastPass show that only small parts of the database that can be used to crack the user’s master password have been copied out by the intruder but did not touch the encrypted user vault data. So if you’ve used a strong non-dictionary master password together with a multifactor authentication, there is a very very low chance that your LastPass login account information can be illegally accessed by the hacker.

In order to further safeguard and secure your LastPass account, here are 10 guidelines you should follow.
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Although it can be used to distribute and download legitimate files, BitTorrent is mostly associated with downloading copyrighted material like movies, music and games. Many organizations and governments have tried to ban users from accessing popular torrent sites like Kickass or The Pirate Bay, but most users can bypass those restrictions with ease. Another restriction you might come across is harder to bypass as it directly affects the internet connection from your service provider.

Connecting and transferring data between seeds and peers in a torrent client requires a lot of bandwidth so some ISPs throttle P2P traffic at certain times of day or permanently to reduce the load on their network. If that happens and your ISP is throttling your P2P traffic you may never get a good download speed, even when connected to a well seeded torrent. A simple test to see if you are being throttled is to download Ubuntu Linux via torrent, this is always very well seeded and should download at close to the maximum speed your connection can handle.

If the result is anything like the image above and your speed rarely gets above a few KBps on a very well seeded torrent, then your internet service is likely being throttled. Luckily there are ways to bypass this problem and still download torrents at a good speed. A simple solution is to get someone else to download the torrent and then you download the files direct from them. This means no P2P traffic is coming through your connection so no data is being throttled.

Here we have 4 free services that download the torrents for you, then you can download the completed files in your browser at close to full speed, bypassing torrent throttling from your ISP.
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If you want to upload a file so that it can be distributed to others, there are hundreds of different services to perform that task. File hosting comes in different categories and a popular type is cloud hosting where you can use services like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, DropBox and iCloud. These are more geared towards personal storage and sharing files with friends, family and work colleagues.

Other file hosting options include services more suited to posting the links anywhere so that anyone can download the file. Sites like Rapidgator, MEGA and ZippyShare are better for this purpose. However, unless you pay a subscription fee, many of them have hosting limitations which place restrictions on what and how others can download the file you’ve uploaded.

Just a few of the annoyances are; a dedicated page to download the file with advertisements (sometimes containing fake download buttons), the requirement to solve a Captcha, waiting several seconds or minutes before the download can start and often the file download speed is restricted.

To get around most of these problems, we list seven free file hosting services where files can be downloaded via direct links. This removes the need for users to visit download pages first and the nuisances associated with them.
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BitTorrent is a protocol that is being used for file sharing. It has been around since 2001 and is still going strong today with it estimated to be using up at least 50% of all Internet traffic. BitTorrent is not equal to piracy as it is merely a method to transfer file. However there are quite a few Internet Service Providers that don’t like their customers downloading files through BitTorrent and employ technology to block or throttle Internet traffic that is used by BitTorrent.

There are a few different ways to block or throttle BitTorrent by ISP. They could be blocking the BitTorrent tracker host and without a tracker, you wouldn’t be able to connect to any peers. They could also block the BitTorrent website itself but this can be easily bypassed by changing the DNS or use a web proxy. Sometimes an ISP can temporarily lift the BitTorrent ban on certain days or time range that normally starts from midnight till morning.

A more sophisticated method in detecting and controlling BitTorrent traffic is by Deep Packet Inspection. This system is able to intelligently detect BitTorrent usage and starts shaping the traffic by throttling the download speed to a minimum without requiring specific rules of blocking BitTorrent websites or trackers.

As we said earlier, not all BitTorrent usage is linked to piracy. There are many legitimate software packages such as the different Linux distributions that can be downloaded using BitTorrent. If you are curious to know if your ISP is throttling or slowing down BitTorrent usage, here are some ways to test it without getting into trouble.
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Anyone can register a top level domain such as mydomain.com from an Internet domain registrar for a small price that is normally paid annually. One of the registration steps involves providing valid and accurate contact information of the registrant. This contact information is known as WHOIS info that is published online and is accessible publicly by anyone at anytime.

Some domain owners are very concerned that their real full name, mailing address, email address and phone number can be obtained so easily especially by spammers, hence they pay extra money to subscribe for Private Registration such as “Domains By Proxy”, “Domain Privacy”, “Privacy Protect” or “WhoisGuard” that hides their personal information from public display. As for people who cannot afford the private registration, they simply provided fake details or just copy the generic private registration information and use it on their profile.

Providing fake WHOIS information can lead to losing your domain name if this matter is reported to ICANN. You are also not supposed to abuse any of the private registration services by illegally using their contact information for your WHOIS without paying for it and that too can get your domain into trouble.

If you need to contact the current or previous owner of a domain name, it is still possible to do it by looking up the historical WHOIS information. There is a chance that when they registered the domain, the owner did not subscribe to any of the domain privacy services and instead entered their real contact information. Here we have 5 online services that can lookup domain WHOIS history records.
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