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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
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. (more…)
Obviously when you are the owner of a website, you’d want to allow visitors from all over the world to access your website. However, there are times when there is a need to block visitors from some countries on a certain webpage or vice versa. One good example is when you host a local contest online and you only want people from your own country to participate. Allowing visitors from your country while blocking the rest is the way to go, so there is no need to manually prune ineligible participants when choosing the winner. If you don’t have a powerful server that can handle the load created by unknown or unimportant bots, it is also best to temporarily block them from accessing your website.
The easiest way to block visitors from a country is by using .htaccess because we can do it ourselves through FTP without installing or messing with the iptables firewall rules. Here we have different places to obtain a generated country IP list in CIDR format for free and another method using a cloud-based web application firewall.
An important note if you want to block visitors by country using htaccess. Make sure you periodically generate a new list because the IP address database changes from time to time or else you might either miss or wrongly block visitor from other countries. (more…)
Every web services must run on a port or else the service will be inaccessible. For example, when you visit a website, your web browser automatically connects to the web server using port 80 because that is the standard port registered in the IANA organization. It is also possible to configure a web server to run under a different port number such as 8080 and since the web browser connects to port 80 by default, you’ll need to instruct the web browser to visit the URL using the different port by adding the port 8080 at the end such as http://www.website.com:8080
Even if you are trying to host a temporary game server, connect to a CCTV, remotely access your router configurations, download media files using a BitTorrent client such as uTorrent, all of the actions mentioned above requires an open listening port for optimal usage and in some cases it won’t work at all if the port is closed.
Fortunately most modern routers already support UPnP whereby the router automatically opens and forwards the required port when it is triggered by the software, saving you the trouble of manually accessing your router settings to forward a port. The only problem is, how do you know whether the port forwarding either manually created by you or automatically through UPnP worked? Here we have 5 web services which you can use to test if the forwarded port is open or closed. (more…)
There are multiple ways to download files from the internet. Still one of the most popular methods is using BitTorrent, but downloading your files from a Cyberlocker is also common. A Cyberlocker is an online file storage service that you can upload files to and then give the links to other users so they can download your files from the service. The most well known service, Rapidshare, is long gone, but others like RapidGator, Uploaded and ZippyShare are names you might have heard of.
While most cyberlocker type services have a free download option, it’s usually restricted in some way. It will usually be by restricting the number of downloads in a certain time period and/or capping download speeds. The number of online file hosting services changes all the time and some get shut down while other new ones appear, but there’s always several to choose from.
To try and keep your uploaded files available for longer, using a service to upload a file to a number of these services at once is quite useful. You only have to upload the file once and it’s automatically redistributed to the selected hosting services. Here we list a total of 15 file spreading or multi host services which will allow you to distribute your files onto several cyberlocker sites in one go. (more…)
Kaspersky GetSystemInfo (GSI) is a very useful support tool often used by Kaspersky Lab engineers to collect system information in order to troubleshoot technical issues. It collects a wealth of information about the users system which can then be analyzed to detect incompatible software, detect possible known and unknown malware on your computer, and also detect program function errors. The Kaspersky GSI tool has been in development for several years and contains many features that make the interpretation of possible problems on a users system easier for both the user themselves and anybody offering technical support.
The Kaspersky GSI tool works along similar lines to Trend Micro’s HijackThis which scans your computer and then creates a log file. The GSI log file though, is massive and far more comprehensive in comparison (typically over 1MB) as the tool is set up to scan just about every corner of your system. The log file that was created on my computer contains more than 15,000 lines and it would’t be easy to analyze manually. This is where the online part of this tool comes into play thanks to the GSI parser. Once uploaded, it takes all of the information in the log file and parses the data into an easily readable tabbed webpage. This functionality means that users with limited computer experience have a better chance to troubleshoot an issue on their own.
Only 3 simple steps are required to analyze your computer with GSI; download the tool, run it, and then upload the results to view online.
1. Download the latest version of Kaspersky GSI. There are 2 versions available when you click the Download link at the top. The latest version 5 is for XP, 2003/2008, Vista and Windows 7/8. As for version 3, this is compatible with Windows 2000, NT and 98.
2. Run the GetSystemInfo (GSI) tool and click the button to create a report log file. By default, the settings are set to collect recommended information from the system. This can be changed by going into Settings and moving the slide bar, or manually changing the scan criteria. For example, setting the slider to maximum will also include scanning the \System32, \Windows and \System32\Drivers directories and also Services modules.
If you want to scan your computer for malicious software, it is recommended that you change the setting to maximum before running the utility as malware often installs itself in those locations that are not included in the Recommended setting. Before running the GetSystemInfo utility on the system, it is recommended to close all other running applications first.
3. Once the GSI tool has completed, which could take a few minutes if the maximum setting is used, a webpage will open telling you the report log has been created with a link to give to anyone providing technical support. To have a look at the report yourself, there is a link in the lower left corner “if you want to analyze it yourself (for experts only), click here“. Or you can upload the report log file to GSI Parser at a later date. The report file is automatically saved to your chosen location in a zip archive. Within a few seconds, GSI Parser will show you the report log file in an easily readable tab format.
If GSI found any possible malwares on your system, you should see something like this in the summary screen:
You can also sign up for a free account at Kaspersky GetSystemInfo where you can start rating the files and also write comments. Kaspersky GSI is a useful utility and resource for identifying a number of system issues not just security threats. But just like any other utility that scans and analyzes your computer, it is recommended that you have at least a reasonable level of experience in computers to analyze the log file and interpret the results.
It’s probably a good bet that most computer users at some point would like to know where the location of a website is, or to trace a location of an individuals IP address to a region or country. There are many reasons for this, and it could be simply because you are curious as to the origin of a particular company or service before deciding to use it. If you’re a webmaster it’s very useful to know the trends of what people are doing on your website and where they’re coming from, and the IP address of users helps to achieve this.
As an IP address is something each user on the internet is allocated, it’s not that difficult to find out various details as to where the address is currently originating from as long as you know how to get hold of this information. Many services can trace a particular IP address and even pin it down to the town or city it’s currently being used in, as well as telling you the service provider and various other details about where it’s coming from. No personal information such as names, phone numbers or location addresses can be found in this way. (more…)
If you’ve ever posted your email address publicly in online forums or in the comment area of a blog, it is very likely to get harvested by spammers to send unsolicited emails to you. Another common way for spammers to easily and quickly create a database of email addresses is by using software to automatically generate millions of email addresses from a dictionary file and so coincidentally your username is found in their dictionary. This is why a newly registered and unused email address can still receive spam.
The currently most used method to fight spam is to block it using an anti spam system which is either pre-installed in your email server, installing as a plugin to your email client software or a standalone program on your computer. Another way to fight spammers is to bounce a non-delivery notification back to the sender which they might take you off their email address list. Here we have 5 tools which you can use to bounce email back to sender. (more…)
