The Password Fail extension for Google Chrome tries to aid the user in evaluating a web service. It displays icons in the Chrome statusbar if a website is loaded that is using bad password policies, specifically saving passwords as plain text.

One of two icons may appear in the web browser’s statusbar upon connection. A yellow warning sign that indicates that a website sends out passwords in plain text after user registration and a red sign that a website sends them out upon request.

Both are indicators that the passwords are stored in plain text on the web server which basically means that attackers will also be able to get their hands on the unprotected data if they find a way to either request the data or hack the server.

Password Fail relies on user contributions. Users can submit new websites and services that they suspect to store passwords in plain text. This will be verified by the team by registering. Only after that will a website be added to the service’s database.

A sample list of websites with bad password policies is available on the Password Fail website. It lists among others MySpace.com, Brady Games and Stumbleupon as offenders.

Chrome users can download the extension for their web browser directly from the Chrome extension gallery.

There are no lack of websites to do this, in fact Netflix currently has one of the best recommendation engines, but unfortunately is only available for people in the US.

A couple of other notables come up, including Movielens, Flixter and Criticker. However by far the best service I’ve discovered is Jinni, a new movie recommendation engine in public beta.

I really won’t go into too much detail about the site, I suggest you go sign up yourself, but I will say this; Jinni provides the most useful recommendation service I’ve ever used and is also unique in inclusion of the long tail into the system. Many services notoriously suffer from simply sending people to the same popular movies which in turn makes them more popular and more likely to be recommended. On Jinni you’ll get the popular, the obscure and the unlikely.

The engine is based around the Movie Genome, a similar idea to the Music Genome Project used by Pandora.

“Jinni’s social search-and-recommendation engine uses our Movie Genome, a big, ongoing project with the Jinni community to describe video more complexly. Using proprietary technology, a Jinni search takes you inside plot elements, atmosphere, and more – for search that reflects how we think and talk about movies”

Because Jinni is using a much richer set of data than the recommendation system at Netflix, it can consequently create much better results and even solve the problems Netflix has with predicting indie if people will like certain indie movies like Napoleon Dynamite.

Also, if you are a big Netflix user – Jinni integrates well with the service including the importing of Netflix data and ratings and the ability to add a movie from Jinni to your Netflix account.

Mozilla Prism (via Download Squad) can be downloaded and installed as a portable standalone application or as a Firefox web browser extension. Running the standalone application will open a configuration menu where the user enters the url of the web service that should be run on the computer desktop. Additional settings can be configured including shortcut creation, selection of a icon and the elements that should be displayed in the Prism interface (with our without navigation bar, status messages or navigation keys).

The service will automatically start after the configuration finishes. It can later be launched from the shortcut location that has been defined during configuration.

The interface looks like a minimized version of the Firefox web browser without all toolbars and elements. This is a distraction free way of providing web services on the computer desktop. The main benefit besides being able to launch web applications by clicking on a shortcut is that users can do less harm in comparison to the normal web browser interface where they can change settings or navigate to different pages.

A bookmarklet is available to create Prism applications on the fly. There are also official and user created application bundles available for various web services.

Several options – including proxy support and font selection – are only available if the “show status messages and progress” option is enabled during setup.

Categories range from computer hardware to digital cameras and camcorders, office equipment and even baby and kid stuff. Users looking for a specific product can use the search form on top of the service which will display suggestions during the process. The approach is best suited to find a specific product quickly as it makes more sense to type in the product name directly than to browse the specific category on the website.

Browsing one of the categories is the better approach if you know that you need a new product but have no specific company and model in mind. Products can be sorted by various means including price, popularity, name or FreakScore. FreakScore is a weighted index of all aggregated professional and user reviews. The main advantage of this approach is that scores from different review sites and user reviews are combined to compute a better score for each product.

Expert and user reviews can be read to get a better understanding of the score. Testfreaks mashes up reviews from sites like Amazon with reviews on professional review sites like Benchmark reviews.

Opinions about those sites differ from letting them do what they want with your content to contacting lawyers and suing them. Clever webmasters can use content copying websites to their advantage if they play their cards right. Since most of those websites use RSS feeds to automatically post the copied contents they include links in those posts automatically. Some even post tags or related posts of the original site as well.

This means that every link that you post in the original article will be posted by them as well if they have automated the process which in turn means free inbound links to your website. It gets better. If they do link back to your site as they should they usually use the title of the article to do so. This means free targeted inbound links to the article on your website.

There are some sites that copy your content but do not post links at all. Experience has shown that contacting the site owners directly asking them to either remove the content or add a link using the article titles will be successful in most cases. There is not an easier way to get free targeted links than this way.

Here is one of the emails that we send out usually to offenders who do not link back to our site although they use our content on theirs:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I’m writing on behalf of the technology blog ghacks.net. It has come to our attention that a blog located at http://***/ is publishing articles without authorization.

We are asking that the person responsible either

a) gives credit where credit is due by linking to the articles properly and visible using the title of the article as the link anchor or
b) removes all content that has been taken from ghacks.net

best regards

This is usually enough to receive a response in less than 48 hours. All that have been contacted so far have added title links to the original articles.

How To Find Content Copying Websites:

There are several ways to find websites that copy your content. You can copy a passage of one of your articles in a search engine or use services that will list most of the sites that copy the content. Some of the services are Fair Share or Copy Gator.

Fair Share does offer an RSS feed that lists all the websites that have been using at least 20% of the words of an original article on their website displaying if the copycats link back to the original post or not. This makes it easy to identify those sites that do not link back and contact them.

Options if the site owners do not comply

Webmasters have a few choices if site owners do not react at all to the request. They could contact the hoster of the domain, lawyers who take matters from there or even advertisement companies who display their ads on those websites.

Final Thoughts

While some webmasters do not want to see their content at all on other websites others can take advantage of the fact that content copying websites exist by getting free, valid links from those sites. These sites might also send in traffic to the original site. The number one site that is using our contents is sending more than 3000 unique visitors per month our way.

Webmasters should not worry to much about search engine positions as search engines usually do a very good job of identifying the original site and the copycats. Duplicate content penalties will hit them and not the original site.

A letter that has been send out by the Google Docs team seems to have made the worst case scenario true for some users of the online service. According to Techcrunch who received a copy of a letter that has been send out the following happened: The Google Docs team identified a bug in their online service that may have caused the sharing of documents without the knowledge or permission of the user.

“This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.”

While it is unclear as to how many users have actually been affected by the bug it does outline the problems of storing documents, files and information on the Internet. There is always a chance that the documents will fall into hands that they are not intended for.

But first things first. To shorten an url one would simply head over to the Shrinkomatic website and paste the url in the form on the main page. The service creates a unique short url in the form shrinkomatic.com/xyz which will redirect to the original url. This is definitively not the shortest url for an url shortening service but any name that is easy to remember should be fine for most users because that’s what url shortening is all about.

If you sign up for an account you can manage all the urls that have been created with the service. The list does contain a very nice and maintainable overview of the created urls. It also provides access to statistics detailing how many times the link was accessed (url trackin).

The unique feature are special urls for websites. Special urls are located at their own subdirectory of the website. While this does not necessarily different to creating a single link to a website it does provide the site owner with additional statistics.

The site owner will see all links that point to his website by all users of the service. That’s an excellent way of keeping track of the links if the service is used a lot.

Daniel has some great plans for the service. Users will be able to export their links to txt or csv and also share their links with others. He has more in the pipeline but some features are to unique to be spilled yet.

You can read about new announcements at the Shrinkomatic blog or visit Shrinkomatic directly to shrink some urls.

Shinkomatic has been discontinued. Alternatives are Tiny url or bit.ly.

It is pretty obvious that a computerized summary won’t be as good as one from a human. It might still be worth a try if you lack the time or will to read a longish article. A good test text was the CNN article “Five ways to keep Alzheimer’s away”. The expectation for that article was to be presented with a list of the five ways that can keep Alzheimer’s away.

It is up to the user to pick the amount of sentences that should be returned. It can range from 1 to 100. Trying to squeeze a long article in 1 or 2 sentences might fail more often that it would succeed. Selecting 5 or 10 sentences did not reveal the desired information of the Alzheimer article. It did list some of the recommendations but not all of them.

Even more disturbing was the inclusion of part of the footer links which clearly had nothing to do with the article. The problem here is obviously that the service is analyzing the whole page and not only the part that contains the article. Areas like the header, footer or menu should be exempt from the analysis to avoid the confusion.

A Firefox add-on is available for Great Summary as well. It adds an entry to the right-click menu which sends the page to Great Summary.

The service could be very interesting if the developers would improve the detection rate of the important parts of a web page further. They should also lay more emphasize on titles and lists because these usually contain important information.

Still: There is not much to lose here. If you are desperately needing a summary you might want to give Great Summary a try.

According to the developers of Generatus their product is ideal for the imaginatively challenged. Generatus is a social network status generator which turns the overly repeated and boring statuses like “Martin is working”, “Drinking Coffee” or “Jim is visiting his grandparents” into something witty and original.

Simplicity was probably the main design idea behind Generatus. Males can simply hit the Generate button while females will have to click on the female to generate female statuses (not sure if there is really that much difference to justify that, it is probably used to make use of the right grammatical person in the sentences). It is also possible to use tags to get a status that relates to the selected tags.

The program generates statuses like “Fred missed winning the lottery by only SIX numbers”, “Fred was schizophrenic once, but we’re better now!” or “Susi is pushing up daises”.

Judging from those “witty” statuses it is probably fair to assume that Generatus aims at the school – college kid fraction of the population.

Clicking on the central “star” will close in on that star and fill it with exactly 235 picture thumbnails. The planet can be rotated with the left mouse button and zoomed with the mouse wheel. A click on a preview image will load that image in front, another click will load information about the picture like the name of the artist, a description and a link to the Flickr page.

The Flickr page of the selected photo are loaded in a new tab. The user can use the navigation on top of the screen to load another batch of thumbnail pictures from Flickr which replace the old photos shown on the planet.

Tag Galaxy provides an intuitive way to browse for photos on Flickr. It does require a good chunk of system resources though to function properly. Computer memory usage went up between 250K and 400K when using the service.

Could also be a nice way to determine if you are really the father of a baby.. Sorry, just kidding. The user simply uploads at least one picture and either uploads a second picture or picks the face of a celebrity from the celeb database.

If you ever wondered how your baby with Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Paris Hilton or Johnny Depp would like then here is your change to find it out.

The user can pick a baby frame, select a gender and name for the baby before the baby morphing technology steps in and creates the face of the could be baby.

This is an interesting idea for couples who like to discuss how their children will look like but also for others who love to find out about it. Neat idea.

It searches for domains that make use of both the domain name, subdomains, the extension and directories to create a del.icio.us domain name. In the case of del.icio.us del is the subdomain, icio the domain name and us the domain extension. The creating of those fun names is blazing fast and makes heavy use of Ajax to avoid page loading times.

One thing that’s missing however are actual lookups if the domain name can be registered. Domain finder presents all possible domain name combinations even if they have already been registered.

It would be nice if the lookup would be included. Another option that would fit well would be to link directly to some domain registrants to register the domain name if the lookup revealed that it was still available.

Even better that you can cancel the service at anytime. It is a bit sad that this service is currently only available on Amazon.com but it could happen that the localized Amazon portals in other countries will follow the lead if the service turns out to be a success.

What I like is that you do get a 15% discount and that the items are shipped freely to your location. This could be especially useful for household items that you use on a daily basis. Amazon offers five main categories that hold items, those are: Baby & Child Care, Food & Snacks, Health & Wellness, Household Supplies and Personal Care & Beauty.

The benefit of using a service like this is that you do not have to think of buying an item when you are running out of supplies. I’m not saying that you will never again run into a situation where you are running out of toilet paper or coffee because you still have to select a schedule for the delivery.

The danger that I see is that it could happen that you get either to many items delivered or to few. It probably will take some time until you set the right schedule for the household items. Most items seem to come in packages of two or more which explains the pricing. It did look a bit high on first glance but considering that you do sometimes get 2,3 or even 4 items for that price it sounds reasonable again.

Hundreds (so far) of more or less useful Flash-based widgets are freely available for your website at Yourminis.com. You can add these widgets to your own site by simply copying the embed code of each widget – no further editing is required. You only need some skills in Macromedia Flash if you decide to create new widgets on your own using Yourmini’s API for Flash8 IDE.

More likely you’d want to try existing “minis” created by other people which are made available on the Yourminis website. These widgets often use some external services (Google, Veoh, Craigslist) to acquire and display desired information or media. You can also remix existing widgets to suit the needs of your site better.

You could add some widgets that display contents of news sources such as Digg or let your users watch the latest videos, embed games and other widgets. Check out some examples of what Yourminis offers below:

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