Sunday, July 19, 2009
Free Firefox plugin allows torrents hidden inside PNG image files
A website called Hid.im posted a Firefox plugin that makes sending torrents to people a simple matter of accessing an image, right-clicking and choosing “Save Torrent As…”. The Hidim Firefox plugin uses the open-source portable network graphics (PNG) file format to encode it data through an image which appears like this:
This JPG image displays graphically what three separate PNG files would look like, as they were created on Hid.im to demonstrate the image. These files are (top) sameer verma - olpc photo dvd.torrent, (middle) legaltorrents collections - web development icons superset.torrent and (bottom) politics apocalypse - oppressed by the authorities remix sources.torrent. They will not work with the Firefox plugin. Visit the Hid.im site to right-click on the original PNG images there on the front page to test the application.
Internally within the 2 pixel tall PNG file the data is arranged in reverse vertical columns, proceeding from left to right as in the following layout:
The torrent data is stored in place of what would otherwise be valid 24-bit red,green,blue (RGB) pixel values, which is what the internal PNG file format uses to determine each pixel’s color value. By having a value from 0-255 each for red, green and blue, a single pixel’s color within an image can be determined. In the Hid.im implementation, the RGB color data is replaced with bytes from the torrent data, thereby making the image appear like static or snow on the screen, while actually conveying real data underneath.
In order for the plugin to determine whether or not a particular PNG file is an actual Hid.im image, and not just one which looks like it, it looks for this embedded sequence of characters, which appears at the beginning of the file: [104, 105, 100, 105, 109, 32, 105, 115, 32, 116, 111, 114, 114, 101, 110, 116, 115, 33]. These characters correspond to the following ASCII sequence: “hidim is torrents!” (in lower-case).
If that character sequence is found, then the following data within the PNG file is used to extract a torrent, which according to the website’s example, appears in the following format, with each section separated by colons:
- Line length (bencoded integer)
- Filename (bencoded string)
- sha1 hash of the .torrent file (bencoded string)
- data (bencoded string)
The bencode (pronounced Bee-encode) structure is the encoding format used for P2P BitTorrent applications, and is native to their internal structure. Bencoding supports integers, strings, lists and dictionaries (which are a list of associative arrays). There is some sample source code on the Hid.im website showing how the Bookmarklet (the encoded torrent data file) can be converted, and saved to disk.
Right now the application is open source. It’s limited in size to a 250KB PNG file, but is governed by the extremely loose MIT License, which would allow for greater length PNG files to be created quite easily. The MIT License states:
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
The extremely free nature of the MIT License was chosen because the application’s creator, Michael Nutt, desires it to be made into a wide web standard. Right now there is only the Firefox/Safari plugin, but he hopes that since it is open source with such a free license structure, it won’t be long until other browsers are supported.
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Invesp Launches BlogRank
If you have been blogging for a while, you probably how important it is to network with bloggers on your same niche, right? The problem is that sometimes it is tough to find those bloggers. Technorati does not have a breakdown by niche or categories. Some blog directories do, but they don’t have too many indexed blogs to be worth it.
Thinking about that problem the guys from Invesp.com launched the BlogRank service. They are tracking over 30,000 blogs, and they use a proprietary algorithm to rank those blogs inside each category. The interesting thing is that apart from the overall rank, you can also check the rank for individual factors, for example the blogs with the largest RSS readership or lowest Alexa rank.
The first release has 50 categories, but they are planning to expand it to 500. It is worth a bookmark if you often find yourself trying to find good blogs on specific niches.
Now You Can Use Dynamic Subject Lines for Your Feedburner Emails
This was probably the most requested feature in the history of Feedburner. Until yesterday, if people subscribed to your blog via the Feedburner email service, all the subject lines of your emails would be static, containing either the name of your blog or some other text that you would specify.
This is obviously annoying because subscribers can’t know what the email is about before they open it. On Daily Writing Tips we have close to 10,000 email subscribers, and at least once a week one of them would email us asking how come the subject lines only contained the name of the blog….
Well, good news (spotted by Problogger and Technotip). Feedburner was probably working on that feature already, and today they finally released it.
Now you can use the code ${latestItemTitle} to make the subject line of your emails equal to the title of your latest post. Once logged in Feedburner, you can do this under “Publicize” > “Email Subscrptions” > “Email Branding.”
You will find the code there, with some examples of how you can use it. Cool stuff.
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
How Popular is Your Site?
Popuri.us is a simple web tool to check the popularity of your website. Here is a list of factors that it takes into consideration:
- Google Pagerank
- Alexa Rank
- Compete Rank
- Google Backlinks
- Yahoo Backlinks
- MSN Backlinks
- Technorati Links
- Delicious Bookmarks
- Bloglines Subsribers
Tools for Displaying Online Visitors
If you have a popular website you could consider displaying the number of online visitors. It will give you and your readers the idea of how many people are reading the blog at any given time, what hours of the day are the most trafficked ones and so on.
Below you will find three online tools that offer this feature. Bear in mind that you should avoid using those counters if the average number of readers on your blog is really low; after all you do not want to give a reader the impression that he is the only one reading your stuff.
- whos.amung.us: it is a widget that can be easily integrated into any website. There is no registration required and you can even choose to hide the widget so that no one else will be able to access the statistics.
- 24Log.com: the service requires registration, but it offers several buttons and styles to choose from. Additionally you can also define the time frame that will be used to compute the number of online users.
- Myonlineusers.com: this is a very simple service that will display the number of online users through a text link. You just need to integrate a Javascript code into your template.
Monday, July 6, 2009
Monetize your blog with Auction Ads
Auction Ads is a new advertising network (owned by Shoemoney Media Group and MediaWhiz) that will enable bloggers and website owners to monetize their blog by displaying eBay auctions. A lot of people have already reviewed the service extensively, so instead of reinventing the wheel I will just link to the best reviews around the blogosphere, check it out:
If you enjoy this article please comment me. Thank you!!!!Making Money Online is About Getting Big (and Not About Jamming Ads on Your Website)
I see this far too often:
- Guy reads on some blog or website that it is possible to work from home and make thousands of dollars from the Internet.
- Guy gets excited and creates a website or blog.
- Guy starts getting some traffic, and right after he jams his website with all kinds of ads. CPM banners, 125×125 buttons, Google Adsense, Kontera and so on.
- Guy wonders how come he is just making $100 monthly after a lot of hard work
When I come across those small websites hammered with ads I get the impression that the owner is trying to milk every last penny out of the visitors that are coming there, instead of trying to grow the site itself.
Sure depending on your luck and skill you might end up making a couple of hundred dollars every month. But is that what you are aiming for? Even if you manage to reach $1,000 monthly. Is that your ultimate goal?
The problem with this approach is twofold. First of all when you pack your website with ads all over the place, you will damage your reputation. Some readers will think that you are just trying to make a quick buck, and they will probably never return.
Secondly, when you try to make as much money as possible from a website that is not even getting 1,000 uniques a day, you automatically start with the wrong mindset. You adjust your goals accordingly, probably limiting your growth potential.
Now you might ask: “what about sites like TechCrunch or Mashable that also have ads all over the place?”
Well, those websites already have a very big audience, and huge credibility on the market. Once you are at that stage, you probably can pull off an ad-heavy layout without facing too many problems. But I am sure that when Michael Arrington started TechCrunch his main goal was to make the blog an authority on its niche, and not to squeeze money out of his early visitors.
Note that even those large websites never blend ads with the content, or use intrusive forms of advertising like pop-ups and in-text ads.
The takeaway message is: if you want to make money online, aim to get big and credible first, and then monetize it.