Contrary to claims that emerged Wednesday, Network Solutions said it isn't "front-running" the Internet address registration process, a practice in which a company registers a potential domain immediately after a prospective buyer searches to see if it's available. In fact, the practice that triggered the accusation is an attempt to counteract front-running, the company said.
Front-running can give a registration company an advantage over the customer who wants to register the site--for example by preventing the customer from registering it through a competing registrar or by selling it to the customer at an inflated price.
The company faced criticism of front-running Tuesday, with discussions cropping up at Domain Name News, Slashdot, and DomainState discussion boards.
"Network Solutions has instituted a four-day lock on all domain names searched on their site. They are effectively using phishing techniques to hijack or steal domain names and forcing domain name registrants to register their names at Network Solutions. The standard domain name registration fee at Network Solutions is $34.99--significantly higher than the leading alternatives," complained one commenter.
Although Network Solutions does temporarily register a site a customer searched for, spokeswoman Susan Wade denied there's anything nefarious afoot. "Network Solutions is not front-running," she said.
Network Solutions holds the domain for up to four days, during which time a customer can register it only from Network Solutions and after which it again becomes generally available if unregistered, Wade said. But that feature, she said, is a "pre-emptive" measure to protect customers--from front-runners.
That's because front-runners can tell when a customer has searched for a domain at Network Solutions, for example because Network Solutions then must check availability at other sites when a customer searches, Wade said.
"This search data is captured at the various registries. We believe there are registries and/or Internet service providers that may be selling this data to front-runners. So, by holding domains searched on Network Solutions, this pre-empts the search data being captured," she said.
Spam, zombie robots, and the rest of the dark underbelly of the Internet has led to one of the Web's big annoyances: the captcha. That's the barely readable block of random letters you must translate in order to prove your humanness, and it's supposedly the one thing that separates us from the machines. It's also used in nearly every site registration process--and more recently at site logins. The bottom line is that it's annoying but also utterly necessary to keep evil at bay.
Enter reCAPTCHA, a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. A mix between disease-curing Folding@Home, and MyCroft [review], reCAPTCHA requires users to solve two jumbled words: one is the actual captcha, the other is just a word that needs to be translated into text. These words come from various scanned books and documents residing on the Internet Archive. Many of those books were written before computers and in their current state (PDFs and image files) are just glorified photographs--a medium that is still hard to sort through. Once complete, they'll be digital text, and completely searchable.
Words for translation are not just chosen by random. Documents that have been scanned, get checked by an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine, which is able to pick up many of the words. Those that are misspelled by OCR, or are impossible to read, are plucked and put into the ReCaptcha word pool. Sites can implement ReCaptcha several ways. There are plug-ins for WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB, and PHP.
I've embedded a sample ReCaptcha below. You'll notice both words look similar, as ReCaptcha is using both words from the same source, so you can't tell which one has already been solved.
[found on del.icio.us]
... Read more
(Credit:
Sxip Identity Corporation)
Like most webware fans, I love to play with the cool features at sites such as Splice, Jumpcut, and the like, but most of these Web 2.0 ventures require registration, which in turn requires filling out forms and tracking passwords and log-ins. It's not only Web-based applications and community sites. I often get most frustrated when buying airline tickets or holiday gifts through new online vendors. Typing out my entire address and credit card information is fine a few times, but I have lots of relatives, and the 23rd form gets to be a bit tiring.
In the past, software solutions have filled the gap admirably. One excellent product is Siber System's RoboForm, which provides a robust platform for managing your personal information, all encrypted via AES, BlowFish, or 3DES. While RoboForm is a great program, the amount of information and passwords you can manage is limited for those of us cheapskates not willing to shell out $30 for the full version. The open-source application KeePass is great for securely storing passwords, but it doesn't fill out forms automatically.
Now, a new Firefox extension called Sxipper (pronounced "skipper") aims to improve on that browser's password-management features with a free, secure system for automatically adding your personal information and passwords to Web sites. On installation, Sxipper scours your address book and Firefox preferences for passwords and information you've already saved. It then walks you through a wizard that explains the privacy policy and end-license user agreement, lets you select your personal icon, and asks you to enter basic personal information for your profile.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
After a brief, optional demo from the Sxipper site, you're off and running. If you land on a Web form that's in the Sxipper system, a prompt with your icon will ask if you want to "Sxip this." You'll then be provided with a Sxip dialog that lets you specify which of your personal information you want to add to the form. On page with a log-in form, you can choose which account you'd like to use and then automatically log in. When you visit a form that isn't in the Sxipper database, you can add it to the program's "semantic map" for other users. That map will then be credited with your username. (Register for Splice with Sxip and you should see a "Sxipped by peterb" note at the top of the prompt.)
Though it's still in beta, one obvious problem with Sxipper arises when you've got a log-in page such as Digg's that forces you to complete a randomized CAPTCHA form. Unlike RoboForm, Sxipper currently has no option of adding your log-in and password to the form without automatically entering it, resulting in a CAPTCHA error. Another downside is you can't manually add maps to the system. The only way to add them is to set your Preferences to "Auto Prompt Map Creation," which will prompt you on every form that Sxipper doesn't recognize. The problem there is you might have HTML-based forms you use regularly for various purposes. You don't want to have to cancel the Sxipper prompt each time you visit those forms.
(Credit:
CNET Networks)
Those are both easy issues to fix. Sxipper should add a option to its taskbar icon that lets you manually add a map and a selection to its autoprompt mapping feature that says "No, and don't ask me about this form again." Aside from small bugs and necessary improvements, most of the Sxipper preferences such as changing your map attribution and saving your personal data to a backup file are nonfunctional. In fact, some of the options don't even fit within the preferences pop-up window. You can see what the Sxipper team is up to next with its release notes for the latest version.
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