Archive for the ‘web’ Category
Tor
December 23rd, 2008
Tor is a program designed to allow its users to surf the web anonymously. When the user requests a page, Tor directs the request to one of the servers on its network, which sends the request on through the network until it reaches its destination. The destination server sees a request from one of Tor’s nodes, not from the original user, thereby providing them a degree on anonymity.
It’s also now possible for Tor users to host servers anonymously, allowing them to share potentially restricted content.
What prompted me to write this post was an article in Wired which noted that there’s now a web service called tor2web which allows a regular user to browse Tor’s servers (albeit without anonymity). Unfortunately, most of the servers seem to contain either (1) pornography, (2) conspiracy theorists, or (3) Linux user groups. Still, the technology’s pretty neat!
Incestuous Linking
December 11th, 2007
Incestuous linking occurs when a number of sites all link to each other in order to increase their search engine rankings. Sensible search engines (Google, for example) filter out these “incestuous” links.
As always, you can read more about this phenomenon on Wikipedia.
A fine example of incestuous linking can be found here.