Into The Unknown

For all us frustrated licence payers, Beebhack aims to discuss what the BBC is afraid of mentioning; "This site is designed to be a resource for re-purposing on our own terms the BBC content that we, the licence payers have paid for."


VirusTotal (like Jotti's malware scanner) is a web-based virus scanner; "a service that analyzes suspicious files and facilitates the quick detection of viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware detected by antivirus engines." Simply, you upload a file through the web site, it passes your submission past ~30 commercial antivirus programs and reports the results back to you within two minutes. A remarkably simple way to check a file if you're feeling a bit suspicious. Curious? See a sample results page here (for a real virus file, in this case an MSN worm).


I know this has been around for a while, but it deserves some attention. Are you a Digg user? Do you want to visit a really popular site but it keeps on timing out or downloading really slowly? You could give the Coral CDN a go - in a nutshell, it's a free service anybody can use which lets you request web sites and files, all of which go through their own network of servers scattered around the world. The idea behind this is that at some point in their network, they're bound to have a machine geographcially closer to the target location than your machine is, so it will speed up transfers.

It does work too, particularly for heavily-trafficked sites. It's simple to activate, too: just add .nyud.net to the end of any web address (so google.com would become google.com.nyud.net). .nyud.net:8090 and .nyud.net:8080 also work sometimes when just using .nyud.net doesn't, so give those a go too.

Simple to use, faster transfers and free! Next time a site gets slashdotted or dugg heavily, give it a try. Alternatively, you could give the Planetlab/CoDeeN free academic network a go, although that involves one extra step (choosing one of their server IPs and configuring it as a proxy server in your browser). For a comprehensive list of Planetlab/CoDeeN public proxies, use Samair's Proxy Checker (just look for any proxy with Planetlab/CoDeeN next to it).


Oh, and lastly, if you're after decluttering your browser home page, give Symbaloo a try.