Enhanced Pixels

Today, I would like to offer a tip on opening restricted websites. When I say restricted websites, I do not mean anything illegal, but rather sites, which you cannot open from places like your office at work or school. Those sites aren’t harmful, but often have been deemed as distracting in certain environments, so it might be better not to access them. I will show you how to do it anyway. Actually, there are a few ways to do it:
• Search for a website in Google (www.website.com). You will notice, that when you want to click on the website, it will not open. However, you can open the cache version of the page, which will enable you to visit the site. It might be a slightly older version though.
• Use an online IP conversion tool to get the IP address of a particular website and enter the IP address in your browser. This should open the website as well.
• Use proxy anonymizer tool website, which will change your IP address. This will change your identity on the internet and should allow you to visit the restricted website as well.
I am treating the above guide as an education tool, so please don’t abuse the knowledge you gained too much.

Many people use Internet Explorer and never care to download and try any other web browser. Internet Explorer is definitely the most popular browser, but who said that it is the best? Only because it comes for free with your Windows? As a person who prefers Opera and Firefox, I find it inconvenient that some sites only work in Internet explorer. Of course, I have IE installed on my PC and if necessary, I open it, but I prefer not to do it. It would be just another browser open on my computer. Recently, I was wondering, how many people can name other browsers, like Opera, Firefox or Netscape? Probably not everybody, as only those, who live geeky lives, are more likely to be able to do it. However, I am glad that overall awareness of other browsers is growing, and that people are more and more open to other browsers as well. I predict that in the future, there will be many good browsers which we will be able to choose. Today the competition is still not so steep, but in the years to come, there will be more and more companies releasing competitive browsers. I encourage each one of you to try at least one other browser than IE, and see how you like it.

Do you think that your credit card details are safe at the restaurants you visit? Even though in most cases your credit card details are safe, hackers have ways to hack into cash register terminals and steal credit and debit card numbers. Such details are often sold later on the Internet, and you can imagine what problems it might cause. This year, there was a situation like this, as two hackers managed to hack into 11 Dave & Buster’s cash register terminals. It has been said, that they captured data for about 5,000 credit and debit cards, which is a quite large number considering those were only two hackers. While I am not saying we should not visit restaurants, I think that we should look a little bit deeper into possible security vulnerabilities at such establishments.

An operating system is one of the most important parts of a computer. While technically it may not be a part of hardware, it is a software which is really necessary. Windows XP is still a very popular operating system, even thought Windows Vista was released some time ago. The question is: when will Windows XP disappear? It may not be easy to answer the question fully, but Microsoft has stated some time ago, that it will stop selling/ allowing to preinstall Windows XP in 2010. There is an exception to this rule, specifically when it comes to very cheap computers being sold in China and India. Such computers will still contain Windows XP to make it possible to keep the price as low as possible.

Many years ago, nobody heard about social networks, or at least they were not so popular as they are today. Currently, social networks are among the most popular internet sites and millions of people who would otherwise probably not use internet that often, are spending many hours in front of their computers. Social networks allow people to make friends with others who live very far away, possibly even in other counties. Social networks are also used to communicate with those who we know in real life. With so much recent success of these networks, the question is whether they pose any danger. After observing people socializing on the internet, I have to say that there might be a danger that since people are anonymous, they might say things they wouldn’t dare in real life.

Have you ever wondered what the phenomena of Craiglists is? The site is the seventh most viewed site on the internet. Not bad, isn’t it? Even though the website is originally based in San Francisco, it operates nationwide and also worldwide. The idea is very simple. People like to buy and sell used things and this is where craiglists come in and help. With their thousands of classified ads, no wonder that the site has so many visitors. People will always need to be buying and selling things and this is why sites like that will always be popular. I remember seeing Craig the founder of craiglist.org on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart earlier this year. Just an ordinary guy, nothing special, which proves that anyone can start a career on the net and be successful.

Some movies are known to have great dialogues between characters, just the only problem is that as a viewer you do not have influence over the dialogues in any way. When it comes to computer games the situation is completely different. The developers of games can allow users to choose what their in-game character will say, but I feel that they do not use this liberty as much as they could. To truly feel like you are your in-game character you need to have influence over the actions of your avatar and this includes what he will say in specific situations. Games like Neverwinter Nights or Knights of the Old Republic are examples of games which contain hundreds of pages of dialogues and at the same time allow the player to choose what he will respond to non-player characters.

Most of us want to be rich and even if we are rich according to world standards, we still want more and more money. Other people know this fact and some of them would do anything to cheat other people from their money. This is basically how the Nigerian confidence trick scams emerged. They are also called advance fee fraud and are based on the fact that the target is persuaded to advance relatively small sums of money in the hope of realizing a much larger gain. Don’t be fooled by such scams, as it is easy to loose your hard earned money. There are a lot of scammers on the internet and you should be careful with whom you are doing business.

If you are using Internet Explorer as your main browser, you can significantly improve your performance if you know the shortcuts to some of the actions and if you know how to use them. Let me here quote a few examples of very useful shortcuts that can save you a lot of time while browsing:

Personally I don’t use all of the shortcuts, but a lot of them are useful and can increase your performance considerably.

Websites are a crucial element of the World Wide Web and no wonder that webmasters like to look at trends and statistics associated with them. In order to compare different websites with each other you may want to visit Google Trends, as you will be able to see some pretty interesting information. First of all, you will be able to see the search volume of keywords, but most importantly, you will have access to data displaying daily unique visitors for many sites. This way you can compare two different websites and see which one is more popular. While I encourage you to use this tool, it doesn’t have as much data as other visitor tracking tools such as Alexa and that is why you shouldn’t only depend on Google Trends for traffic estimates.