webrampage

Now you want to go to some site at school or work and you it’s blocked. And you get an idea. You start using proxy sites. And a few days later, you see that the proxy sites you used are all blocked. Well you could go around looking for new proxy sites every time the filters block one of the proxy sites you used to visit the blocked sites or you could do something else that is a lot better.

Okay stop thinking about using proxy sites. They will eventually get blocked. Okay now this is a little trick that I will teach you and this works. It’s pretty easy and most likely will work on all URL filters. For example, you want to visit brainfeedlabs.com and it’s blocked. Check if the command-prompt is enabled. If it works then great, and if not then you will have to do this thing at home and try it the next day at school or work. Okay open command-prompt and type “ping brainfeedlabs.com” and you will see some stuff come up on the screen. Now on the first line it should say something like “Pinging brainfeedlabs.com [65.254.250.102] with 32 bytes of data:”. You want to write down the IP address of the domain, which in my example is 65.254.250.102 (the number in the square brackets).

Then you want to convert the numbers in the IP address to an eight-digit binary number. You can do this by using the Windows Calculator. So, open it and click on “View” and set it to “Scientific” and then type “65″ and click on the “Bin” option. And it will convert it to an eight-digit binary number for you. So write down the number and do this for the rest of the numbers and write them down in the order they are in the IP address.

Now you should end up with a number like “100000111111110111110101100110″. And then you want to convert this eight-digit binary number back to a normal number. So do that and you should now have a shorter number like “8650229″. Okay open Firefox or Opera (this does not work in Internet Explorer) and type “http://8650229″ in the URL bar and it should take you to the blocked site. And if does not then check if you have done any mistakes in writing down the IP and then converting it. Or maybe they already have made sure that this does not work. But not a lot of people know about this, so you probably should check for mistakes.

There might be times when you get confused on which browser you should use, or maybe you just stuck to one browser for years and didn’t really care about checking out the other browsers. Well it can actually get confusing as the browsers keep adding new features and try not to fall behind. Like I kept switching between Internet Explorer (also called IE) and Firefox. Well there’s been a great war over this in 90s, but not between IE and Firefox. It was between IE and Netscape Navigator.

Netscape Navigator was the most widely used browser in the 90s and Microsoft had just started working on IE 1.0 which was released later as part of Windows 95 Plus! Pack in the August of 1995. Both Netscape and Microsoft released new versions of their browsers as fast as they could. They added new features, but didn’t really care about fixing the bugs and so it was a time of unstable browsers. Microsoft started to win the first browser war as they supported scripting and CSS, IE was also the default browser in all Windows (95% of the people used Windows) and most of all, Microsoft was a bigger company than Netscape and that means, they had more money to develop their browser. And in 1997, IE was also the default browser on Macs for five years.

IE won the first browser war, Netscape fell from 85% to less than 1%. And IE is now being used by 95% of the people. Then the second browser war begun. Now it was between IE and Firefox. Firefox was basically an experimental project of Mozilla, started by Dave Hyatt and Dave Ross. Right now, we don’t know which browser will win the second browser war. But at the moment, IE is on the lead as Firefox has only about 16% of the market share (it’s the second most popular browser). And if you are thinking about Opera and Safari. Don’t worry, most people don’t even know they exist.

I think that IE is great for security while Firefox has some features like you can choose from about 2000 add-ons, change the theme and installing plugins are fast and easy. Firefox has it’s anti-phishing feature, but still it doesn’t make me feel as safe and secure as IE does. Plus, Firefox might have some privacy issues. Yeah because it sends out information to Google to check if the web page is safe to browse and that’s basically how their anti-phishing works. Well I’ll look into this and post more about it.

I would suggest that you go with Firefox if you are into web developing or like to do something more than just checking your email and surfing the web, because it has some really great add-ons. And it’s always good to keep both, IE and Firefox installed on your computer if you are web designer/developer, since you need to see if your pages work and look good on both browsers.

By the way, here is some interesting stuff. Okay in 1997, the IE team had a big party in San Fransisco to celebrate the release of IE 4.0 and they had this big 10 feet IE logo. And after the party they put the big logo in front of the Netscape office and it also had a sign saying, “From the IE team”. Then the Netscape team had their dinosaur mascot hold a sign reading, “Netscape 75, Microsoft 18″ (representing the market distribution at that time). Another interesting thing is that the IE team and Firefox team are so nice to each other. They worked together on making Firefox compatible with Vista, and IE team sent a cake to Mozilla to congratulate them on Firefox 2.0. Though Bill Gates criticized Firefox by commenting, “so much software gets downloaded all the time, but do people actually use it?”.