It’s a fair question right? Pretty much everyone plays at least one Facebook game these days, well almost everyone :) They’re easy to set up, they can take much of your free time and anyone can get into them relatively easily. Fast forward a bit though and you start to realize that if you want to do well at these games, they’re actually quite hard. You’re not going to blast from level 1 to whatever the level cap is in your game of choice over night. But probably that’s why people are addicted to them.

My newest addiction is Roller Coaster Kingdom. I had played a bit of FarmVille and Mafia Wars and had done well enough.
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Today, one of the top notch content monitoring services TheWebWatcher.com (http://www.thewebwatcher.com) removed the -beta after three years of fine-tuning and stated that the service will be free for lifetime.

“However the customers are strongly encouraged to donate when they are using the service for commercial needs.”, they said.

The service will be free for lifetime and that changes the plans of the team to make it payable after the beta- period. The users that can afford to donate however will have a “special” flag on their accounts that will increase the limits of URLs that can be monitored per account. (more…)

An interesting project, YouTomb (http://youtomb.mit.edu/) collects the banned from YouTube videos for alleged copyright violation.

The authors says that “YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation.”
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Being being curious what’s new in Windows Vista ? Look at the code … :-)
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Are they (Google) using API or just grabbing ?

A fresh screenshot from GoogleNews (http://news.google.com) :)

// idiom 1
cop[0].goodInPercent = 100;
cop[1].goodInPercent = 0;

// idiom 2
isCrowd = personCounter >= 3;

// idiom 3
injury += insult;

// idiom 4
1: board.draw();
goto 1;
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Another bug in the Wordpress platform was discovered yesterday. This time the vulnerabilities exist in the XMLRPC and Pingback
implementation that are included with Wordpress.

The advisory says that WordPress does not sanitize the sourceURI before passing it to wp_remote_fopen(); and this makes it possible to specify non-HTTP resources to be read such as local files or ftp sources. In particular, a malicious user can determine whether certain files exist on the local file system.
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This time the exploit uses global variables in “/wp-trackback.php”. The exploit can be used only if the “register_globals” variable on the host PHP server is on (e.g. “/etc/php.ini” has “register globals=on”) and the Trackbacks on the Wordpress<=2.0.6 are enabled.

On success, the expoit gets the hash password of admin user.
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The author claims that the web-site is 18.939 kilometers high (that’s about 11.769 miles), and the highest “div” element of the world is defined like that:

div#whws {
  font-size: 100cm;
  height: 18939em;
  line-height: 1.0;
}

And here’s the address - http://worlds-highest-website.com

According to the Netcraft survey, the Web has grown 41.5% this year. The increase of 30.9 million sites for 2006 makes the web with 105,244,649 sites, which means that the Internet has doubled in size since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million.

The leader of web server platforms is Apache with 60,32%, followed by Microsoft (Microsoft-Internet-Information-Server, Microsoft-IIS, Microsoft-IIS-W, Microsoft-PWS-95, & Microsoft-PWS) - 32,78%, Zeus - 0,49% and Sun (SunONE, iPlanet-Enterprise, Netscape-Enterprise, Netscape-FastTrack, Netscape-Commerce, Netscape-Communications, Netsite-Commerce & Netsite-Communications) - 0,44%.

Blogs and small business web sites have driven the explosive growth this year, with huge increases at free blogging services at Google and Microsoft. Domain industry juggernauts Go Daddy (U.S.) and 1&1 Internet (Germany) have also seen strong demand for low-priced domain names and shared hosting accounts.

Orginalsignal.com is a typical Web 2.0 application (there’s no logo with reflection effect on the top right corner, but I hope that the guys ill fix it;) that aggregates information from different sites like TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Solution Watch, 37signals, eHub, GigaOM, etc.

The aggregator is organized in four categories which include - Web2, Digg, Buzz and 15 Blogs.

The Web 2 category aggregates the most popular blogs on the Web 2 theme, including blogs like TechCrunch, eHub, Museum of Modern Betas (very interesting blog for the Beta services), etc.

The Digg part gives the top stories from digg.com grouped by day and week.

The Buzz part presents the top links from the Bookmark sites like - del.icio.us, reddit.com, topix.net, etc.

The 15 Blogs part gives the last posts from 15 Blogs including AListAprt, ProBlogger, The Official Google Blog, Engadget, etc.

In addition, OriginalSignal.com offers a detailed search on all categories mentioned above, and also a RSS feed on them.

OriginalSignals.com is a perfect web2 & blog news aggregator that will keep you tuned into the world of Internet.

Ever wondered where are they on the map?

Cool Maps - 7 Wonders is a set of interactive Google Maps on different categories on the topic of the 7 Wonders of the World. The site uses Google Maps API, and the ‘wonders’ are separated in four categories:

The Leaning Tower of Pisa and The Stonehenge are with good views on Google Maps, so don’t miss them if browse the site. Enjoy !