Recently, we have updated our Website Link Checker’s engine to a much stronger one. This post describes the features of the new engine. We believe that few broken link checkers, if any, can compete with our latest engine. Before this update, our Website Line Checker tool was able to check only two basic types of web page links:

• <a> href values,
• <meta> content url values with <meta> http-equiv="refresh".

When we are talking about web site links, we usually do think of <a> href values. However, from a webmaster’s point of view, it is important that all URLs in the code of the web are correct. For example, it is important to know whether all website’s images (<img> src) do exist. And there are many other ways to link to resources from web pages. Think about Java applets, Flash objects, new HTML5 media tags, etc. The more different types of linking your broken link checker recognizes the better. On the other hand, without losing any real functionality, it might be possible to omit several obsolete and poorly documented tags, which are usually unsupported by modern web browsers. Considering this, we have decided to implement a link checker engine that would fully cover HTML4 and HTML5 standards and CSS3.
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As you probably know from our recent news, Online Domain Tools allows you to create so called Runlinks and Permalinks. What are these good for and how to use them is the topic of this post. We will uncover some technical details so that you are able to get most of these new features.

What Is Runlink?

Runlink is a link that specifies a tool you want to run and how to run it – i.e. the tool’s arguments. A Runlink can be created either manually or using a Runlink button, which is easier and preferred method. Let’s have a look at a simple example. We will create a Runlink for Ping Online that is going to send 2 pings to google.com with 5 second timeouts and other Ping Online arguments will be left with their default values.

1. We type http://ping.online-domain-tools.com/ to the browser’s address bar.
2. We fill the desired arguments in the input form as if we wanted to run the tool with these arguments.
3. Click the Runlink button on the right below the input form.
4. A window with the link pops up.
   
5. The generated link looks as follows:
   

   http://ping.online-domain-tools.com/run/?ipAddress=google.com&w=5000&n=2&i=128&l=32

   As we can see, “run/” was appended to the path of Ping Online’s URL. This tells the server that it is a Runlink. Then we can see the query string contains all the arguments from the input for

   • ipAddress contains the value of the Host / IP address field;
   • w contains the value of the Timeout field;
   • n contains the value of the Count field;
   • i contains the value of the TTL field;
   • l contains the value of the Buffer size field.
6. Now we can copy the given link into the address bar of our browser and see what happens. It is not a big surprise that we have just executed Ping Online with the given arguments.

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There are many online password checkers on the Internet. In this post, we evaluate 24 of them that are somehow serious. We expect all these checkers to work well for common trivial cases – i.e. to recognize a very simple weak password as a weak password and a very complex strong password as a strong password. But, just to be sure, we do test that feature too. Our primary focus here, however, is on passwords that are interesting somehow. The main goal is to see how many of the tested password checkers can evaluate strength of passwords correctly.

Smarter Attacks = Better Checkers

Now, what does it mean to evaluate a strength of a password correctly? It should be noted that from the 24 checkers we compare here, few of them actually support some kind of a dictionary attack. This is why we focus solely on brute-force attacks, which is what all the tested checkers support. Password checkers themselves do not really perform brute-force attacks, they just try to count or estimate how long would it take to an attacker to perform a successful brute-force attack on the given password. We think that the smarter attacker the password checker can “simulate”, the better the password checker is. For example, assume we have this very simple password “qregjperb”. It is simple because it uses lower case Latin alphabet characters only – i.e. set [a-z]. Since it is known that many computer users do use weak passwords, a smart attacker might try to crack this password assuming the limited character set. In this case of 8 characters long password, the attacker would end with approximately 26⁸ possible combinations (we omit the need to test shorter passwords first because the actual length is unknown to the attacker). On the other hand, not that smart attacker might take, for example, a whole ASCII set of characters (256 characters) and thus face a much larger task of approximately 256⁸ possible combinations. It is thus obvious that a password checker, which does not consider these “smart” technique of an attacker, tends to claim many passwords as strong while in fact they can be cracked pretty fast.
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Online UUEncoder and UUDecoder, what is that? uuencode is originally a Unix program used to encode binary data into text representation (see its Linux man page). Many Internet protocols were implemented in a way they expect only text command and data to be used. If binary data are about to be transferred, some kind of binary-to-text encoding must be used. UUEncoding is just one alternative, Wikipedia has a nice table of other alternatives.

Online UUEncoder is simply a web application that is able to transform an input message using UUEncoding. Where there is a UUEncoder available, there is likely to be a UUDecoder present too. Obviously, UUDecoder is something that is able to transform the UUEncoded data to their original form. At least that is what you would expect from it, right? You assume that if you encode something using UUEncoder and then use UUDecoder on the output you get the original data, right? Well, somehow this is not always the case as we are going to show you below.

Common Problems

Online tools are quite specific and different from desktop programs. You run online tools from within your browser. This means that you can be using Windows, Linux, Mac, and many other platforms and run Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, and many other browsers. With a desktop program it is more clear what is the environment the tool is run in.

Online UUEncoding tool probably should support two types of input. For quick short inputs an option to type the input as a text might be a good idea. For larger inputs it comes handy when you can use a file as an input. If you want to encode large binary data it is only the file input that makes sense. At least today, when most browsers are not happy to work with megabytes on information on the page.
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Hello and welcome! This blog is intended to extend Online Domain Tools web site with some, hopefully interesting, information related mostly to what we focus on – tools that you can run online from within your browser. If you read our blog you will get deeper insight into how our tools work. We will discuss common issues that you can experience while using online tools and we will compare other online tools providers with our own implementation.

We will be also glad if we get some feedback from you. So, get ready and have fun!