~ Combing resources ~
         Petit image    Combing
resources
Version December 2000
Compiled with the help of Rumsteack
   

See also the [main], [local], [regional] and [usenet] search engines pages
I have also added a small digression about the DANGERS you can incurr in when searching
[akamai galore]
Combing is an important technique - whatever interest you may have - quite effective and pretty useful in order to spare an incredible lot of Internet searching hours. Webpages providers, counters and stats applications, webrings organisations and much more, all have finalized search engines that you can use at leisure for combing purposes, exactly as you may want to use the [local] and [regional] engines. You can also use the [main] search engines and/or ftp search and/or [usenet] search.
You'll find some essays about combing on the main [Combing] page
[Web page providers] [Url relocators] [Web rings etc.] [Web-databases] [Other stuff]
[Xoom] [Hitbox] [Fortunecity] [Geocities]

~ Webpages providers ~

(See also the [local] search engines page)

These pages are often used as repositories for files you may be searching for, beware the fact that a mp3, exe or jpg file may have a "whatever" three-letters extension. Good queries (with well-placed * and ? wildcards combionations) will help a lot in finding "hidden" files here.


Acme City

 
AOL

 
Freespeech

   
           
Freeyellow

   
           
Fortunecity

   
           
Geocities
 
Netscape


Tripod
Search   

Xoom
    XOOM.com     The Internet
     

~ URL Relocators ~

Million of pages are added/deleted/modified every day, some of them carrying information you may need or/and you did not even suspect could exist. Usually, the webmasters of these kind of sites use relocators - for obvious reasons - therefore the material there can be tracked this way.

Cjb.net

   
 

Tsx.org
 
This form searches in Description and Keyword.
Search in Title
Do NOT Show Adult Sites

~ Webrings, counters and Top whatever ~

Don't waste your time doing it yourself, others have already done it for you (Surreal5)


Hitbox
(Now yep.com, heavily advertisement-infested & crippled :-(

   

For instance: http://www.yep.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?criteria=searching&x=6&y=9

The Webring (now fagocitated by yahoo :-(
Search for: Any Word All Words Exact Phrase
In: Ring Descriptions  Ring Names & Keywords

For instance: http://search.webring.yahoo.com/search?p=hacking :-)

Related readings

"The importance of Webrings for combing purposes", by Lorenzo Gatti

~ Search for Databases ~

If you discover a database devoted to your field of inquiry, it can be like striking gold

FinderSeeker
Category :
Country :
Keywords :
Leave Blank for all Search Engines
Display max. of hits per page


~ Other stuff ~



Some of these services can be really useful, behind all their commercial crapness
[DirectHit]   [Links2Go]   [AboutCom]
DirectHit

Search DirectHit for... 
Advanced Search
help


Links2go

Links2go Search
Search Within: All Topics; Privacy and Security ; Internet ; Web Search ; Statistics


Aboutcom

Search for    



akamai galore

see below: Using the akamai bastards for our anticensorship purposes


Please note that the abovereported Aboutcom site is an heavily commercially infested service, and that they also use webbugs!
I found the well known "akamai" one inside their form in September 2000, and this motivated me to write this snippet:

src="http://a772.g.akamai.net/6/772/968/1ae79ffda76a86/images.about.com/all/buttons/H_go_butt_ffffff.gif

You may be interested to know that Akamai is nowadays one of the top "spying" organisations on the web: The original idea was to reduce delay: Akamai pushes much Web content to a network of servers located around the Internet, thus reducing the load on a Web site's central computers. It's called network caching. Akamai selects the most data-rich content, like graphics and photos and put it on its servers. Akamai's system then decides within milliseconds the fastest route to deliver each request for Web content to an individual surfer. This surfer (you) is eo ipso tracked.
To do that, Akamai continually tracks Internet traffic from its monitors on more than 100 of the networks that together make up the Internet. You can easily infer how many sniffing and grepping possibilities this opens to akamai itself and how easily you can be tracked (akamai inter alia allows Web sites like Yahoo to track their individual surfers, allowing them to customize its response to each individual and to sytematize individual patterns for comercial purposes).
For more info about webbugs visit this very good site: [http://www.privacyfoundation.org/education.html]

As an interesting side note, the akamai clowns have of course proudly assembled a huge commercial database of IP numbers's with their "geographic and network point of origin":
http://www.akamai.com/html/sv/edse_eshow.html
It is indeed very kind of them to tell us between (and not so between!) the lines what they are doing... however, since I presume that soon or later they will realize that the following infos don't sound as innocent as they presume, and since I therefore reckon that th following words will disappear, I'll report them here, just in case. Read the following and have your due cold shivers back along your spine... "
Using Akamai's EdgeAdvantageTM platform, intelligent mapping technology, and enormous network reach (thousands of servers in hundreds of networks around the world), EdgeScape maps user IP addresses to their geographic and network point of origin. This information is assembled into a vast knowledge base and made available to Edgescape customers. A customer's Web server or application server communicates with the EdgeScape knowledge base by using a proprietary API and EdgeScape Engine-software that constantly taps into the knowledge base to retrieve the very latest information. Each time a user accesses the Web site, EdgeScape provides the following data:

� Country from which user is accessing site
� Geographic region within that country (i.e., state or province)
� Name of user's origin network
� User connection type: dial-up, DSL, ISDN or cable".
Akamai also scans your C:WINDOWS, does trojan horse probes&more. I'm using a number of firewall and hack tracing utils on my system. My logs show that Akamai uses non-standard ports, uses Trojan horse probes such as Sub-7 and Backdoor G2. It also scanned my C:WINDOWS directory. Typical ping and port probes were launched on Ports 1408, 1431, 1434. By their using Trojan Horse probes as well as scanning the main Windows directory goes FAR beyond 'serving' their customers and clients. Consider the implications of planing CLient server tojans on YOUR system and reading what's in YOUR directory. How is this supposed to better serve YOU? Answer: It doesn't! DoubleClick isn't any better. It too uses sneaky port, trojan horse probes *AND* Microsoft's Netmeeting in attempting to connect with your computer. Those companies have realised that the cookie accepters are dwindling and are now resorting to stealth technology. If you value your privacy, write them.
Quite a snooping, eh? Of course many other, more specific info can be gathered (and sold or simply used) as well. Sounds like Orwell's manifesto for the new millennium :-(

A good private firewall and/or proxy combination, a decent level of anonymity and a more widespread use of PGP would help a lot in this context...

A quite interesting sidefinding

A quite interesting sidefinding is that YOU can use akamai to bypass censorship proxies at work or at school... this is great fun... SINCE NO PROXY WOULD EVER DARE TO BLOCK AKAMAI! (the respect for all sort of commercial bastards of most sysads and "censorship enforcers" is as well known as ludicrous... ehehe :-) just use a url like this one... http://a1.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/ (this will do, but there are many more, of course... investigate using a good firewall sniffer then add your url... so to get my site through this own-made 'censorship bypasser' you would link to: http://a1.g.akamaitech.net/6/6/6/6/www.searchlores.org/ NOONE will block your connections any more... Moreover I imagine you have an idea of the huge quantity of akamai loggings any average server will get during a day... ehehe...
qui potest capere capiat...

I'm sorry: seems kinda like I discovered "hot water": In fact, after having published this snippet, I found a MUCH BETTER (and previous) explanation of this technique by Bennett Haselton @ peacefire:


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