PHP: Clean up all the user input

One of the most common exploits are the result of unintended user input. User input by URL, forms and cookies has to get cleaned up from any exploitable input before doing anything with it. Most importantly you want html characters (like <,>) to be encoded to their harmless html representative and ', " escaped by a slash to exclude external code to be forced into your site. This script code below runs through the array $_GET, $_POST and $_COOKIE, and cleans up the values passed from the user. Please force integers on user input e.g. ID's by stripping out any other character. I'ts best to always also have Mod security installed.

These filters (filter_var) only work in PHP5, but with a good regular expression it can be also run in other versions. It's also good to truncate a string to a maximum number of characters or else you could exposed to this. In this script the string allowed is limited to 100 characters this could break alot of systems (like long user comments) so be carefull with that.

PHP: Working with forms

Never put any settings in hidden form fields, and expect them to not be exploited. Easily exploitable is the example below where a form value identifies the user by UserID.

These hidden form fields can be set to any value. Look at this example on a major bank website. Another tip is to add a token to a form field that is based on the clients encrypted IP, session and/or cookie so the form is harder to temper with by CRSF exploits. More on tokens and why it's needed in my upcoming post.

Also dropdowns can best be setup like the example below to restrict unexpected values from the user in $dropdown.

PHP: uploading files

Never let people upload stuff to your server, unless you know what you are doing. Best way is to store the uploaded file in a folder unavailable via a url (e.g. next to your public_html folder) and have a file act as a proxy that grabs the uploaded file and forces a innocent extension like .jpg (only when it's an jpeg of course).

Javascript: don't echo/print user input in javascript

A very common exploit like XSS is usably the fault of javascript code beeing run on the domain. Javascript can steal and forward user cookies, or make any (unintended) user actions like "delete account". For example this javascript php combination:

Could easily be exploited by creating a url /?username=name'+alert(1);+foo+=+'bar. The cleanArray() function above helps some against these problems since it adds slashes, truncates the string and encodes characters.

User management: don't store anything critical in a cookie

It seems tempting to store certain values in a cookie, saving time to retrieve settings from a database for example. For example to give a user administration rights:

Also saving $passwords, $usernames and $userID's (especially incremental $userID's. UserID = 1 having admin capabilities?) in a cookie is a bad idea, cookies are as easy to tamper with as changing a variable in a URL. Best way is to crypt or md5 settings to identify a user:

When a user has a cookie, and you want to check it's credentials. From the cookie $useridentifier you generate the md5 by combining your encrypt key and user IP and match that with the users cookie set.

Another best practice is to set the cookie to HTTPOnly, to exclude javascript (AJAX) to read the cookie contents.

PHP: Header forwards

An not widely known behavior on a well known practice: A header forward, without a exit() or die() could continue to load the page if the browser (or an exploiter) continues to load the page.

Mysql: limit your updates and deletes

When performing sql queries that contain dynamic variables always limit your query to 1 (of course unless you need to update or delete a bunch).

Apache: Mod Security

Install mod security. It has a nice black list of rules that block certain (common) exploit attempts from the external environment e.g. blocking exploits in the user agent string, bogus image uploads, injecting XSS, SQL injecting, commands, and url request string. In your .htaccess you set the mod_security to on on most apache installs:

And last be very careful when installing external scripts like Wordpress, Gallery or even Cpanel (webbased server control panel) on your server. These scripts could have a security hole that can be exploited throughout your domain and even on the whole server. Always update to the latest version, and don't install in the standard directory so crawl bots won't find it easily.

• Competition in the search engine listing is huge and always on your tail. With a very good reason: real money is being earned from the traffic. Thousands of dollars a day could be the difference between being #1 or #2. If you find a great way to out rank your competitor, you can count on them imitating your strategy. And not much stands in their way, because it’s hard to hide your SEO strategy with tools like Yahoo! SiteExplorer or Technorati that reveal your (in-)linking strategy. Or notepad that shows your complete page markup (HTML) . While page markup and content are important, my experience shows inlinks are the main ingredient to success (note: that’s not a secret). All these success factors can be revealed and adopted by the competition.
• Search engines are always tweaking their ranking algorithms. Your strategy that got you to the top, could as easily bring you back to the bottom again. If you are #1 yesterday, and #1 today, doesn’t mean you will be #1 tomorrow. I’ve learned that the hard way by now…

You end up with a constant craze of tweaking your markup, adding content, revising changes based on a possible relation between your edit and rankings, expand your site with functions, restyle to minimalism, focusing on high traffic keywords, focusing on niche keywords, link exchanges, no-following, etc. Whatever your personal fad is.
But in the end, the search engines are a blackbox, and you can only hope that you’re lucky enough to come out on top.
My thoughts went out to search for another way to make money with online traffic without search engines as middlemen who determine my online and offline faith. I don’t want to invest in (ad-) campaigns, or do low margin arbitrage on buying and selling traffic, nor do I want to game the system since that wouldn’t be a long term strategy either. I need a strategy that is low maintenance, fully automated, little competition, providing quality ad views/leads and viable as a respectable long term business. It maybe sounds lazy, but that’s not my intention, these qualities will make a scalable business with low operating costs.
And there the answer is: 404. File not found. Dead links. Expired domains. Misspellings. Typos. Dead ends. All traffic that goes to waste and ends on a blank page. I might be able to come up with a variation of what businesses are already doing with dead-end traffic:

• Millions of people mistype domains. Even a small percentage of 0.01%, could lead to billions of pageviews on the wrong place. Instead of focusing on the first part of a domain name (e.g. googgle.com) by buying all these misspellings (typo squatting is a well known ‘business’ practice) for a few dollars each, this company made a deal with the country of Cameroon – owner of the .cm extension – to handle all typos in the last three characters of the domain name: (“domain.cm”). This deal leads any domain + .cm to their ad page.
• Instead of getting the standard not found page, or could not connect from your browser, internet provider Verisign hijacks the user and redirects them to a related ad page instead. A nice traffic flow leading to a good revenue bonus for an internet provider. But they are not unique: browser toolbars are also in the game with a ‘service’ of fetching a dead link, and redirecting a search results/ad page to the browser. Google, Adobe, Yahoo, Microsoft are all forwarding dead end traffic to their businesses. Google’s new browser chrome has it started turned on.

So my brain brainstormed on my next possible project that didn’t need Google, or any other search engine: Own 404! Spider the internet in a smart way, get loads of data from browsers and webpages. See how internet traffic moves from click to click, and focusing on dead ends: a page that isn’t there anymore. When logged, get control of the page (yes, legally), push to a relevant ad page. When no owner of the dead end (domain) exists get the domain. Instead of the dead end 404 page, people get my ads!
With the internet getting older and bigger by the day, more dead ends pop up, and I’ll be happy to take them over. No more high traffic website with content, but a high traffic end-point with ads:
5 visitors per page/day, control 200,000 previously dead-end pages, gives 1 million page views/day, CPM 3 dollar, $3000/day * 365 = 1,095,000 a year.
While the project might be viable… my current and upcoming projects are still bound by the search engines and their judgments and I’ll have to accept it... for now.

Games are hot

After a long period of books becoming a movie (Harry Potter), currently comic books characters become movies (Spiderman, The Hulk) our future holds… drum-roll… games that become movies! ‘Tombraider’ set it all off with taking in $300M worldwide. The movie was a big hit, although not really because of its script quality, but rather due to Angelina’s - hard-to-ignore - front assets. Hollywood is now attempting to achieve the same thing with numerous computer games listed below:

Sequels, Triquels and more

Hollywood loves sequels. Sequels provide some kind of guarantee of people coming to the theaters, thus bringing in the money. For example take American Pie. Everybody loved it, but while part 1 brought in ‘only’ $102M, the horrible sequel was somehow cashing 40% more (over $145M).  It gets worse with the ‘Scary Movie’ series that reached a global total of $800M with 5 movies. Some noteworthy sequels:

Every time I hope the moviemakers will just give up after yet another bad sequel, but somehow you guys can’t seem to get enough of paying money for a movie that really isn’t worth sitting through if you were the one getting paid to see it! Anyways it leads us to triquels, fourquels…

Destined for disaster

Sometimes you just need a tiny bit of information to predict if a movie will be hot or not. Somehow these movies just don’t sound like box office successes.

Retro = cool

Didn’t you love the A-team? Of course you did, everybody did! So Hollywood decided to make a movie of it (sound familiar?). Too bad all characters are overweight now, so they have to bring in other actors (won’t be the same without the real BA “I ain't gittin' on no plane!" Baracus will it?).  Anyways go over the list below and decide what will go on your 2009-calendar.

Money, money, money!

So what would you do, if you had 100+ million dollars? Apparently the producers of the movies below got that question and answered by saying “We will make a movie!”.

Thai are overall very friendly and enthusiastic people, which provides a nice break from European so-called ‘hospitality’ (be careful for the elephants though!).

Next to a great experience of a first time in Asia, I’ve had to post something on what’ve experienced about domains in this non-english country (their language goes something like this: ราชอาณาจักรไทย). Although only a limited group of Thai are able to read, write and talk in English all website references go to english / ASCII characters .com (or .th)-domains. Not only companies servicing foreigners in tourism and transportation but also (local) governmental sites refer to .com-domains on billboards while the description is fully in the Thai language.
For me this emphasizes that although the number of domain top-level names will be increased significant soon and IDNs are targeted at a big portion of the web from Asia, a “ascii-domain.com” is strong and widely used even on the other side of the world.

PS: I wish I had taken some pictures as examples, but l had to pretend I had no work on my mind to my girlfriend .
PS2: Get a blue-ray player and buy the “Planet Earth” documentary from the BBC. 550 minutes of jaw-dropping entertainment.

our planet is really tough
and there is nothing to suggest that it is going to change anytime soon

in the long run, earth can cope with anything we can throw at it
we could clear all the jungles, but a jungle can regrow over a few thousand years
we could burn all earths’ fossil fuels, flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide
but even then, it will take the planet only a million years or so for the atmosphere to recover
even the animals we are wiping out will eventually be replaced by others equally rich in diversity
as a relentless work of evolution continues
it’s only a question of time
the earth will be just fine.

it’s not to say rapid changes we force on earth don’t matter
that is because humans operate on a different time scale
we have evolved to life in a world as it is now
so in changing this world, we are altering the environment that has allowed the human race to thrive
we could be creating conditions that threaten that long term survival of our civilization

so all this stuff about saving planet earth, well that is not the problem:
planet earth doesn’t need saving, earth is a great survivor
it’s not the planet we should be worrying about, it’s us.

(transcripted from: Dr Iain Stewart )

We’ve had the Dutch Tulip Bubble (1673), South Sea Bubble (1720), Industrial Bubble (1929), Internet Company Bubble (2000), and the recent Sub prime Mortgage/US Housing Bubble where the asset in the form of a tulip bulb, property or stock price has risen to extremes in a short period while imploding in an even shorter period of time.

Exploding (stock) prices - thus short term profits - attract people of all classes wanting to ‘invest’ and join in the profits. This creates a price of the asset based on what someone else would pay for it, without having a realistic view on the real tangible asset (the company) providing the equity holder profits on dividends and/or long term investments growth. The huge investment demand led to 159 dotcom IPO’s in the first quarter of 2000: all companies were not making any profit, but their stock sold as if it was given away free.

Only a small bump in the road could cause for the market bubble to implode. No new buyers were found for the current price, and people sold, sold and sold, just because everybody sold. And the realisation of the bubble came in too late.

Strengthed by derivates where margin calls enhanced its initial price dropping effect. This ‘side-effect resulted in multi-billions dollar write-offs on their imploded assets by the worlds biggest banks, hedge funds and insurance companies.

Since a few months a market has proven to be booming and very liquid with huge profits: this is the domain name market. Although domains have a value of around $8/year (bulk only $5). Their after-market value shows profits of over 20,000% on e.g. English dictionary words with the .com extension.

Here is a short list of recent domains sold over 1 million dollars on the domain after-market:

Computer.com ($2,200,000) Creditcards.com ($2,750,000) CreditCheck.com ($3,000,000) SEO.com ($5,000,000) Beer.com ($7,000,000) Porn.com ($9,500,000) Seniors.com ($1,800,000)

[ See recent sales on sedo.com ]

A domain auction in June ‘07 sold 16 domains of over $100,000 and this October 12 domains sold for over a $100,000. For example CarSales.com sold for $400,000 where obvious a intermediar company could sell cars. More questionable in future value is CrosswordPuzzles.com that was auctioned for $210,000.
Remember this price is payed for the domain name only. Without any content, website, marketing, or company. Just a domain name.

How come have these prices exploded? It seems that the market has saturated, where all ‘good’ names are already owned by someone. And it is a important issue, because people expected domain names to have limited value (not exceeding the price of a new domain) because you just bought a domain that was still available. But prices are exploding, build on a fundamental economic basis: something is only worth something if its availability is limited. Gold and diamonds have value, because it’s limited available.
Domains names were unlimited, millions of (real) combinations are possible, but it seems that now every dotcom domain name is owned making the the non-after market limited in availability.

In mid-2007 there were 138 million top level domain names active according to VeriSign. The domain market has a large percent of individuals holding a (one-domain to large) portfolio of names, where each name represents only an $8 investment. In the second quarter of 2007, 14.5 million new registrations were made.

The market is now flooded with buyers: companies starting a web company, individuals who want a website/weblog with a catchy name, large portfolio holders, and gold-seekers buying domains hoping to sell them for more.
As a multi-million Widget producing company, owning widget.com and widgets.com is some prime real-estate/asset. A good real life example is vodka.com ($3,000,000) sold to a Russian vodka company, and beer.com ($7,000,000) sold to a Belgium brewer. With search engine ranking being highly volatile this is a sound long-term investment where you don’t need to be dependent on any company (like Google).

But we shouldn’t underestimate the value of the domain itself. Its value is in the steady stream of type in traffic. The domain could be a prime online real-estate where people looking for ‘widget’, go online to ‘widget.com’ as URL (the “.com” extension has been promoted so much, it’s the first thing on peoples mind).
Arriving on the widget.com page, domain owners set up a landing pages showing usually relevant (to ‘widget’!) advertisements only. With current cost-per-click prices in niche markets over $2, a few clicks to an advertiser on the landing page could earn back the yearly costs of the domain, and not very uncommon by pass this break even point. And now the most interesting part is, what if you have $10/month revenue domain times 2,000 domain names? This would result in $20.000 revenue/month with over a 99% profit margin because the domain owner doesn’t have to make any costs beyond the domain price to make a turnover.
And it’s a win-win-win situation. The visitor eventually lands on the highest-paying relevant advertiser page, the advertiser has a relevant to their product potential customer and the domain owner has made a few cents without any promotion (costs).

This all making domains a very attractive asset due to its stream of income for an unlimited period, and it’s possible after-market value.

But you are too late*, as I said before; the good names are already taken. Pre 1999 almost all dictionary words were gone, and in 2001 after the internet bubble many quality domain names became publicly available again but grabbed again for 8$ within seconds. Between 2001 and 2005 all valuable widgetwidget.com were sold (the value of the domain is not in its shortness, but in what it describes) leaving only overpriced domains relative to the initial price.

So we see a huge market growth. But the main question is. Is the domain market a bubble waiting to implode?

The resemblance of all previous bubbles is that the market is flooded with buyers wanting to make short term profit, the general media is joining the craze, lousy domains (assets) are sold in the after-market for 1000% profit, and joining in now won’t make you rich.

More buyers attracting more money providing a self fulfilling prophecy on the price, until ... but the inferred question:  Are domain names a long term business opportunity?

There are many uncertainties*, to many to discuss here, but can we assume that the basis of all of this is on if people keep typing in these domains? And, will there be growth in these numbers of visitors and CPC? Is it a long term growth business providing a landing page with ads only?

* Update: when I say “you are too late”, I don’t refer to new business ideas or unique/niche domain profiles… ofcourse you can make money if you are entrepreneur I just want to warn you that you might enter a ‘bubble’ due to little knowlegde of the market and blindness of the success stories.

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How it works

Interesting news last week where populair blogs lifehacker and gizmodo announce that they prefer people from not digging every article anymore. An surprising post ofcourse resulting in mass diggs, because if the digg community loves something, that would be talking about themself…

Their reasons to stop digging their website include the following:

• Prefer people to click their banners, instead of digging.
• Don’t want to keep adding servers every week.
• They want to be viewed as profesional journalist, instead of link bait writers.
• And many other reasons we common people will never understand…

But lets see how many frontpage stories these and other sites actually get. With the Digg API I grabbed the data from 01 Feb 2007 to 15 June 2007, and counted what domains got the most stories made populair (the notorious frontpage). A quick sort of the array created a list that show 3,033 unique domains getting 13,091 frontpage listings in the last five and a half months. On average there are 90 frontpage stories from 20 sources (domains) per day.

[...]
treehugger.com (74)
metacafe.com (82)
flickr.com (84)
lifehacker.com (87)
thinkprogress.org (95)
reuters.com (104)
destructoid.com (105)
msn.com (105)
google.com (107)
rawstory.com (110)
crooksandliars.com (111)
washingtonpost.com (112)
consumerist.com (116)
break.com (119)
go.com (126)
wired.com (152)
nytimes.com (179)
blogspot.com (188) - various blogs
cnn.com (188)
gizmodo.com (194)
yahoo.com (206)
engadget.com (302)
arstechnica.com (395)
co.uk (469) - various sites
youtube.com (1249)

Although Gizmodo.com got 194 frontpage stories, and Lifehacker.com 87, YouTube should have been the one complaining with over 1,249 stories (well videos in this case)! Surprisingly only 3,000 unique domains have ever been on the digg homepage: I thought the internet was bigger?!

So if this list teaches us one thing, that would be that expanding digg’s horizon beyond the current 3,000 websites might not be such a really bad idea because the ‘top’ sites don’t appreciate it anyway,!

PS: See this page for the complete list of frontpage domains.

So here we are many hours later: WordPress Theme Generator.
It lets you design a complete theme (with widget support), save to a .zip file, extract and upload. Easy & Fast.  No need for CSS or PHP knowledge. Let me know your comments, so I can improve (if needed).

Few Simple Examples:

So, if you want to create a WordPress theme fast & easy:  Try it out.

The upcoming weeks I will be promoting this in the web community and hope to reach the goal of a million souls aware within several weeks. I’ve added ‘ads’ of the project to my adsense alternate ad code, and ask websites that are reading this to look at it and try it out: help raise awareness on a important topic and no more blank ads on your site. If you have a blog you might wanna try writing about something actual important

If you have time to read this, make some time to also read the article. Awareness is the starting point for a better world. Thank you.

UPDATE 21 april 2007: Millionsoulsaware.org is going at a good pace! The counter is over 11,000 souls aware after three weeks, but we already reached a 1 million goal because the banner (above) is beeing downloaded almost 1 million times a day (!). With help of my lyrics site friends. Click through rate is low, but we’ll get there…