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For The Lamer... These questions (reworded and spell checked) are lame, but give you admins out there a bit of a flavor of the mentality of "intruders" that write to me. Four people asked all three of these questions in the same email.... 08-1. How can I falsely increase the hits on my counter? 08-2. My ISP limits web space and I want tons of graphics. What do I do? 08-3. How can I get pictures without paying for them at adult web sites?
08-1. How can I falsely increase the hits on my counter?
This one is a sore spot with me, as I have no understanding as to the importance of a web counter. If you are a site trying to gain advertisers, well, you would obviously forge this number (make it very high) and even forge your logs to show thousands and thousands of entries to a perspective sucker^h^h^h^h^h^h client.
There. I feel better.
Now, how do you increase the hits on your counter without hitting reload a zillion times like some type of lamer? You simply reference the counter on someone else's site that is a high traffic site. For example, if the high traffic counter is at http://www.thegnome.com/cgi-bin/count.cgi, then simply add that link to your page. Lame, but simple. Anyone looking at your source code can see you are pathetic.
08-2. My ISP limits web space and I want tons of graphics. What do I do?
Very common lamer question. First off, consider a competing ISP that offers more space, or if it is worth it, ask if there is an extra fee to get your allocated space increased. Also note, GIFs are smaller than JPGs if you save them correctly, so convert existing JPGs to GIFs. 256 color palettes in a GIF are usually fine, even for scanned photos. Don't ask me how to do this, however -- simply read your graphics package's documentation or try a graphics newsgroup. If that doesn't work or is not to your liking, you can resort to "image piracy".
Lamers can simply point a URL for a graphic to another web site. A common thing is to point a link at a click art repository, instead of actually copying over the link and placing it locally on your server. But beware -- a site you've linked your graphics to could go down, or even worse, change the picture on purpose to make you look like the lamer you are. For example, Museum Mercantile (http://museummercantile.com) had a problem with lamers linking to an animated email GIF located at http://museummercantile.com/images/email.gif. They noticed this because of excessive hits in their logs to that image. So they renamed the image to emaiL.gif, updated their pages, and then copied out a 200k+ file called email.gif.
08-3. How can I get pictures without paying for them at adult web sites?
You know, I almost didn't put this in but several people have asked. For those of you reading this who are not into porn, just pretend that there are web sites with REAL useful data in a protected directory that you wish to access. For those of you I told to actually pay the whopping $5 the adult site is asking for, that IS the best solution. The second solution is USENET and one of the porn newsgroups, as lamers that DO retrieve these files often post them there, along with the porn sites themselves to get you to check them out.
Often a site will limit a part of the web tree, let's say the main page to the subscriber area. Since this page is the only spot with links to the good stuff, a site will limit access to that single page. Your job is to guess the links under the main page. Look at the public areas. Note the names of directories and files, note the layout. It is possible that you can guess these URLs, and quite possible these are unrestricted. For images, they may have them all in a single image directory, so try and guess that one first.
Another option that I have used for non-porn sites with great success is to use search engines. There are many search sites that allow you to submit a URL for indexing -- try submitting the URL of the protected page and let the spider try and index everything underneath it. Depending on the search site, you could have the entire protected area indexed in a few days. For example, I found a site that allowed online credit checks, skip tracing, NCIC searches, and all kinds of info. Indexing that site allowed me to view every single submission form. Of course I still needed an account name and password to actually submit the form, but it was still fun to plow through and look at WHAT I could have submitted. By the way site in question is no longer on the web, but I'm sure their CGI scripts had potential holes that could have allowed for submissions to be made...
