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Does your website have an image on it? It can be exploited that way. Does your email render html, even with scripting turned off? It can be exploited that way. A few trusted sites have been compromised with this exploit. Some seedier as networks (with hundreds or thousands of affiliates) are using this to generate cash. There is no patch for Windows ME, 98, or 95 and there will never be as these OSes are unsupported. These systems will ALWAYS have this vulnerability.

Imaginine if someone uploaded this to MySpace (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details ?q=&url=www.myspace.com/), as they allow full html formatting, embed, iframes and all kinds of crazy crap. One exploit on a popular blog will cause A LOT of damage.

my question is, why do people believe these stories at face value?

Reminds me of that one chick that said she needed 20 grand to pay off expensive shopping sprees and then claimed the money poured in, that savekaryn website a few years back.

Somehow I doubt her (or this million dollar webpage) made any money until they claimed they made a bunch of money and then told newspapers who then spread the word and then sites started paying for advertising (or in karyn's case, just sending money).

And for those of you thinking "naw, internet hoaxs dont happen, the newspapers are surely checking their bank accounts, etc", think again: this guy claimed this christmas lights were being turned off and on by visitors to his website and it turned out to be a hoax. Dozens of major online news sites reported the lights as real, it wasnt until a reporter showed up unannounced and called a friend online and told them to turned the lights off & on and it didnt work that they finally figured out the hoax.

You'd think lights being turned on & off over the internet would be the easiest to verify, but it didnt stop everyone and their mother from reporting it as 100% true. Makes you wonder how much of the news is true and how much is a hoax?

So there you have it, there are internet hoaxes and fakes and the online news media reports every little story as 100% true without doing any fact-checking to verify it's true. Therefore I call this million dollar homepage mythbusted!

my theory: about half the pixels are stuff he just threw up there for nothing, linking to mom-and-pop shops who will be happy to get any hits at all. Now that he's getting a ~750 million hits a day he's able to charge real money.

He's had a lot of mainstream press coverage before today -- see his Press page.

He has a very high Alexa rank of 1480th in the world (ya, not exactly the most reliable source but better than nothing) . His reach per million users is 810, which I think means around 150,000 to 200,000 visitors a day.

Sure, anything *could* be a hoax, and I am usually pretty skeptical with these things, but I really don't think so in this case. Journalists have seen his paypal account (like from the Times Online) and verified the money.

Even slashdot.org is more popular than msnbc.com, according to Alexa.

the homepage of msnbc directs to an msn.com site, so, you should be comparing that. http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &compare_sites=msn.com&y=t&q=&url=news.bbc.co.uk Of course, msn has other stuff.. but, you can't use alexa to weed that out. MSN is ranked #2 behind Yahoo for most web users by alexa.

Infact, Alexa rates it thrird behind CNN aswell as the BBC
In order it goes:
1. CNN
2. BBC
3. MSNBC
followed by the Newyouk times, Google news etc. Link

The MSNBC Web site... is the most-used news site on the Internet.

Sez who? Alexa.com puts it orders of magnitude below the BBC News website, for example.

In years past the Zeitgeist included far more information and far less fluff.
Where's the low-down by country? Where's the scale that allows us to relate the
various graphs?

You could do much, much more interesting stuff using the Alexa data. I hope someone does. There must be a mountain of dissertations to be mined in there, not to mention new business models.

Actually, it looks like traffic is still climbing. Last year there appears to have been a drop-off in September or so, but that also was climbing during the holidays.

In related news /. is the #1 mover this week on Alexa. Also check out this graph. Pretty much proves via science that dupes == money.

In related news /. is the #1 mover this week on Alexa. Also check out this graph. Pretty much proves via science that dupes == money.

Do you have an example of a very large website that uses PHP? I don't recall ever seeing one.

Umm, Yahoo:
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963937.html

Ranked the #1 trafficked site by Alexa:
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=yahoo.com

Search is an important part of the Platform. Every document in the Data Store is indexed and included in the Platform's search engine, and this engine forms the backbone of all SearchBased collections.

The Price Guide has the full details.

'Alexa will not be held responsible for the loss or theft of information in the event of a security breach.' from: http://websearch.alexa.com/docs/faqs.html#security

Man, I would hate to see who or what is held responsible.

As part of the package, it appears the AWSP offers ssh access to the Alexa cluster where you can write arbitrary C code.

That seems a little dangerous, doesn't it?

As part of the package, it appears the AWSP offers ssh access to the Alexa cluster where you can write arbitrary C code.

That seems a little dangerous, doesn't it?

Some books that were original and have been created almost entirely by Wikibooks authors that I consider to have some value include:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/US_History%3A_Content s (A book about U.S. History)
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Consciousness_studies
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ada_Programming About Ada programming
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D/Noob_to_Pr o Introduction to design using Blender

All of these were made book of the month. The Japanese Wikibook is a little bit embarassing as it was recently restructured, but the participants ganged up on the voting page for the book of the month to try and get some additional exposure to their little project. Even so, there has been some significant progress there, and they are learning from some other well-done language Wikibooks, including Portuguese and Chinese

Another section where we are trying to learn a little bit from our earlier mistakes on Wikibooks is the Wikijunior sub-project where we are trying to make introductory texts for elementary school children. There are four "books" there right now in various stages of completion, and are more than just a few screen fulls of text. There is a big push right now to try and get the Big Cats book ready into a formally published format, and the Solar System book is undergoing a huge editorial revision right now to simplify and provide encyclopedia-level citation coverage for every fact in the book. We are also trying in Wikijunior to avoid the mistake of having everybody run off into all directions and instead try to make it more of a group project to actually complete something.

That really is the largest problem right now, a lack of focus. A couple of people come onto Wikibooks and try to write a book, only to discover that it is a much harder process to complete than it seemed right in the beginning. They usually get an outline written (if they are any good at all) and start a chapter and a half, then get bored and move on.

Another problem we have contended with is that there was a period of about a year where Wikibooks was incredibly neglected by the original founders, who moved onto other projects. A whole new group has essentially taken over what was on Wikibooks in the past six months or so and really tried to reorganize the whole thing. That is an ongoing task, and there is a lot of stuff to clean out that shouldn't be there. Some huge debates over what should be there and what should not is continuing, and an attempt to re-focus the aims of the project. We are also trying to get people with real leadership qualities to try and help build the project, including not just recruitment but also raising the standards to make some very real book-length projects instead of a bunch of mini-encyclopedias.

In terms of Alexa ratings, Wikibooks is now in the top 10,000 websites (see http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=&url=wikibooks.org for more information), and the #1 e-book related website in terms of number of visitors. This beats even the "professional" e-book websites. The Assayer by contrast is only in the top 2,000,000 websites (it does have some specialized features though that are very good). BTW, I have also contributed to The Assayer in the past, so it wasn't a completely new site to me either. I would like to in fact add some links to your site, but I hope you can handle the increased bandwidth as a result.

I do want to thank you for

What the heck is going on here?

Maybe someone should sign up with the nick "* * * Abc" and submit stories like mad to see if the Slashdot editors just pick the first nick with a somewhat interesting story...

Alexa's ranking is less relevant these days, but still informative.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? range=1m&size=large&url=http://george-harrison.inf o
If you click the link you'll get to see a graph of his "reach"
(% of internet users)

For those too lazy to click the damn link:
Traffic Rank for george-harrison.info
Today: 297,221
1 wk. Avg: 383,824
3 mos. Avg: 1,133,067
3 mos. Change: [UP] 502,098

As a quick look at Alexa would point out, 50% of pages on yahoo are on mail.yahoo.com. 90% or more of those pages are refreshes to see messgages or even your inbox because of how their mail reader system works.

Compare that to the G-mail system (only 6% of their pages by Alexa's count link) that's smart enough to allow you to check all your mail without a page refresh something like Alexa will pick up. That's where so many of Yahoo's page views come from: a dumb mail system.

As a quick look at Alexa would point out, 50% of pages on yahoo are on mail.yahoo.com. 90% or more of those pages are refreshes to see messgages or even your inbox because of how their mail reader system works.

Compare that to the G-mail system (only 6% of their pages by Alexa's count link) that's smart enough to allow you to check all your mail without a page refresh something like Alexa will pick up. That's where so many of Yahoo's page views come from: a dumb mail system.

What is amazing about Yahoo is the number of page views per visit. This is a really important metric for any business counting on advertizing revenues. The numbers are here (also a google.com comparison). Compare that to Google's numbers. Google's numbers are 2-3 times lower!

What is amazing about Yahoo is the number of page views per visit. This is a really important metric for any business counting on advertizing revenues. The numbers are here (also a google.com comparison). Compare that to Google's numbers. Google's numbers are 2-3 times lower!

I was working at home on 9/11, and yes: CNN was down until they put up a no-graphics static page. Slashdot was up and running just fine.

Slashdot traffic ranking: 800
CNN traffic ranking: 24

During a big news event slashdot's traffic might quadruple, but CNN's would be off the chart. CNN could slashdot slashdot (and most other sites).

Of the top ten google searches on 9/11 the only one that beat World Trade Center was CNN. 6000 users per minute were using google to find CNN.
Effects of 9/11 on Google

I was working at home on 9/11, and yes: CNN was down until they put up a no-graphics static page. Slashdot was up and running just fine.

Slashdot traffic ranking: 800
CNN traffic ranking: 24

During a big news event slashdot's traffic might quadruple, but CNN's would be off the chart. CNN could slashdot slashdot (and most other sites).

Of the top ten google searches on 9/11 the only one that beat World Trade Center was CNN. 6000 users per minute were using google to find CNN.
Effects of 9/11 on Google

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=www.kazaa.c om

Traffic Rank for kazaa.com: 3,951

That's pretty high I guess.

Though that doesn't mean everyone who visits their site downloads Kazaa. The high rank can also be attibuted to malware/zombie pcs.

My point is this, while trolls are a nuisance, and some are energetic, most humans come to Wikipedia to learn or to teach. There will always be enough good guys to fix the damage of vandals. Otherwise, we should move to a better neighbourhood.

Do you have any references to back that up? It seems way off to me. I think you're confusing that with the number of requests that the root servers see that are unnecessary (redundant / could be cached by ISP's) which I believe is 98% -- but that's not 98% of all DNS traffic, not even close.

Check out this, this, this and this; over half of the big ISP's have a cached response for the most popular sites on the net.

I saw this on Digg about 2 days ago. Even the title is a direct ripoff. I see so many ripoffs from Digg on /. every single day (except a few days later).

I read Slashdot about once every 2 days now, instead of my normal all throughout the day that I used to. My surfing time is now devoted to digg and Engadget(and other Weblogs Inc Blogs). You get better quality news with less dupes, better quality writeups, often humor, and just a better web experience in general.

But I do like the CSS on /. now. It makes it easier to do Greasemonkey scripts, and I'm running a couple of Slashdot user scripts now.

I hate to troll, but this is more of an open letter to /. editors. Just look at the Alexa numbers. There's a disturbance in the force. Here's a link to my digg news.

For those interested in visualizing this, here is how Slashdot and Digg compare, according to Alexa: http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=6m&size=medium&y=r&url=slashdot.org#top

According to alexa they are doing 40 million page views a day. If the ad click through rate is an abysmal 0.1% and they only make 10 cents a click, they would still have revenue of $4000/day (or 1.5 million a year). I don't know what there operating cost is, but I think 1.5 million will easily pay 4-5 employees a reasonable salary and cover hosting expenses.

As far as I can tell, believe it or not, the August spike was Mozilla Foundation being reorganised. You can also see a clear spike when Firefox 1.0 was released. In fact there is a generally high correlation between Slashdot.org readership and Mozilla.org readership:

http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=900&h=350&r=18m&y =r&u=slashdot.org&u=mozilla.org&u=digg.com
http://www.mozilla.org/news.html

Note that Alexa numbers only count users browsing with IE and with the Alexa toolbar installed.

For a long time now this site has been falling but the editors won't listen. I've tried time and time again to get something going but the editors just won't listen. Even the slashbot groupthink here won't take it. For instance you've already been modded redundant and off topic as will I most likely. Like any entrenched bureaucracy they hate maverick thoughts and dissident opinions. For me, /. is the ultimate in hypocritical sites, they claim to be the bastion of free thought and open source philosophy but soon as you want to get things moving again, rather than stagnate, they'll come down on you like a ton of bricks.

Slashdot is slowly becoming more like Microsoft: conservative, slow and copying other peoples products (read: news). Whilst Digg is becoming what the open source movement is really about: speed, openess, wisdom of the crowds, and people empowered news reporting.

I imagine the typical responses though: "Don't let the door hit yourself on the way out" or "If you don't like it leave." This is the level of rhetoric and moderation that /. has become.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=&url=youtube.com

That's impressive growth.

Trying this again: Alexa Global Top 500.

I think the Slashdots mucked up your link. Try Alexa Global Top 500.

Do people still use Yahoo? I guess being the number 1 most trafficked site on the internet doesn't mean much to Google fanboys.

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=lan g&lang=en

Here's a comparison of bbc.co.uk and slashdot.org:

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=6m&size=medium&y=r&url=bbc.co.uk#top

Utter rubbish!

Have a look at alexa and you'll see that the bbc site deals with 20 to 30 BILLION hits a day. Slashdots 1 billion is not going to make much difference to their servers.

"Um, yes? Google is probably the most-visited site on the internet. Millions of requests per second would be reasonable. I'd be suprised if they were only running off 5000 boxes."

That would actually be Yahoo, followed by MSN, then Google.

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=lan g&lang=en

Yep, and its only getting worse.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=2y&size=large&compare_sites=slashdot.org&y= t&url=digg.com

Take it or leave it.

Details here. Do they still use MySQL?

Yahoo actually used Google's search engine for a long time (among others - they switched a couple times in the early days and ended up with Google since it was the best). Yahoo has hardly been anti-Google until much more recently when Google has decided to compete directly against Yahoo. They actually owned a fairly large stake in Google and were one of the initial investors in the company. They made in the neighborhood of $900 million when Google went public. Times have changed with Google's emergence of a portal and competing web site, but this was competition was something that Google initiated.

All that being said, Yahoo is still the most popular site on the internet - by far. They have more than twice the amount of traffic than Google and Microsoft COMBINED! (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details ?&range=6m&size=medium&y=p&url=www.yahoo.com#top). Yahoo is lacking in a lot of areas and I don't always appreciate the approach they have taken with advertising, etc, but they do have the most comprehensive set of internet services out there and have been doing this for a lot longer than Google has. Bash them all you want, but I wouldn't write them off :)

Alexa gathers their data from people using the Alexa Toolbar that works in Internet Explorer on Windows only. (more info)

Somehow I think that that fact may be playing a role there..

Alexa gathers their data from people using the Alexa Toolbar that works in Internet Explorer on Windows only. (more info)

Somehow I think that that fact may be playing a role there..

the commercial ssh.com site appears to draw a bigger audience (and thus, a better alexa ranking) than the free openssh.com site. if the more popular, better-known software (ssh, commercial) wants to call attention to a free competitor (openssh, free), that's their mistake, and i hope the openssh community benefits from it!

'The piracy business is not something anyone can make money on,' is the most stupid thing I ever read. Are not The Pirate Bay making money? If you think they are not then look at their traffic http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? q=&url=thepiratebay.org and ask yourself "Is there a website with that much traffic that is NOT making money?". Yeah, I realize that their sponsors, the advertisement companies they use, are among the worst in the industry. Why? Because more serious corporations like Google Adsense does not allow their advertisements to be placed on websites like that. But even though they are using the worst paying solutions in the industry, they ARE making money. Lots of money.

BitTorrent sites are generally not about "being kind" or "we are against copyright or have some other justification". Websites (including BitTorrent trackers) ARE ABOUT PROFIT. And there IS profit in it. I know. I once had sites who, then, had the same traffic as the pirate bay had. It was not a tracker, the sites merely indexed trackers and mirrored their torrents. So it was even "more innocent" than the pirate bay. And I could claim that "we are not hosting this content" and "we are not even tracking it" and therefore me, in fact, in reality, making money off piracy was therefore alright and justified. Then the RIAA started getting angry about music and even though the sites technically were not doing anything wrong it was obvious the money made was made because of piracy. So I choose to remove the music section and configure the spider to ignore .mp3. Then the MPAA started their propaganda in the media against movie piracy and I rewrote the spider and the scripts and so they automatically removed all movies. Then were was only television shows left, and the MPAA did not indicate they minded that. But later they decided that too was bad and again pushed propaganda on the media, and then there was nothing left to filter away and I closed those sites, contacted the mainstream entertainment industry, tried to get legal deals and found that only the adult industry were willing to allow some content to be distributed by BitTorrent. Today I have several (legal) adult torrent sites.

I honestly consider I did consider the alternative: Rent servers in a country like Sweden and engage i major copyright theft. I even made spreadsheets and so on. Even though I got quite pissed off when the MPAA stupidly claimed that sharing television shows is somehow piracy and bad and that alone, apart from the huge profit, made me want to do it, I at length decided that it would be morally wrong.

Why am I telling you all of this? To make a point. There IS a lot of money to be made off piracy. And that is why a lot of people are doing it. I never had a thousand-part of the traffic the pirate bay has today, and I still made a lot of advertisement money off mirroring torrents. Technically that money was not made from piracy, only by distributing hash codes and links as one may innocently claim, but in reality it was made off illegal distribution of copyrighted media files. No matter how much you claim "we are only tracking" or "only mirroring torrents" or whatever, torrent sties and torrent search engines and even normal search engines who pick up .torrents make a lot of profit off piracy. That is the truth and we all know it, we just choose to support this and turn the blind eye because it suits us (and also because there IS NO LEGAL ALTERNATIVE that is equally good).

The people who run BitTorrent sites and trackers, legal or not, sites do it because IT IS PROFITABLE.

and Pudge for writing the code to convert 900k users, 60k stories, and 13 million comments to comply

Huh? By doing what, running them through HTMLTidy? Oh, the horror! What sort of "conversion" is required on the data, when we're just talking about changing the presentation layer?

Look, this conversion was done by A List Apart nearly two years ago. I'm not impressed. And don't give me some crap about how it's hard for Slashdot to change its code, because it's such a high-traffic site. Slashdot is miniscule compared to Wikipedia, (which runs entirely off donated hardware, to boot). If a bunch of volunteers at Wikipedia can write code which serves up validating HTML (and does a hell of a lot more complex work than Slashcode does), why did it take the well-paid proprietors of Slashdot two years to get there, when someone had already done the hard work for them?

Perhaps they're too busy posting dupes, abusing the moderation system and otherwise being petty emperors of their ever-shrinking (see above graph) realm?

At least Jon Katz has faded into well-deserved obscurity. "In our post-Katrina world, blah blah blah..."

...but MSN is used by more than a handful of people.