Waze

People from United States are luckier than Europeans, because USA government gives maps of the territory for free, so there’s a complete base to start with. Anyway it’s also possible to start from scratch: we just started to draw maps here in Italy, and major cities like Rome or Milan are already half-mapped. Let’s call Waze the Wikipedia of streets

www.waze.com

You can do the search once (it works also with advanced filters, like geo-distance or the ordering by criteria), then copy and paste the URL of the results’ page to eBalert: it will instantly create your feed, updated every 12 hours and ready to be added to your preferred feedreader. The service doesn’t require any signup.

The “about” page doesn’t explain how the search engine exactly work, and doesn’t give informations about sources… anyway the service is very good and is worthwhile!

http://www.songza.com/

Its security is based on the fact that it is a destructive algorithm: if you MD5-encrypt a string, you’ll get an another 128 bit (16 characters) expression that is the unique checksum of the original string, and it’s impossible to go back. The result can be compared to the MD5 of another string (e.g.: entered by a user); if the two checksum are exactly alikes, the input received is correct.

This is a good way to securely store users’ sensible information (like passwords), making them not understandable by anyone but still usable to verify user authentication.

MD5 reverse engineering is not possible (you should calculate MD5 of any possible string or phrase to find the correspondent original one), but several websites born trying to do the impossibile, storing MD5 hashes and original strings from anywhere.

The utopic idea: if we’ve a database of MD5 checksums of “everything”, we have a “dictionary” to recover any expression from its MD5.

… maybe just another useless Internet application. Do you want to contribute adding the checksum of your name to the World’s MD5 database?
Mine is 9667aacee4c11ab5cb1aee39cb183599

Biggest MD5 crack databases
http://nz.md5.crysm.net/ (28,000,000+)
http://md5.rednoize.com/ (47,000,000+)
http://gdataonline.com/seekhash.php (168,000,000+)
http://www.tmto.org/?category=main&page=search_md5 (306,000,000,000+)

More about MD5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5

FON Maps is a Google Maps application that helps users to find the nearest FON access point, but what I can do if I’m going to move to a foreign city and I want to connect to a FON spot? I can’t use FON Maps if I’m not online, but I can’t go online if I don’t know where is the nearest FON access point!

Raúl Ochoa did something for me: FON Maps Liberator is a web mashup that uses FON Maps to export the position of access points in .GPX format, to add them to the “Point Of Interest” of our GPS.

For example, I entered the name of a street of the zone of Torino where I were planning to go this week-end, and I saved the .GPX file on my hard drive (about 30 FON spots in 5Km²); then I exported in TomTom format (.ov2) with PoiEdit, a very good (shareware) software and I put the final file into the MMC card of my Nokia 6680.

When I had to connect to the Internet with a notebook from Torino, I told to TomTom to bring me to a near FON Spot and after 10 minutes (only 5 for the nearest, but it wasn’t active ) I was checking my e-mail, sitting in my car

http://rau1.com/fon/maps (it seems that this service has been discontinued)
http://www.poiedit.com

(vai alla versione italiana di questo articolo)

Finally, the official italian tourism portal is open.

Roberto Falavotti, the managing director of “Sì Innovazione Italia” said that Italy “invested” 45 millions of Euros to see it completed:

• 21 millions to make italian deparments insert contents;
• 4 millions to aggregate the centralized informations;
• 8 millions to IBM;
• … and the rests to “finalize it”.

For a person like me (I work as web developer), this is a real insult to my intelligence: how a nation can spend 45.000.000 euros (of our money) for a single site? In addition, now it’s really slow (and it doesn’t respect accessibility rules!)… how many servers you can buy with 1 million of Euros?

… and this site (ITALIA.IT) is on U.S. servers.

Google Calendar has (finally!) reactivated SMS notifications for Italian cellular operators.
You’ve just to go to Settings -> Notifications and enter your mobile phone number, to receive the verification code (it has to be entered on the same page to activate notifications).

Thank you Google!

PS: and about other countries? Are there other nations where SMS notification were deactivated?

“La Fonera” is a FON router and it allows to join the FON network; it connects to your existing modem or router, with an ethernet cable, and it gives two Wifi streams: the first one is private, for personal navigation, the second is shared, available for any other FON user that is close to you (you can adjust the available bandwidth for the two streams).

FON users can use others’ Wifi spots everywhere, without paying anything (for example when you’re on holiday with your notebook). Access is restricted throught a personal login/password, so FON can inform authorities in the case of abuses.
Users can navigate a World map to discover where’s the nearest FON Wifi spot (you can also download a part of the map to your GPS device).

Joining the FON network is the key to get free internet access everywhere.

If you’re not interested in mobile internet you can also choose to give Wifi to others, and to get paid from FON (they will share with you money they get from FON users that, on the contrary, don’t give out Wifi, but they pay for using it throught others’ FON spots).

http://www.fon.com

The old version was a single image, with the text “Italia” embedded:

This change seems to be also in other international Google website.

The old version is visible, for example, in one of the cached pages by Archive.org.
Bandwidth optimization?

20 Questions is a nice game, based on a web application that computes what users answer and then tries to associate questions, answers and what people thought, to improve its guess ability.

I tried with “Nutella” and “Modem” but it didn’t have success (even if it went near: “chocolate” and “computer hub” ).

It’s funny to come back often, to discover the status of it’s guessing ability…
Also hardware versions are available (one of these is in the little picture above), to bring 20 Questions with you

www.20q.net