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Awesome Ideas That Somebody Else Already Thought Of



A brief directory of schemes and concepts I’ve had to make the Internet a better place, which I later found out somebody else did already. Take a look at them, they’re free & really useful!

1. Free domain-only verification SSL certificates -> I used to recommend StartSSL, but they got bought out and the new owners flagrantly violated minimal best practices for a generally trusted CA; they were subsequently dropped from several browsers. Fortunately, at least for the time being Let’s encrypt offers a popular free solution, though as they are also likely the most exploited by phishers and are not making even a cursory effort to stem the flow of certificates they’re issuing whose requesters have nefarious intent, I’m interested to see how long they remain in the circle of trust.

2. A centralized, hosted intelligence to automatically identify and combat spam comments on blogs and forums, taking into account the most recent spambot patterns & trending behaviors around the blogosphere -> Akismet. I’d been thinking of this one for years…though I would have simply called it the Forum Spam Bulletin Network. The basic idea is to catch spambots at a usage pattern which doesn’t charactarize real individuals: posting lots of the same thing over and over at a pretty fast clip to different sites. A central service that is aware of comment activity across the entire Internet could identify this telltale pattern and automatically identify/remove messages from spambots. One feature I had in mind that akismet doesn’t do…ongoing tracking of messages and callbacks to sites when more becomes known about a previously accepted comment to reclassify it as spam.

3. An open directory of tagged/categorized and searchable open-source software -> openhub.net (formerly ohloh). It’s not perfection, but it’s pretty darned good. Tag search has issues (clamz is tagged as amazon and music, but a search for those tags reveals 0 projects), would be nice if there was a stackoverflow-style community ranking of tags to prevent over-tagging and an attempt at gathering a project’s popularity and using that in the search algorithm. Overall fast and clean implementation though, and I was able to locate many projects I searched for by tag or features, such as “javascript diff” returning mergely.

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