Kop's comments

Kop · on June 15, 2023

Have you looked at Startpage?

https://www.startpage.com

gs17 · on June 16, 2023

If the complaint is about Google's results, Startpage isn't going to help much.

Kop · on April 5, 2013

You get that long and obscure URL while visiting google logged out, with no cookies.. So they all must be the defaults.

If they are the defaults, why put them in the URL?

mootothemax · on April 5, 2013

So they all must be the defaults... If they are the defaults, why put them in the URL?

You've probably answered your own question there.

zandorg · on April 5, 2013

I found this recently with a 6-field form. The browser sends empty FORM fieldstrings.

Eg: http://www.bing.com/search?q=test&qs=n&form=QBLH&...

Here, sk is "".

You can strip out empty fields with a bit of PHP (creating a new URL without the empty strings), which seems to work okay, but it's probably best not to risk the wrong effect, which is the end program seeing the empty fields wrongly (as NULL and not "").

Kop · on April 2, 2013

Thanks lucb1e for pointing it out -- I edited the article to reflect this and I apologize for (temporarily) spreading the misconception that SHA-like functions are good for hashing passwords.

The intention for my article was to analyze the different hash functions, and benchmark them in .NET, and not to discuss anything related to passwords (which would require a blog post of its own, and it's a topic I hadn't extensively researched). I got a little carried away mentioning passwords.

Kop · on April 2, 2013

Hash functions are generally designed to be fast. For the very concern you mentioned some people prefer using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt to store the password, which on the other hand is designed to be slow.