Hi all.

Firstly, let me apologize for being so retarded as to have called this thing 'Conflicker' for the past month. I didn't find out I was wrong up until about two hours ago. I've only read about 50 news stories about it... Anyway...

Earlier today I finished watching Lesley Stahl's "freak out" on 60 Minutes and it struck me just how many times I'd read the same crap over the past month. I've decided that, to remedy the situation, at least amongst DonationCoder regulars, I will post this purely factual summary of the virus/trojan/worm/whatever Conficker. I am most certainly no Conficker expert, but I believe I can do a better job laying out the facts than much of the mass media, and I'll try to keep the tech talk down.

A huuuge thank you to SRI International for publishing their superb analysis of Conficker which has provided me with a couple of hours of very interesting reading. I highly recommend the more interested parties read it, it makes for a very enlightening read.

This looks like extremely exciting news for developers interested in making high quality Flash games.. It's a new open source flash game engine called PushButton Engine, and it looks very impressive, including physics, tilemaps, and networking.

The PushButton Engine is an open-source [FLASH] game engine and framework that's designed for a new generation of games. This game engine helps you spend less time with code conventions and more time designing fun experiences.

• Physics based on Box2D.
• Gameplay components: health, teams, state machines.
• Sprite-based and SWF-based 2D rendering.
• Tilemap system.
• Pathfinding library.
• Basic networking. Pass events to/from your servers, do XMLRPC/JSON Web API requests, etc.
• Awesome UI capabilities via Flash - localizable, stylable/themable, internationalizable.
• Editor
• Easy to customize and extend for your game, based on the components you are using.
• Human-readable XML formats, so easy to do automated processing, use other editors, convert from external sources, etc.
• Written in Flash, so runs everywhere PushButton Engine does.
• Advanced Networking Library

http://pushbuttonengine.com/

I recently created a web survey for the DonationCoder.com site (take it here).

I went looking for a service to use for the survey, and finally settled on SurveyGizmo.com.

Now I need to say up front that i didn't do too much comparison with other products -- so i can't really tell you with any confidence that SurveyGizmo is the best tool out there, but on the other hand it's hard to imagine a simpler system.

It's a polished and extremely intuitive and attractive system which will hold your hand at each step, but it's capable of very powerful customization.  I was very very impressed.  Examining results was just as well designed at the survey construction.

Now for cost:

• If you are creating surveys that will have less then 250 responses per month, you can use it for free.
• If your surveys will have less than 1000 per month, it will cost you $20/month.
• For more responses you can subscribe to larger plans.

Seems pretty reasonable though i'm not sure what happens to your surveys if you cancel payment or only pay occasionally when you have a one-shot survey to take.

http://www.surveygizmo.com/

Table of contents:

• 1. Worm Breeds Botnet from Home Routers, Modems
• 2. Aussie Classification Site Hacked in Censorship Protest & Australia Denies List Leaked
• 3. Firefox Exploit Sends Mozilla Into 'High-Priority Fire Drill' Mode
• 4. Leaked Memo Says Conficker Pwns Parliament
• 5. Researchers Poke Holes in Super Duper SSL
• 6. Google's Tweaked Search Results May Keep Us Googling Longer
• 7. German Cops Raid [Home of] Wikileaks [Associate] After Internet Blacklist Posted
• 8. Google Searches for Holy Grail of Python Performance
• 9. The Pirate Bay to Roll Out Secure €5 Per Month VPN Service
• 10. Security Fears Spark Linux Drive in Iran

Can somebody please recommend to me a good CD/DVD burning program that is Vista compatible? I currently have Nero 6 on my XP Pro but I will be loading Vista Business next week and I know that Nero 6 is not compatible. I'm not really sure that I want to pay another $50 to upgrade to ver 7. Does anybody know of any good freeware burning programs that are Vista compat?

Once again Download Squad finds something useful:

From Downloadsquad: http://www.downloads...or-privacy-fanatics/

Iron: Chrome for privacy fanatics

Posted Sep 24th 2008 1:00PM by Christina Warren

If you want to use Google Chrome but are concerned or have questions about Google's policies for collecting usage data, you might want to give Iron a try.

Iron, developed by German software company SRWare is Chrome stripped of all the user ID information that gave the German government cause for concern.

I don't speak German, but the guys at the Incomplete-News Project have helpfully published an English translation. According to them, Iron is essentially the Chromium source code, with the following modifications:

    * No unique user-ID
    * No user-specific information is sent to Google
    * No alternative error messages
    * Crash information is not sent to Google
    * No Google updater