It's been a while since I posted about a cool flash tower defense game..

Bloons Tower Defense 5 is packed to the gills with towers and upgrades of a seemingly infinite variety.  Very cool.

http://ninjakiwi.com...Tower-Defense-5.html

Flash under attack, emergency patch issued: Update immediately

The Flash developer is rolling out an emergency update to the world's most popular Web plug-in for two vulnerabilities, that are currently being actively exploited by hackers.

http://www.zdnet.com...mediately-7000011031

URL Snooper is a program written to help users locate the urls of audio and video files so that they can be recorded.

Many links to streaming audio and video that you come across on the web are hidden behind javascript or activex scripts. Because of this, it is sometimes very difficult to figure out the actual urls that correspond to the streams being played. URL Snooper provides easy solution to finding the URLs for all streams by by watching network traffic and identifying potential urls, especially streaming media urls.

Program Web Page and Download: https://www.donation...rlsnooper/index.html

2.32.01 - Feb 4, 2013

• [Feature] RTMP multimedia links were not shown when multimedia protocol filter was enabled.
• [MinorChange] Improved text labels for search filters.
• [MinorChange] Changed auto network adapter test url and search string
• [BugFix] An error about "Scrollbar property out of range" could be generated when resizing raw packet view panel.
• [BugFix] Parentheses in urls were truncating urls at that point.
• [Feature] View Live Packets option is now on main window and easily toggles live packet panel (size is remembered)
• [Feature] Added datetime column to url grid.
• [Documentation] Updated documentation with some links to a few popular downloader tools.
• [Feature] Portable zip now uses ConfigDir_Default.ini which is overridden by the presence of a ConfigDir.ini file, so users unpacking the contents won't overwrite any custom ConfigDir.ini  they may have.
• [Feature] Now using a dual package (installer and portable zip), with portable zip preconfigured for portable use; installer and executable are now signed.

This is a wonderful, heartwarming story about how online computer hardware retailer NewEgg fights back and destroys patent trolls who routinely get away with bullying and extorting money from businesses under the guide of legal threat.

NewEgg has long been a fantastic website to buy computer products from (and find product ratings by informed technical users) -- but this article casts NewEgg in a whole new light -- as a company with a personality and a fighting spirit.

.. it's a huge validation of the strategy the company decided to pursue back in 2007: not to settle with patent trolls. Ever. We basically took a look at this situation and said, 'This is bullshit,'" said Cheng in an interview with Ars. "We saw that if we paid off this patent holder, we'd have to pay off every patent holder this same amount. This is the first case we took all the way to trial. And now, nobody has to pay Soverain jack squat for these patents.

http://arstechnica.c...saved-online-retail/

From the details I've read this university and especially the computer science department of this university should be ashamed of its cowardly behavior -- expelling a student who was nice enough to report a security vulnerability to them.

I suspect this is one of those cases that will be lucky enough to get enough attention to be reversed -- one wonders how many similar episodes do not get attention.. Shameful.

After an initial meeting with Director of Information Services and Technology François Paradis on Oct. 24, where Mr. Paradis congratulated Mr. Al-Khabaz and colleague Ovidiu Mija for their work and promised that he and Skytech, the makers of Omnivox, would fix the problem immediately, things started to go downhill.

Two days later, Mr. Al-Khabaz decided to run a software program called Acunetix, designed to test for vulnerabilities in websites, to ensure that the issues he and Mija had identified had been corrected. A few minutes later, the phone rang in the home he shares with his parents.

“It was Edouard Taza, the president of Skytech. He said that this was the second time they had seen me in their logs, and what I was doing was a cyber attack...

..Following this meeting, the fifteen professors in the computer science department were asked to vote on whether to expel Mr. Al-Khabaz, and fourteen voted in favour.

http://news.national...dents-personal-data/

Excellent Smashing Magazine article by Nick Zakas and Nicole Sullivan - creators of CSS Lint - on what's involved in starting and running a real FOSS project.

At Velocity 2011, Nicole Sullivan and I introduced CSS Lint, the first code-quality tool for CSS. We had spent the previous two weeks coding like crazy, trying to create an application that was both useful for end users and easy to modify. Neither of us had any experience launching an open-source project like this, and we learned a lot through the process.

After some initial missteps, the project finally hit a groove, and it now regularly get compliments from people using and contributing to CSS Lint. It’s actually not that hard to create a successful open-source project when you stop to think about your goals.

These days, it seems that anybody who writes a piece of code ends up pushing it to GitHub with an open-source license and says, “I’ve open-sourced it.” Creating an open-source project isn’t just about making your code freely available to others.

The article has some good discussion of several open licenses and what they mean from a developer and project perspective. A must read for anybody not already familiar with how these things actually work.

Read the full article here.

Additional links:
CSS Lint website
CSS Lint on GitHub