A user reports today that trying to download a DonationCoder program results in a new dialog in Internet Explorer 9:

"[PROGRAMNAME] is not a commonly downloaded program and could harm your computer"



And then the dialog practically begs the user to delete the dangerous file.

Here we go again.

This is an absolutely outrageous unacceptable message, just as bad if not worse than the false positive fiasco in the antivirus world.

You cannot go telling people that you think a download could harm their computer without any basis for doing so.

If you want to tell people that "Hey i've never seen this program so i'm not going to vouch for it's safety" that's fine.

But you just cannot tell people downloading a file "this could harm your computer" just because the program hasn't passed some mystery f*cking qualification.

This is how these big guys play this game -- they know they don't have to worry about their software being marked as harmful so they don't give a damn if they scare people away from independent developer stuff.

IE should be avoided like the plague until they fix this.  Absolutely outrageous.

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Please complain loudly and share this information widely -- these companies cannot be allowed to keep playing this game of scaring the life out of users every time they find a file that hasn't made it to some "approved" software list that the big companies control.

PROTEST LOUDLY -- this is not ok.

Once again Microsoft seems absolutely hell bent on destroying their reputation and running their company into the dirt.

DC member ewemoa writes:

Been trying out Redo Backup and Recovery to backup and restore a system partition for Windows XP.  (Mentioned earlier by ha14.)

Sample set up:

0. Prepare a minimal updated Windows XP (mine may have been somewhere in the neighborhood of 7GB).
1. Download and burn the Redo live cd.
2. After booting from the live cd passed the initial menu, choose the menu item to install to USB device (8GB was more than enough) and follow the screens...

Sample backup usage:

1. Boot from the USB device (here, this was much faster than via optical media).
2. Choose backup and follow the screens -- choose to save the Windows XP partition to the USB device.
3. Wait a bit (less than 10 minutes here).

Sample restore image:

1. Boot from the USB device.
2. Choose restore and follow the screens -- choose to restore the image from the USB device.
3. Wait a bit (less than for backing up here).

Recommend testing with VirtualBox first.  FWIW, the following was a nice tip for getting VirtualBox to boot from USB:

  http://www.pendrivel...drive-in-virtualbox/

The live cd comes with a few useful apps including gparted, palimpsest (aka Disk Utility), TestDisk, a disk wiper, and Chromium.

Redo appears to be a wrapper around partclone which IIUC is used by Clonezilla (also nice but more complicated to figure out IMHO).

A DC Member writes:

"This is a really amazing post by a Google employee, supposedly intended originally for a private Google audience but "accidentally" posted publicly and now, apparently, allowed to remain public. Read it while it lasts!
https://plus.google....51/posts/eVeouesvaVX
Some choice quotes:

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right... But there's one thing [Amazon] do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups.

That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on. But no. No, it's like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don't know. It's pretty low.

It's a long write-up but well worth reading all of it. Please do!

I don't really have much to add except to say that I've never really understood this issue as clearly as he states it here. I've had some sense of it, but the way he lays it out makes it blindingly obvious. I hope Google learns from this because I like their products and the general way they do things, but it's true that they are slowly losing the platform wars. I honestly thought G+ must have had a strong platform vision internally that was slowly being exposed to the outside world, but it sounds like maybe that's not the case. Eek!"

- Oshyan

DC member vlastimil writes:

"Hi all,

first of all, I would like to thank all donationcoders, who helped with testing (https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=27867.0) and with picking the right name (https://www.donation...ex.php?topic=28144.0). After a long I hesitation, I decided to keep the RealWorld Paint name as many of you have recommended.

RWPaint is a free image and animation editor focused on bloggers and other people who work with pictures and animations online. Notable features include:

• Support of layers with styles.
• Import and export of .psd, .xcf, .pdn formats with layers and in case of Photoshop also with some styles (is there any other non-Adobe image editor that imports layer styles?).
• Many drawing tools (pencil, image brush, rectangle, ellipse, lasso, polygon, flood fill), and photo-retouching tools (red eye remover, clone, shape-shifter (liquify-like) tool).
• All basic image effects (shadow, fill, outline, bevel, glow, exposure adjustments, content-aware resizing, colorize, shift hue) and some less usual ones like displace or environment mapping. Plus a javascript interface for custom filter creation.
• Decent gif optimizer.
• Animation <-> filmstrip conversions.
• And a cute splash:

Oh, and here is a download link: http://www.rw-designer.com/image-editor

My review today is for King of Tokyo:

I learned about King of Tokyo from the Cracked LCD Review of it by Michael Barnes and the review on Drake's Flame, which I recommend you go check out.

When Michael said it was a simple game with lots of theme, that was one of the best board games of 2011 -- I just had to try it. And I'm glad I did -- It's exactly what I'm looking for in a game -- a fast fun experience that is easy to learn and a pure pleasure to play.  It's a great game.

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It was designed by the same guy who created Magic the Gathering (Richard Garfield).  The artwork is out of this world, cartoon monster styled -- and the components are really fun to look at and read and use.  It's got a big stack of cards that are phenomenal.

I won't go into the rules, you can read them on the Board Game Geek site or the Cracked LCD review I linked to above.  Basically each player controls a monster and they fight to stay alive and gain victory points. Gameplay is fast and furious and there is a lot of luck involved.  But always tricky choices to make and tension and surprise around every corner.  We had a huge amount of fun talking during the game and enjoying watching the process unfold.

This game really worked for me in an area where games often fail for me -- and that is with the rule-changing cards.  King of Tokyo comes with a large deck of (beautifully illustrated) cards that give players special powers and change the (simple) base ruleset.  In many games that use this idea of rule-changing cards, the rules on the cards are long and complicated and are hard to absorb and incorporate.  But King of Tokyo does it so well -- with just minor changes, and perfect themeing -- it just works.

Final rating: 10 out of 10 if you are interested in a quick fun game with people who are learning for the first time.

After barely a week with my HTC Sensation I knew I would never buy an HTC product again. Now, this will help me remember if I ever think of changing my mind:


Massive Security Vulnerability In HTC Android Devices