Any DC member who wants to come over for board game night on Saturday October 22 2011, is hereby invited to my house in Champaign Illinois, USA.

Free DC mug is your reward. We will be playing board games all day and night.

Let me know ahead of time if you are thinking about coming (I am 10 minute walk from Amtrak station and 20 minute drive to airport).

It's no secret that I am a big fan of board games, and I love watching reviews of board games.  One of my favorite things to watch is a board game video series made by Tom Vassel, who runs a site called the Dice Tower.

He's just announced that he is going to begin his video series counting down his top 100 board games of all time.. And his daughter melody will be presenting her top 100 as well -- perfect if you have young children.

http://www.dicetower.com/top_100.html

1. Newsletter Editorial

DonationCoder is not a charity, but we've always tried to be good internet citizens -- lending our support to good ideas and encouraging our members to find projects to be actively involved in.  We're a small site without financial resources, but we love talking to people about their new idea and cheering them on.

In this month's newsletter editorial I wanted to bring special attention to a few noteworthy items.

The first item concerns a battle we fought and largely won -- a battle against a particularly insidious new practice adopted by CNet's download site, to wrap all software hosted on their site with their own custom adware installer regardless of author's desires.

The second item I want to bring your attention to involves a problem we have been ranting about for years now -- the dreadful way antivirus companies handle false positives (cases where an antivirus program says that a program is infected when it isn't); due to laziness they frequently end up terrifying users based on nothing more than a guess, and are slow to correct their mistaken identifications.  In the last week longtime DC forum member and skilled windows programmer Jeremy Collake from Bitsum Technologies has begun a new effort to address this problem -- and the related (and often more damaging) problem where entire websites are rated as "dangerous" (and sometimes even blocked) because of these false positives.

There are also a number of new DC member software releases that deserve special attention this month.  DC member Tranglos as released an early beta version of his NANY 2012 entry, called Ethervane Echo, a new clipboard tool, and it's already getting lots of attention.  DC member ATH also released a new version of his WinButtons tool and a number of DC members are reporting their success in using it with a small touchscreen device.  And DC Member HamRadio released a new tool for portable document launching.

We also had a really interesting discussion on the forum with a programmer who has been working on "Fairware", an open source software-payment model similar to the one used by DonationCoder.  Lot's of really interesting talk on that thread for those who are interested in donationware and other voluntary payment models.

Lastly, I'd like to draw your attention to a new open tool called ZUploader.  I've been searching for an existing tool to integrate into my Screenshot Captor screenshot tool, which would make it easy for people to upload screenshots to different image hosting or ftp sites.  When I found ZUploader I knew my search was over.  It's a great tool that supports lots of services, like ftp, imageshack, imgur, flickr, photobucket, rapidshare, dropbox, and more.  It's a pleasure to use and I can't recommend it enough.  The author has also expressed his desire to hear feature requests, so if you can think of anything you'd like to see added to the program, don't be shy about asking.  If you are a user of Screenshot Captor -- check out the screencast I posted showing the new ZUploader integration.

You'll find all of these items and many more in this edition of the DonationCoder newsletter..

I don't know if the technicalities are right, but it looks plausible, sadly:

http://nikcub.appspo...cebook-is-not-enough

But logging out of Facebook only de-authorizes your browser from the web application, a number of cookies (including your account number) are still sent along to all requests to facebook.com. Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions.

A simple graphic that is true for all of them, not just Facebook.


https://plus.google....08/posts/2vZ3Dk4pfjJ

Long time DC forum member db90h writes today about his new effort to address the issue of false positive reports by antivirus vendors -- an issue that we have ranted about regularly on the forum:

"I have been a member of a malware working group at the IEEE of which almost ALL security vendors participate. I've therefore been in a position to create and propose this new Forum: http://bitsum.net/fo...php/topic,915.0.html . This is only hours old, but one security vendor has agreed to take part. As the others wake, we'll see who will voluntarily take part in it. As long as Software Vendors take part, security vendors will eventually be forced to take part in order to respond.

This is a DRAFT, it is late, I'm too tired too proof-read.

• OFFICIAL SITE: http://bitsum.net/fo...php/topic,915.0.html

I would like to congratulate Microsoft as the one company who takes the conservative approach, making their false positive rate the lowest in the industry. Kudos to them. All security companies should act that way! Causing collateral damage to innocent businesses/families is simply unacceptable. It will sometimes accidentally occur, but clearly not enough is being done to prevent this problem, as it has only gotten worse.

---------------------------------

Accountability. Transparency. Communication. Prevention.
Helping to prevent false positives and mis-rating of web sites, instead of merely retroactively addressing them

The purpose of this board is to provide a public place to communicate false positives and improper site ratings to the security companies. Once a false positive or improper site rating occurs, the damage is often already done. Compounding matters, some security companies do not respond to false positive or improper rating reports in a timely manner, if they respond at all. In other cases, they DO respond in a timely manner. We need to know which companies respond well, and which don't seem to care. Some less than legitimate security companies may even use false positives as a means to drum up business, as to users it may appear as if they detected something that other software missed.

This is NOT for Bitsum, it is for the whole world. This is a place where anyone can report a false positive or mis-rating of their web site. Then everyone can see what action the offending security company takes, if any.

When a false positive occurs, it is imperative that we determine WHY it occurred, and work together to AVOID it in the future. This takes cooperation between the security companies and software vendors.

The intent is not to crucify the security industry, I hope everyone understands that. Transparency allows us to see which act responsibly, and which don't.  Users can see which security companies CARE about false positives and the collateral damage to hundreds or thousands of innocent small businesses. Accountability is important to fixing this issue.

After all, if a security company causes substantial collateral damage, destroying innocent businesses and families, are they any better than the malware they protect against? We need to know which companies care, and which don't. Users can then make their purchasing decisions based on that.

This is NOT related to executable compression, as false positives now occur on almost all software, compressed or not. So it has NOTHING to do with PECompact.

Please remember, security companies have a VERY hard job, so it is understandable that false positives occur. However, we should all work together to mitigate them as much as possible and avoid collateral damage."