Why Zimbio.com is not Safe for Bloggers ?

Why Zimbio.com is not Safe for Bloggers ?

This seems to be an inappropriate topic but its true. I will tell you some facts which will justify my comment that Zimbio is not good, or rather its unsafe for professional bloggers.
Before we proceed just know something about Zimbio.com .

What is Zimbio.com ?

Zimbio.com attracts bloggers using the Livingly Media link at the bottom of their website. That link takes them to  "http://www.livingly.com/for-bloggers/", where they tell bloggers that if they post their content on Zimbio then they will get a wider audience, more views, and free publicity. (New Bloggers can easily get into this trap)
However Zimbio have a lot of content of their own but now most of the content posted there is from different blogs or websites. I came to know about that when content of one of my websites is copied by some other website and then they posted it on Zimbio.com . It was a major setback for me as those links were diverting a lot of traffic that should have been to my blog. Those links easily get ranked on Zimbio as zimbio is a high-ranking website and search engines give preference to content available on it.

Some facts you should know about Zimbio

• If you post your content on Zimbio, then it become Creative Common (CC). Professional bloggers know what Creative Commons Licence means. It means that now your content is not yours, any body can use it.
• If you put your content on Zimbio, then search engines will crawl it first and then on your website. (Due to the better ranking of Zimbio). Thus they might consider your content as duplicate content (while it not). Search engines don't know that have created an account on Zimbio and yourself posting it there. Serious bloggers know the effect of duplicate content on SERP.
• In short term you might get better traffic from Zimbio but in long term you will loose your ranking in search engines.

What Google says about Zimbio.com : 

There is nothing better than google. Here is the link to diagnostic report of Google about Zimbio. Please read it.

http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=zimbio.com/&hl=en
As this report says that malicious software were noticed on Zimbio. I will never suggest you to use zimbio.
If you want to protect your blog from getting copied must read my post :  Find Websites Copying your content. 

Winter Shorts 3: PyWeek #16 in April, Rainbow Rooms, Valyria Tear on OS X

PyWeek #16 in April

PyWeek logo

PyWeek is a game jam that obviously goes on for one week and requires the use of Python. It takes place online and there are overall winners in team and solo categories, as well as awards. The dates of the 16th PyWeek challenge are 00:00 UTC April 14, 2013 to 00:00 UTC April 21, 2013. Registration opens on 15. March 2013.

There is a message board for the community and there are interesting methods to publish Python games as HTML/JavaScript using pyjs, as demonstrated by the PyWeek #15 entry Kaos.

License Requirements: At least Shared Source required. Free software licenses recommended.

PyWeek #15 Entry: Rainbow Rooms

Rainbow Rooms Video

Rainbow Rooms is a physical-nonsense-maze puzzle game based on libtcod.

Various fonts are being used, some of which might be problematic license-wise for including in for example Debian's official repositories but it should be possible to replace them in less than two hours including research and documentation.

Code License: GPLv2
Content License: Unclear

Valyria Tear: "Final Release of Half-Episode I"

New Valyria Tear GUI screens

Valyria Tear Half-Episode I has been released, which I suppose we can take as 50% of Episode I's acts being complete.

The release brings new graphical interfaces and development is ongoing.

An OS X version can now also be grabbed from the OSX thread.

Code License: GPLv2
Content License: Various (DFSG approved)

FedEx spam loads malware

Received an email from (supposedly) FedEx today, seems my parcel was unable to be delivered:

Print your receipt!

    Mail details:

Subject: Shipping Information‏

Sender: stoiciu_ro01@uhost.ro

X-Originating-IP: 195.78.124.42

Content: 

FedEx

Tracking ID: 1795-21492944

Date: Monday, 18 February 2013, 10:22 AM

Dear Client,

Your parcel has arrived at February 20.Courier was unable to deliver the parcel to you at 20 February 06:33 PM.

To receive your parcel, please, print this receipt and go to the nearest office.

Print Receipt  

Best Regards, The FedEx Team.

FedEx 1995-2013

The 'Print Receipt' button points to a filesharing website, where a ZIP file gets downloaded. Inside the ZIP is an EXE file with a neat little Word icon. When running the file:

Postal Receipt  information

You get a Notepad file with some information. Is your name Mark Smith? No? Then you're infected. Is your name Mark Smith? Then you're infected anyway. 

Does this behaviour look familiar? Well noticed, we've seen this in a post from some months ago:

UPS spam downloads malware

Gathered files. Contact me for a copy.

Some more details about the downloaded file:
Postal-Receipt.exe
MD5: d335b890e1bc260a259b994533333d02
VirusTotal Report
Anubis Report
ThreatExpert Report


The following file was dropped in the %appdata% folder:
ujfhmdlk.exe
MD5: d335b890e1bc260a259b994533333d02
VirusTotal Report
Anubis Report
ThreatExpert Report


The malware tries to connect to the following IPs:

46.105.143.110
50.115.116.201
74.117.61.123
77.79.81.166
81.93.248.152
87.106.51.52
91.121.140.40
91.121.28.146
93.125.30.232
95.140.203.241
109.235.252.2
118.97.15.13
122.155.18.53
149.62.168.76
188.165.205.46
190.111.176.13
190.111.176
202.153.132.24
213.229.106.32
217.11.63.194



It performs the following GET request on port 8080, probably to download more malware.  
(I was however unable to reproduce any additional droppers or system modifications): /509A37A363A4A88C8B6BBD234F063B9CEE4072C470F04B0AB239C05FF89DA4B98D1E54BF77C0CD96CD8BC4004B3459C13194D0F9E0D64CF108A635F7468E817F408A20EF7149233F1356D2B3565F49





Conclusion

• Don't click on any link(s) of unknown senders. In fact, don't even open mail from unknown senders.
• Have you indeed ordered something? Check the status of it directly on the supplier's website.
• Don't be fooled by the Adobe or Word icons, they are actually EXE files. You can enable an option in Windows so you're always sure of the filetype being used:
  Enable Viewing of Filename Extensions for Known File Types
• Install an antivirus and antimalware product and keep it up-to-date & running. In this case, the payload is at least 4 months old! This should be easily detected by your antivirus product.

Asylum: Free-as-in-Freedom Horror Adventure, Successfully Crowd-Funded

This is a guest post by Hythlodaeus on an interesting FLOSS game engine project, being developed by a professional games company.

ASYLUM video

I guess I should take a few paragraphs on this article to explain my stance on crowd-funded game projects. I've always been turned off by most Kickstarter game projects for a very simple reason: after personally inquiring a plethora of developers on their stance for Open-Source and Free Software, I was generally met with negative replies, half-baked excuses, bitter retorts or complete silence.

Now, although I recognize it is every developer's right to pick the license and the conditions for the usage of their own work, it strikes me as a very odd attitude for people engaging into crowd funding projects to be so unwilling to provide any other warranties to their prospective backers and future customers other than “we will make this happen if you give us enough money”. From this point, let's make something clear: pledging on a crowd-funded game project isn't exactly the same thing as buying a video game. From the backers' part it's an investment and a risk. It's about depositing your faith on other peoples' words, in hopes they will eventually deliver what they promised. When you buy a game, be it good or bad, you at least know that you're dealing with a finished product. When you pledge on a crowd-funded project, completion is only a possibility regardless of the campaign's success.

So, in my personal opinion, I've always thought crowd-funded game projects should strive to provide the level of trust they request from their backers. In this case,  that means allowing people to have access to the game's source code under a permissive / Free Software license, preferably starting right at the end of the campaign. Why? Simply because that allows for a tighter control of what's going on in the development backstage, and will allow every contributor to provide better feedback on the work being done. Raw engine code also gives backers something that can eventually be picked up and used for other personal purposes, if the project happens to fail for some reason.

With that said, let's talk a little about this project, which is, after all, what lead me to write this post. Asylum is the brainchild of Agustin Cordes, the Argentinian developer behind Scratches, a horror game that managed to get some degree of attention way back in 2006. The project aims to create a Lovecraftian-inspired horror point-and-click adventure game that will focus on an intense and immersive atmosphere, followed closely by engaging storytelling. From the trailer and screenshots provided so far, it seems like a rather professional endeavour, but for me the most pleasant surprise, was that the developer's in-house engine, Dagon, will be Free and Open-Source. On top of that, Cordes himself actually took the time to explain why he believes the engine should be free, and how such a decision aims not only to help preserve Asylum for future generations, but also to empower other indie developers by providing an open platform anyone will be free to use.

Asylum Kickstarter Video (Bonus)

Since there is no information available about specific licensing on the project page, I actually went on to ask the developer about which specific license was being used for the Dagon engine:

Me: Hello. I have one question regarding Dagon. You already stated it's going to be free and open source, but exactly under which software license are you going to release it?
Agustin Cordes: Hi! We're currently using CDDL but I'm expecting to re-license with the more popular MPL 2.0 very soon. Cheers!
Me: Fair enough. Do I have your permission to quote this conversation in a news blog about Free Software gaming?
Agustin Cordes: Absolutely! :)

“MPL” referring of course to the Mozilla Public License, which despite not being a strong copyleft license, it is both Free Software and GPL compatible. So perhaps Dagon can motivate a new generation of graphic adventure lovers to innovate upon the work started by Asylum. We can only hope future Kickstarter projects and indie developers adopt a similar perspective on Open-Source development.

With little less than a few days to go (I'm ashamed to say I only heard about this project very recently), Asylum is already fully funded, but if you still wish to contribute to this genuinely FLOSS project, or simply purchase the game for a special price, you still have a chance. Extra funding goals have already been set, and some additional rewards may also seem worthy to you.

The source for Asylum's engine, Dagon, can already be found here, currently licensed under CDDL (Thanks to Evropi for pointing this out).

26th February 2013 AUD & Euro Daily reports

AUD Weekly & Daily cycles

Yearly 50% level Support...

12 hour random support on Tuesday, as shown

but at the same time it's being sold down from the Weekly 50% level towards the Weekly lows

Euro Weekly & Daily cycles

Bearish but random Support on Tuesday's lows