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• Does VMware_ThinApp_4.0.3_169725.msi contain Trojan.Win32.Vapsup in it? [closed]

  - by Joe

  Today I ran a full system scan using Online Armor++. It detected Trojans in the installer. I have had this installer on the computer for many months and I do not remember if I ever installed it on this PC or not. For some reason I unpacked the installer with 7zip though. I was probably going to attempt to make it portable. Anyway so I had the installer in a folder, and another folder next to it with all of the installers files unpacked. The VMwareVS.cab file that was extracted from the installer, also had its files extracted into another folder. This was all done many months ago. OA++ did not detect the installer itself as as Trojan VMwareVS.cab, but it did detect 4 of the files that I had unpacked as Trojans. Here are the details of what the scan detected on my PC today. Note: I uploaded these files to VirusTotal....the Ikarus and A-squared engines(the engines from Online Armor++) are not detecting anything. But some of the other engines are detecting the same Trojan that OA++ detected(Trojan.Win32.Vapsup). C:\Downloads\VMware_ThinApp_4.0.3_169725.msi [This file was not detected by the Virus Scan as infected] CRC-32: 50189335 MD5: 9e32e3272d2637fb6e0759a604879e6f SHA-1: 19ef5a6d586ddcc5b9222ba57b0f14159655f3f8 C:\Downloads\VMware_ThinApp_4.0.3_169725\VMwareVS.cab [This file was not detected by the Virus Scan as infected] CRC-32: d3a9694a MD5: ddc278a8fe0a25486277d9800e6af85a SHA-1: 456b731c8b6fdb7a1d7bcff3d1fbe9df58ccc73a Online Armor++ Virus Scan Results: Detected Trojan.Win32.Vapsup.vee!A2 C:\Downloads\VMware_ThinApp_4.0.3_169725\Binary.ThinstallProcess CRC-32: 4888b13c MD5: 4884cb4622278c0835b9a5dcd2ae0473 SHA-1: ed879ae65147805dd69e1355c17df814b9d434ce Detected Trojan.Win32.Vapsup.vef!A2 C:\Downloads\VMware_ThinApp_4.0.3_169725\VMwareVS\AppSync.exe CRC-32: fd20b378 MD5: cbdcdd590f7ffc52b6ce68fa11f2bda4 SHA-1: aebf685e02d6693df9eaa92c67dc5746792b5ecf Detected Trojan.Win32.Vapsup.veg!A2 C:\Downloads\VMware_ThinApp_4.0.3_169725\VMwareVS\logging.dll CRC-32: 8adee5d5 MD5: 56ff9b83f58ba8eacb6e939aa4759bf0 SHA-1: b52fa38765a25fe6a2c4f60d76545a4dd64904eb Detected Trojan.Win32.Vapsup.vek!A2 C:\Downloads\VMware_ThinApp_4.0.3_169725\VMwareVS\thinreg.exe CRC-32: 423c5652 MD5: c436feff8d9096e7475c84a6bca6096c SHA-1: 685b84af796132ce144aacd6ff23379e17ddf1a7 Are these files indeed infected by this Trojan, or is it just a false positive? Does anybody have the same version of the original installer, who could find out if the Checksums of the installer and unpacked files match? Should I be worried about whether this Trojan has spread and infected my machine? Thanks in advance for any help!

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• Expert iptables help needed?

  - by Asad Moeen

  After a detailed analysis, I collected these details. I am under a UDP Flood which is more of application dependent. I run a Game-Server and an attacker is flooding me with "getstatus" query which makes the GameServer respond by making the replies to the query which cause output to the attacker's IP as high as 30mb/s and server lag. Here are the packet details, Packet starts with 4 bytes 0xff and then getstatus. Theoretically, the packet is like "\xff\xff\xff\xffgetstatus " Now that I've tried a lot of iptables variations like state and rate-limiting along side but those didn't work. Rate Limit works good but only when the Server is not started. As soon as the server starts, no iptables rule seems to block it. Anyone else got more solutions? someone asked me to contact the provider and get it done at the Network/Router but that looks very odd and I believe they might not do it since that would also affect other clients. Responding to all those answers, I'd say: Firstly, its a VPS so they can't do it for me. Secondly, I don't care if something is coming in but since its application generated so there has to be a OS level solution to block the outgoing packets. At least the outgoing ones must be stopped. Secondly, its not Ddos since just 400kb/s input generates 30mb/s output from my GameServer. That never happens in a D-dos. Asking the provider/hardware level solution should be used in that case but this one is different. And Yes, Banning his IP stops the flood of outgoing packets but he has many more IP-Addresses as he spoofs his original so I just need something to block him automatically. Even tried a lot of Firewalls but as you know they are just front-ends to iptables so if something doesn't work on iptables, what would the firewalls do? These were the rules I tried, iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name DDOS --rsource iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 1 --hitcount 5 --name DDOS --rsource -j DROP It works for the attacks on un-used ports but when the server is listening and responding to the incoming queries by the attacker, it never works. Okay Tom.H, your rules were working when I modified them somehow like this: iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m length --length 1:1024 -m recent --set --name XXXX --rsource iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m string --string "xxxxxxxxxx" --algo bm --to 65535 -m recent --update --seconds 1 --hitcount 15 --name XXXX --rsource -j DROP They worked for about 3 days very good where the string "xxxxxxxxx" would be rate-limited, blocked if someone flooded and also didn't affect the clients. But just today, I tried updating the chain to try to remove a previously blocked IP so for that I had to flush the chain and restore this rule ( iptables -X and iptables -F ), some clients were already connected to servers including me. So restoring the rules now would also block some of the clients string completely while some are not affected. So does this mean I need to restart the server or why else would this happen because the last time the rules were working, there was no one connected?

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• SAP PI 7.1 Runtime Workbench error: Domain ??? (domain.null)

  - by Techboy

  Within the Runtime Workbench screen of my SAP PI 7.1 system I have the error: Domain ??? (domain.null) Integration Server Integration Engines Non-Central Adapter Engines J2SE Adapter Tools The SLD CIM instance, class XI Domain shows: CreationClassName: SAP_XIDomain Name: domain.null Caption: Domain null With the associations: XI Contained Integration Repository XI Contained Integration Server XI Contained Integration Server If I do this: Move these associations to the correct SAP_XIDomain Delete the SAP_XIDomain 'Domain null' Restart the SLD Restart the SAP PI system it all appears okay (i.e. the 'Domain null') issue does not appear. The 'Domain null' issue re-appears as soon as I go into the SAP Runtime Workbench. Please can you tell me why it says domain.null and how to resolve it?

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• iptables - quick safety eval & limit max conns over time

  - by Peter Hanneman

  Working on locking down a *nix server box with some fancy iptable(v1.4.4) rules. I'm approaching the matter with a "paranoid, everyone's out to get me" style, not necessarily because I expect the box to be a hacker magnet but rather just for the sake of learning iptables and *nix security more throughly. Everything is well commented - so if anyone sees something I missed please let me know! The *nat table's "--to-ports" point to the only ports with actively listening services. (aside from pings) Layer 2 apps listen exclusively on chmod'ed sockets bridged by one of the layer 1 daemons. Layers 3+ inherit from layer 2 in a similar fashion. The two lines giving me grief are commented out at the very bottom of the *filter rules. The first line runs fine but it's all or nothing. :) Many thanks, Peter H. *nat #Flush previous rules, chains and counters for the 'nat' table -F -X -Z #Redirect traffic to alternate internal ports -I PREROUTING --src 0/0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8080 -I PREROUTING --src 0/0 -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8443 -I PREROUTING --src 0/0 -p udp --dport 53 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8053 -I PREROUTING --src 0/0 -p tcp --dport 9022 -j REDIRECT --to-ports 8022 COMMIT *filter #Flush previous settings, chains and counters for the 'filter' table -F -X -Z #Set default behavior for all connections and protocols -P INPUT DROP -P OUTPUT DROP -A FORWARD -j DROP #Only accept loopback traffic originating from the local NIC -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT -A INPUT ! -i lo -d 127.0.0.0/8 -j DROP #Accept all outgoing non-fragmented traffic having a valid state -A OUTPUT ! -f -m state --state NEW,RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT #Drop fragmented incoming packets (Not always malicious - acceptable for use now) -A INPUT -f -j DROP #Allow ping requests rate limited to one per second (burst ensures reliable results for high latency connections) -A INPUT -p icmp --icmp-type 8 -m limit --limit 1/sec --limit-burst 2 -j ACCEPT #Declaration of custom chains -N INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -N INSPECT_STATE -N INSPECT #Drop incoming tcp connections with invalid tcp-flags -A INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -p tcp --tcp-flags ALL ALL -j DROP -A INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -p tcp --tcp-flags ALL NONE -j DROP -A INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -p tcp --tcp-flags ACK,FIN FIN -j DROP -A INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -p tcp --tcp-flags ACK,PSH PSH -j DROP -A INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -p tcp --tcp-flags ACK,URG URG -j DROP -A INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,FIN SYN,FIN -j DROP -A INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -p tcp --tcp-flags ALL FIN,PSH,URG -j DROP -A INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -p tcp --tcp-flags FIN,RST FIN,RST -j DROP -A INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -p tcp --tcp-flags SYN,RST SYN,RST -j DROP -A INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -p tcp --tcp-flags ALL SYN,FIN,PSH,URG -j DROP -A INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -p tcp --tcp-flags ALL SYN,RST,ACK,FIN,URG -j DROP #Accept incoming traffic having either an established or related state -A INSPECT_STATE -m state --state ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT #Drop new incoming tcp connections if they aren't SYN packets -A INSPECT_STATE -m state --state NEW -p tcp ! --syn -j DROP #Drop incoming traffic with invalid states -A INSPECT_STATE -m state --state INVALID -j DROP #INSPECT chain definition -A INSPECT -p tcp -j INSPECT_TCP_FLAGS -A INSPECT -j INSPECT_STATE #Route incoming traffic through the INSPECT chain -A INPUT -j INSPECT #Accept redirected HTTP traffic via HA reverse proxy -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 8080 -j ACCEPT #Accept redirected HTTPS traffic via STUNNEL SSH gateway (As well as tunneled HTTPS traffic destine for other services) -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 8443 -j ACCEPT #Accept redirected DNS traffic for NSD authoritative nameserver -A INPUT -p udp --dport 8053 -j ACCEPT #Accept redirected SSH traffic for OpenSSH server #Temp solution: -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 8022 -j ACCEPT #Ideal solution: #Limit new ssh connections to max 10 per 10 minutes while allowing an "unlimited" (or better reasonably limited?) number of established connections. #-A INPUT -p tcp --dport 8022 --state NEW,ESTABLISHED -m recent --set -j ACCEPT #-A INPUT -p tcp --dport 8022 --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 600 --hitcount 11 -j DROP COMMIT *mangle #Flush previous rules, chains and counters in the 'mangle' table -F -X -Z COMMIT

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• How to create robots.txt for a domain that contains international websites in subfolders?

  - by aaandre

  Hi, I am working on a site that has the following structure: site.com/us - us version site.com/uk - uk version site.com/jp - Japanese version etc. I would like to create a robots.txt that points the local search engines to a localized sitemap page and has them exclude everything else from the local listings. So, google.com (us) will index ONLY site.com/us and take in consideration site.com/us/sitemap.html google.co.uk will index only site.com/uk and site.com/uk/sitemap.html Same for the rest of the search engines, including Yahoo, Bing etc. Any idea on how to achieve this? Thank you!

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• Ideal permissions scheme for multiple Apache/PHP sites...

  - by Omega

  I'm hosting multiple sites from one server where each site has it's own user and www directory in their home dir. Currently our web server runs as user nobody(99). We're noticing that to run several popular scripts and engines, they require write access to their own files. As the home directory is owned by the user, not nobody(99), what is the best policy or change in hosting configuration that would: ...make it so that all the various engines and platforms work? ...still allow us to work with files and edit them without having to diddle with permissions as root? Thanks for the advice!

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• SQL SERVER – Subquery or Join – Various Options – SQL Server Engine knows the Best

  - by pinaldave

  This is followup post of my earlier article SQL SERVER – Convert IN to EXISTS – Performance Talk, after reading all the comments I have received I felt that I could write more on the same subject to clear few things out. First let us run following four queries, all of them are giving exactly same resultset. USE AdventureWorks GO -- use of = SELECT * FROM HumanResources.Employee E WHERE E.EmployeeID = ( SELECT EA.EmployeeID FROM HumanResources.EmployeeAddress EA WHERE EA.EmployeeID = E.EmployeeID) GO -- use of in SELECT * FROM HumanResources.Employee E WHERE E.EmployeeID IN ( SELECT EA.EmployeeID FROM HumanResources.EmployeeAddress EA WHERE EA.EmployeeID = E.EmployeeID) GO -- use of exists SELECT * FROM HumanResources.Employee E WHERE EXISTS ( SELECT EA.EmployeeID FROM HumanResources.EmployeeAddress EA WHERE EA.EmployeeID = E.EmployeeID) GO -- Use of Join SELECT * FROM HumanResources.Employee E INNER JOIN HumanResources.EmployeeAddress EA ON E.EmployeeID = EA.EmployeeID GO Let us compare the execution plan of the queries listed above. Click on image to see larger image. It is quite clear from the execution plan that in case of IN, EXISTS and JOIN SQL Server Engines is smart enough to figure out what is the best optimal plan of Merge Join for the same query and execute the same. However, in the case of use of Equal (=) Operator, SQL Server is forced to use Nested Loop and test each result of the inner query and compare to outer query, leading to cut the performance. Please note that here I no mean suggesting that Nested Loop is bad or Merge Join is better. This can very well vary on your machine and amount of resources available on your computer. When I see Equal (=) operator used in query like above, I usually recommend to see if user can use IN or EXISTS or JOIN. As I said, this can very much vary on different system. What is your take in above query? I believe SQL Server Engines is usually pretty smart to figure out what is ideal execution plan and use it. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Joins, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Scripts, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

  - by ScottGu

  Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• How bad is it to use display: none in CSS?

  - by Andy

  I've heard many times that it's bad to use display: none for SEO reasons, as it could be an attempt to push in irrelevant popular keywords. A few questions: Is that still received wisdom? Does it make a difference if you're only hiding a single word, or perhaps a single character? If you should avoid any use of it, what are the preferred techniques for hiding (in situations where you need it to become visible again on certain conditions)? Some references I've found so far: Matt Cutts from 2005 in a comment If you're straight-out using CSS to hide text, don't be surprised if that is called spam. I'm not saying that mouseovers or DHTML text or have-a-logo-but-also-have-text is spam; I answered that last one at a conference when I said "imagine how it would look to a visitor, a competitor, or someone checking out a spam report. If you show your company's name and it's Expo Markers instead of an Expo Markers logo, you should be fine. If the text you decide to show is 'Expo Markers cheap online discount buy online Expo Markers sale ...' then I would be more cautious, because that can look bad." And in another comment on the same article We can flag text that appears to be hidden using CSS at Google. To date we have not algorithmically removed sites for doing that. We try hard to avoid throwing babies out with bathwater. (My emphasis) Eric Enge said in 2008 The legitimate use of this technique is so prevalent that I would rarely expect search engines to penalize a site for using the display: none attribute. It’s just very difficult to implement an algorithm that could truly ferret out whether the particular use of display: none is meant to deceive the search engines or not. Thanks in advance, Andy

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• ASP.NET mvcConf Videos Available

  - by ScottGu

  Earlier this month the ASP.NET MVC developer community held the 2nd annual mvcConf event.  This was a free, online conference focused on ASP.NET MVC – with more than 27 talks that covered a wide variety of ASP.NET MVC topics.  Almost all of the talks were presented by developers within the community, and the quality and topic diversity of the talks was fantastic. Below are links to free recordings of the talks that you can watch (and optionally download): Scott Guthrie Keynote The NuGet-y Goodness of Delivering Packages (Phil Haack) Industrial Strenght NuGet (Andy Wahrenberger) Intro to MVC 3 (John Petersen) Advanced MVC 3 (Brad Wilson) Evolving Practices in Using jQuery and Ajax in ASP.NET MVC Applications (Eric Sowell) Web Matrix (Rob Conery) Improving ASP.NET MVC Application Performance (Steven Smith) Intro to Building Twilio Apps with ASP.NET MVC (John Sheehan) The Big Comparison of ASP.NET MVC View Engines (Shay Friedman) Writing BDD-style Tests for ASP.NET MVC using MSTestContrib (Mitch Denny) BDD in ASP.NET MVC using SpecFlow, WatiN and WatiN Test Helpers (Brandon Satrom) Going Postal - Generating email with View Engines (Andrew Davey) Take some REST with WCF (Glenn Block) MVC Q&A (Jeffrey Palermo) Deploy ASP.NET MVC with No Effort (Troels Thomsen) IIS Express (Vaidy Gopalakrishnan) Putting the V in MVC (Chris Bannon) CQRS and Event Sourcing with MVC 3 (Ashic Mahtab) MVC 3 Extensibility (Roberto Hernandez) MvcScaffolding (Steve Sanderson) Real World Application Development with Mvc3 NHibernate, FluentNHibernate and Castle Windsor (Chris Canal) Building composite web applications with Open frameworks (Sebastien Lambla) Quality Driven Web Acceptance Testing (Amir Barylko) ModelBinding derived types using the DerivedTypeModelBinder in MvcContrib (Steve Hebert) Entity Framework "Code First": Domain Driven CRUD (Chris Zavaleta) Wrap Up with Jon Galloway & Javier Lozano I’d like to say a huge thank you to all of the speakers who presented, and to Javier Lozano, Eric Hexter and Jon Galloway for all their hard work in organizing the event and making it happen. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Copy wrongs and Copyright

  - by Tony Davis

  Recently, a Chinese blog website copied, wholesale and without permission, a Simple-Talk article on troubleshooting locking and blocking. Our initial reaction was exasperation and anger, tempered slightly by the fact that there was, at the top, a clear link to the original, and the book from which it was extracted. On the day the copy was posted, our original article saw a 30K spike in visits, so the site clearly has a substantial following! This made us pause for thought. Indeed, we wondered whether it might not be more profitable, and certainly more enjoyable, to notify the offender of similar content and serve a "put up" notice, rather than the usual DMCA "take down" . The DMCA request, issued to protect our and our authors' assets, is a necessary but tiresome, chore. So often, simple communication and negotiation could have averted the need for it. We are, after all, in the business of presenting knowledge, information and help to the SQL Server Community. If only they had asked! Of course, one's attitude changes according to the motivation behind the copying of content. One of the motivations seems to be pure vanity; they do it to try to enhance their CV, or their company's expertise, by pretending to expertise they don't possess. There is a class of plagiariser, however, that is doing it purely for money, getting advertising revenue by attracting hapless readers to their site. Not content with stealing content, sites can invest in services that provide 'load-testing' for websites that is so realistic that even the search engines can be fooled. Stolen content, fake visitors, swindled advertisers. Zero-tolerance is really the only way of dealing with plagiarism, and action will only be completely effective once Bing, Google, and the other search engines strike out from their listings the rogue sites that refuse to take down plagiarised content. It is, after all in everyone else's interests. Cheers, Tony.

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• Blogger still visible after moving to WP; Google Indexing issues after moving from Blogger to WP

  - by Erin

  I recently migrated from Blogger to Wordpress and am having two major transition issues that are really hurting. Despite literally hours of searching and experimenting, I cannot resolve the following: ISSUE ONE: I fixed all of my old blogger links to 301 redirect successfully to my WP links (the 2 structures are different and I realized too late), but my old blogger blog is still sometimes visible! (the 2 designs are completely different) I had 31 hits on my blogger site just yesterday. I have updated my privacy settings to hide my blogger blog from search engines and not be visible on blogger. I also removed my custom domain from blogger already as well. HELP! Not sure how to stop this. ISSUE two: Despite submitting a new site map and reindexing my pages for my WP blog, I am not visible in search engines, although I was very visible previously. In fact, some of my OLD links are showing up. Am I being penalized?? Any thoughts on how to fix. THANK YOU! Erin my site: www.thelawstudentswife.com

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• Duplicating someone's content legitimately & writing HTML to support that

  - by Codecraft

  I want to add content from other blogs to my own (with the authors permission) to help build additional relevant content and support articles I've found useful that others have written. I'm looking into how to do this responsibly - ie, by giving the original content author a boost and not competing against them for search traffic which should go to their site. In order to keep my duplicate content out of search, and to hint to the search engines where the original content is to be found i've implemented: <head> <meta name='robots' content='noindex, follow'> <link rel='canonical' href='http://www.originalblog.com/original-post.html' /> </head> Additionally, to boost the original article and to let readers know where it came from i'll be adding something like this: <div> Article originally written by <a href='http://www.authorswebsite.com'>Authors Name</a> and reproduced with permission.<br/> <a href='http://www.originalblog.com/original-post.html' target='new'> Read the original article here. </a> </div> All that remains is a way to 'officially' credit the original author in the HTML for the search spiders to see. Can anyone tell me a way to do this possibly using rel="author" (as far as I can see thats only good for my own original content), or perhaps it doesn't matter given that the reproduced pages will be kept out of search engines? Also, have I overlooked anything in the approach?

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• Highly SEO optimised forum posts

  - by Tom Gullen

  Given the following forum post: Basics of how internals of Construct work I've used GameMaker in the past. And I know some C++ and have used a few 3d engines with it. I have also looked at Unity, though I didn't get too much into it. So I know my way around programming etc... My question is, how does construct work internally? I know it allows python scripting, which itself is "technically" interpreted, though python is pretty fast as far as being interpreted goes. But what about the rest? Is the executable that gets cre... The forum software will take the first 150 chars of the first post as the page meta description, and the title will be the thread title. All ok. So in Google it will appear as: Basics of how internals of Construct work I've used GameMaker in the past. And I know some C++ and have used a few 3d engines with it. I have also looked at Unity, though I didn't get too much... http://www.domain.com/forum/basics-of-how-internals-of-construct-work.html Now the problem is (not so much with this thread, but other ones) is the first 150 chars don't always create the best meta description. Is it worth my time to cherry pick threads and manually set their description/title tags so they read like: Internal workings of Construct 2 Events aren't converted to any other language. The runtime is a standalone compiled EXE application, which is optimised and actually very fast. Your events... http://www.domain.com/forum/basics-of-how-internals-of-construct-work.html The H1 on the page is still the original title, but we have overridden the title and description to look more friendly on search results. Is this advantageous forgetting the obvious time cost?

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• images within noscript

  - by Guilherme Nascimento

  Note: My question is not about javascript Note: My question is how to make the HTML accessible to search engines. Note: My question is not about hiding texts, is on block loading of images in order to use LazyLoad. I tested various techniques of blocking the loading of images to use effect LazyLoad (I'm developing in javascript), was the only efficient <NOSCRIPT>: The HTML structure that would, with LazyLoad loading of images is achieved via the viewport (visible area of the website in browser). <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, <span class="lazyload"> <noscript><img src="foto-m0101.jpg" alt="image description"></noscript> </span> consectetur adipiscing elit. </p> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, <span class="lazyload"> <noscript><img src="foto-m0201.jpg" alt="image description"></noscript> </span> consectetur adipiscing elit. </p> <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, <span class="lazyload"> <noscript><img src="foto-m0301.jpg" alt="image description"></noscript> </span> consectetur adipiscing elit. </p> This is a bad practice for search engines? If it is a bad practice, you could put an example of good practice? If there is any other issue with noscript talking pictures, forgive me. Note: I did not find any doubts about noscript with images.

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• Is this form of cloaking likely to be penalised?

  - by Flo

  I'm looking to create a website which is considerably javascript heavy, built with backbone.js and most content being passed as JSON and loaded via backbone. I just needed some advice or opinions on likely hood of my website being penalised using the method of serving plain HTML (text, images, everything) to search engine bots and an js front-end version to normal users. This is my basic plan for my site: I plan on having the first request to any page being html which will only give about 1/4 of the page and there after load the last 3/4 with backbone js. Therefore non javascript users get a 'bit' of the experience. Once that new user has visited and detected to have js will have a cookie saved on their machine and requests from there after will be AJAX only. Example If (AJAX || HasJSCookie) { // Pass JSON } Search Engine server content: That entire experience of loading via AJAX will be stripped if a google bot for example is detected, the same content will be servered but all html. I thought about just allowing search engines to index the first 1/4 of content but as I'm considered about inner links and picking up every bit of content I thought it would be better to give search engines the entire content. I plan to do this by just detected a list of user agents and knowing if it's a bot or not. If (Bot) { //server plain html } In addition I plan to make clean URLs for the entire website despite full AJAX, therefore providing AJAX content to www.example.com/#/page and normal html to www.example.com/page is kind of our of the question. Would rather avoid the practice of using # when there are technology such as HTML 5 push state is around. So my question is really just asking the opinion of the masses on if it's likely that my website will be penalised? And do you suggest an alternative which avoids 'noscript' method

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• Preview Chitika Premium Ads On Your Website Quickly

  - by Gopinath

  Google AdSense is an excellent option for publishers like us to monetize traffic. As Google AdSense allow only 3 ad units per page, we have good amount of space left empty on the blog. Why not we use this empty space to earn some revenue(make sure that you are not annoying your visitors with too many ads)? On Tech Dreams today we started experimenting with Chitika Premium Ads to displays advertisements for visitors landing on us through search engines. Chitika Premium Ads are displayed only to US visitors who finds our pages through search engines. Visitors from outside USA does not see these ads anywhere on our site. We being in India, how to preview the Chitika ads on our site? To preview Chitika ads add #chitikatest at the end of the url. For example to preview the ads on Tech Dreams I use the url http://techdreams.org/#chitikatest The above url displays default list of ads Chitika displays. But if you want to see preview of ads for a specific keyword you can append it at the end of the url. Here is another example http://www.techdreams.org/#chitikatest=ipad   Do You Know What The Word “Chitika” Means? What does Chitika mean? When Chitika co-founders, Venkat Kolluri and Alden DoRosario left Lycos in 2003 to start their own company, they sought a name that would suggest the speed with which its customers would be able to put up ads on their Web sites. Chitika, which means “snap of the fingers” in Telugu (a South Indian language), captured this sentiment and Chitika Inc. was born (via) This article titled,Preview Chitika Premium Ads On Your Website Quickly, was originally published at Tech Dreams. Grab our rss feed or fan us on Facebook to get updates from us.

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• general questions about link spam

  - by hen3ry

  Hello, A CMS-based site I manage is suffering from a small but ominously growing number of almost certainly bot-emplaced, invisible spam links placed in registered-user-only shoutboxes and user forums. "Link Spam", yes? Until recently, I've kept my eyes on narrow tech issues, and I'm having trouble understanding what's going on. I understand that we need to tighten up our registration procedures, but more generally... Do I understand correctly that our primary interest in combatting link spam on our site is that major search engines reduce or zero the search visibility of sites that contain link spam? Although we're non-commercial, we don't want to be at the bottom of the rankings, or eliminated altogether. Are the linked-to sites the direct beneficiaries of the spam links, or is there some kind of indirection? What is the likely relationship between the link-spammers and the owners of the (directly or indirectly) linked-to sites? Are the owners of the linked-to sites paying the link-spammers for higher visibility? Are the owners aware that this method is being used? It is my impression that major search engines are capable these days of detecting that given sites are being promoted by link spam, and that these sites may consequently be reduced in search rank or dropped altogether. Do these sanctions occur frequently? Is there any potential value in sending notifications to the owners of the linked-to sites that their visibility is at risk? TIA, hen3ry

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• Leveraging Code in Ever Bigger Games

  - by ashes999

  Summary: The same way that I continually build complex engines and libraries within a single platform and technology to allow me to build increasingly bigger and better games, how to continue this when development crosses into different platforms? If I switch platforms, how do I leverage past code and experiences? Games are hard to build. Big games are even harder to build. I've decided that to be able to make big games, I need to start building smaller games, and building up an asset base of code, assets (graphics, sounds), tools, and most importantly, game engines, so that I can eventually get there. One game at a time. Let me give an analogy. To build an MMO 3D RPG, I would approach this by building and releasing small games with increasingly more features. This could entail, for example: A simple 2D game A tile-based game A game with RPG elements (items, equipment, monsters, battle) A full-fledged RPG A 3D RPG The problem now is if I have to change platforms or tools, I don't know how to leverage past code-bases (and experience) to start with a mature product. Right now, I'm writing Silverlight (FlatRedBall) games. Let's say I stick with this for ten years, and then suddenly decide to write a PS6 game, which is in a different programming language entirely. Granted, I have ten years of game-development experience (and correspondingly ten years of professional software development experience from my day job) to back me up. But I would still like some way to transplant that 2D RPG engine into the new programming language, or else leverage it somehow. Is this even possible? What are my options?

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• The best way to structure/design game code

  - by Edward

  My question is quite broad and related to the 2D game code design/architecture/structure. Usually the main game consists of the main loop where you update & render your world states. However, it's recommended for many purposes to separate rendering from the game-logic and so on. I am kinda confused about the whole situation. Many game engines/libs/sdks don't follow separation schema. They propagate a way where you define some scenes/stages and they contain some objects and the scene/stage controls the user input and so on. For example, in cocos2d(-x) and libgdx (stage2d) the games are usually done the way that the update logic happens at the same time/place as rendering. Also, the propagated way is to have a structure where an object knows how to draw itself - which is not a separation of updating & rendering. The same with Flash based games, they are usually done the way when an object (class) contains a swf or a texture and some data and holds some update logic itself, or updated from main Scene. And again this object already knows how to draw itself via "addChild". Also, some people recommend to use MVC pattern, which will require to completely obey the structure of those engines/libs/sdks. Maybe I am overthinking everything, but I am totally confused. I would be grateful if somebody could point me to a correct direction with the game code structures. What is your way of doing things in libgdx/cocos2d/flash?

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• Good 2D Platformer Physics

  - by Joe Wreschnig

  I have a basic character controller set up for a 2D platformer with Box2D, and I'm starting to tweak it to try to make it feel good. Physics engines have a lot of knobs to tweak, and it's not clear to me, writing with a physics engine for the first time, which ones I should use. Should jumping apply a force for several ticks? An impulse? Directly set velocity? How do I stop the avatar from sticking to walls without taking away all its friction (or do I take away all the friction, but only in the air)? Should I model the character as a capsule? A box with rounded corners? A box with two wheels? Just one big wheel? I feel like someone must have done this before! There seem to be very few resources available on the web that are not "baby's first physics", which all cut off where I'm hoping someone has already solved the issues. Most examples of physics engines for platformers have floaty-feeling controls, or in-air jumps, or easily exploitable behavior when temporary penetration is too high, etc. Some examples of what I mean: A short tap of jump jumps a short distance; a long tap jumps higher. Short skidding when stopping or reversing directions at high velocity. Standing stably on inclines (but maybe sliding down them when ducking). Analog speed when using an analog controller. All the other things that separate good platformers from bad platformers. Dare I suggest, stable moving platforms? I'm not really looking for "hey, do this." Obviously, the right thing to do is dependent on what I want in the game. But I'm hoping someone somewhere has gone through the possibilities and said "well technique A does feature X well, technique B does Y well, but that doesn't work with C", or has some worked examples beyond "if (key == space) character.impulse(0, 1)"

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• Is there an alternative to HTML Web Sockets, now that Firefox 4 has disabled them?

  - by Pino

  I've been checking out some of the latest multiplayer engines in HTML all supporting multi-user games (Very nice) - I believe all these engines use Web Sockets for communication. That’s why we’ve decided to disable support for WebSocket in Firefox 4, starting with beta 8 due to a protocol-level security issue. Beta 7 of Firefox has support for the -76 version of the protocol, the same version that’s included with Chrome and Safari. Beta 8 of Firefox 4 will remove that support. Anne van Kesteren of Opera also announced that Opera are dropping Websocket support. We are confident that other browser developers will follow. Source: Websockets Disabled in FireFox 4 I've just come accross the above, so no sockets in Firefox 4 or Opera.... thats big. Is anyone aware of an alternate or is it Chrome or do we need to just sit and wait for the next release of the major browsers. More info : Rocket Engine appears to work with all browsers including IE8 (http://rocketpack.fi/engine/) what will it be using as a method of communication?

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• Use Your Android Phone to Comparison Shop: 4 Scanner Apps Reviewed

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  A smart phone in your pocket is great for on the go news, web browsing, and—of course—mobile gaming. It’s also fantastic for comparison shopping. Today we take a look at four Android scanners and price comparison engines. It’s quite a neat time to be a consumer. Historically if you wanted to do serious price comparisons you had to haul yourself around town, gather flyers from the newspapers, and otherwise invest way too much energy into potential savings that might not even break into double digits. Now you can comparison shop with an ease that borders on magic: by simply pulling out your smart phone and scanning the barcode or typing in the name of the item you wish to compare. Today we’re taking a look at some of the more popular and powerful barcode scanners and price comparison engines available for the Android platform. Before we get to that, a word on our methodology. To test the barcode scanners and the resulting search results we wandered around and rounded up some relatively random items from around the How-To Geek offices. This included a children’s graphic novel, a Wii game, a board game, a pack of razors, a box of tea, and a bottle of nail polish. It’s a decent spread of consumer items that covers several genres. For each application we scanned all the items, looked for the best price at the time, and noted any other relevant benefits of using one scanner over another. It’s worth noting that our primary focus was on the speed and ease of use. You may find that certain scanners have specific features that best suit your needs. What we focused on was how fast you could scan, compare prices, and purchase items if you desired. Since all the scanners are free-as-in-beer, feel free to download them all and run your own tests to confirm our conclusions. Use Your Android Phone to Comparison Shop: 4 Scanner Apps Reviewed How to Run Android Apps on Your Desktop the Easy Way HTG Explains: Do You Really Need to Defrag Your PC?

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• JavaScript loaded external content SEO

  - by user005569871

  I wonder what is the best way to have Javascript loaded content indexed by search engines. I know that search engines don't execute Javascript, but I am thinking more of an progressive enchantment. I am creating a responsive website, and on the home page I will have some sections about most visited products and recommended product that I plan to load depending on the device detected. These products will be in sliders with thumbnail images and names of the products. If mobile is detected slider content will not load, ant the link to the external page will be shown. I know that external content will be indexed via link to those resources. Where will the users be directed from search in this case? To the external page or home page? Will it be bad for SEO if I show only product names on front page so they can be indexed and hide them with CSS? What is the best way to index that content and possibly direct users from search to home page? Also, i've seen the Ajax crawling but iI would like not to use that if there is any better way.

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• Leveraging Code Across Platforms in Ever Bigger Games

  - by ashes999

  Summary: The same way that I continually build complex engines and libraries within a single platform and technology to allow me to build increasingly bigger and better games, how to continue this when development crosses into different platforms? If I switch platforms, how do I leverage past code and experiences? Games are hard to build. Big games are even harder to build. I've decided that to be able to make big games, I need to start building smaller games, and building up an asset base of code, assets (graphics, sounds), tools, and most importantly, game engines, so that I can eventually get there. One game at a time. Let me give an analogy. To build an MMO 3D RPG, I would approach this by building and releasing small games with increasingly more features. This could entail, for example: A simple 2D game A tile-based game A game with RPG elements (items, equipment, monsters, battle) A full-fledged RPG A 3D RPG The problem now is if I have to change platforms or tools, I don't know how to leverage past code-bases (and experience) to start with a mature product. Right now, I'm writing Silverlight (FlatRedBall) games. Let's say I stick with this for ten years, and then suddenly decide to write a PS6 game, which is in a different programming language entirely. Granted, I have ten years of game-development experience (and correspondingly ten years of professional software development experience from my day job) to back me up. But I would still like some way to transplant that 2D RPG engine into the new programming language, or else leverage it somehow. Is this even possible? What are my options?

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