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Unknown miscreants had a good time two weekends ago when they posted hundreds of flashing animated images onto discussion boards hosted by the Landover, Md.-based Epilepsy Foundation. Flashing lights or bold moving patterns can trigger often violent seizures among 3 percent of the estimated 50 million epileptics worldwide.”I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn’t move and couldn’t speak,” RyAnne Fultz, who has epilepsy, told Wired News about her reaction to viewing one of the images on March 23.

Fultz’s 11-year-old son walked over and closed the browser window after about 10 seconds. Fortunately, she suffered nothing more than a bad headache.

By then, the second day of vandalism on EpilepsyFoundation.org, the jerks had moved on to hijacking the browsers of anyone who clicked on certain forum posts, filling the screens with bright, flashing colors.

Technically, none of this was hacking, since it didn’t involve breaking into anyone’s Web site, and any snotty kid with a rudimentary knowledge of JavaScript could do it.

The Epilepsy Foundation shut off the discussion board on Sunday for about 12 hours, and the attacks stopped.

“This was clearly an act of vandalism with the intent to harm people,” said Eric R. Hargis, the foundation’s president and CEO in a statement released Monday.

However, it doesn’t seem to have been the first instance. A Texas-based discussion Web site called Coping With Epilepsy said it suffered a similar attack last November.

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Disk fragmentation leads to system slowdowns, PC crashes, slow startups and shutdowns. Auslogics Disk Defrag® is designed for fast optimization of modern hard disks.

Hard disks are by far the slowest component in your computer. CPU and memory work much faster than hard disks because they do not have moving parts. Therefore fragmented disks often become a bottleneck of the system performance.

Besides causing slowdowns, fragmentation makes the hard drive disk heads move frequently when reading files which leads to freeze-ups and system crashes. It is important to keep your disks defragmented and optimized as much as possible.

- Improve computer performance and stability
- Increase your productivity – no more waiting for files to open
- Defragment disks in only a few minutes
- Useful disk fragmentation map and detailed fragmentation report
- Windows XP Home and Professional, 2000/2003 and Vista supported

Version 1.4.13.300 Changes
* adds an integration with BoostSpeed
* improves the setup process
* fixes bugs

Download Auslogics Disk Defrag 1.4.13.300

Funny stuff. Good likeness.

This Bonus Pack includes 3 new maps (well, 2 revived back to life for UT3 and 1 completely new map).

• Morbias is the deathmatch arena that started it all, perfectly suited for anything from small intense duels to chaotic free-for-all matches.
• The Unreal Tournament classic, Facing Worlds was one of the most played maps in gaming history, beloved sniper map.
• Searchlight is an intricate new capture the flag map designed for both z-axis rooftop runs and strategic indoor gameplay. Returning classics and fresh new designs let you experience Unreal gaming like never before.

DM-Morbias: The Morbias Station is a transport hub that focuses all traffic passing through Taryd’s jumpgates. The Station offers a terrestrial shuttle, storage facilities (with quarantine services for live cargo), and a social center where guests can meet incoming visitors or hold private meetings in a neutral setting.

DM-FacingWorlds: The Necris have forced their way into even the most revered of Izanagi landmarks. Their corruption has spread to the Temple of Facing Worlds, and one of its towers is already showing the effects of infection and decay.

CTF-Searchlight: The lighthouse serves as a beacon to this remote island, thought to be the ancient home of the Necris Prophet. The spiritual components of the Necris conversion are greatly misunderstood, and their power is vastly underestimated. Those who are willing to face the impact of their conversion often come to religious centers like this one to meditate.

This patch was created to address a few minor issues prior to the next release of America’s Army.

FORCE CLASS
We have enabled Global Forceclassing (FC) on honor bearing servers. Individual FC can still be used but not on honor servers. Using a Global FC on everyone levels the playing field for all. When using Global FC, honor is accrued at less than normal rates due to the fact that old maps were created with specific weapon loadouts in mind. Forceclassed Servers will show up in MBS with an (FC) preceding their name for easy identification.

USERNAMES
Spaces in user account names are no longer permitted. If you have an old account with a space it has been replaced with an underscore character (_) or in the case of conflicts a number. You should have received an email to your address of record indicating the change. All of your other account information was retained.

BAN SYSTEM
Ban system again supports banning by IP, MAC, or Name/PBGUID (for PB servers banning by NAME will result in a PBGUID ban instead of a name ban). Ban system now supports console commands to list ban lists in sets of 20 (or so) to allow “scrolling” through the list to locate banned players. The Admin Command Post only supports showing the first 100 ban entries but now has a wider list to show all the ban details. The Banning system was rewritten and includes the preliminary ability to download a ban list from a web server on game server startup.

The following INI section can be added to support this:

[Engine.BanManagement]
BanListMasterServer=www.somedomain.com
BanListWebPath=/AA2831BanList

This will cause the game server to try to retrieve the “BanList.status” file from the web server using the URL:
www.somedomain.com/AA2831BanList/BanList.status (using the example above) which will be compared to the local version to see if the ban list file version matches.

The BanList.status file contains the following lines:

AABanListMasterServer
Version=
MD5=

If the version does not match (regardless as to whether it’s newer or older) the remote BanList.txt file is downloaded from the web server. It is not recommended to use this for large ban lists. It is anticipated this ban list management system will be expanded in future versions of America’s Army.

PLAYER ADMINS
Player Admin support has been rewritten to require player administrators to have passwords. The new AASM provides support for creating the appropriate format PlayerAdmin entries. For those wishing to manually edit their INI file the PlayerAdmin setting is now in the format “PlayerAdmin=, ” (e.g. “PlayerAdmin=Bob,mysecretpassword”). Player Admins wanting to join the server must join the server using either the MBS browser and right-clicking on the server name (with it selected) and choosing “Join As Player Admin” or by joining via the console using this format “open ?PAPassword=” (e.g. “open 192.168.0.1?PAPassword=mysecretpassword”). You must have logged into your account in order to use this functionality on any official or authorized server.

Comodo Firewall, rated by PC Magazine Online as an Editor’s Choice, constantly monitors and defends your PC from internet attacks. It’s easy to install and use and passes the industry’s most stringent firewall “leak” tests. Unlike some other ‘free’ firewalls, this is not a stripped down version but is the full, completely functional product. This free solution comes complete with continual updates that are FREE forever!

Comodo Personal Firewall 3.0 – System Requirements

* Windows XP (SP2) – 32 bit version
* Windows XP – 64 bit version
* Windows Vista – 32 and 64 bit versions
* 64 Mb RAM
* 35 MB hard disk space for 32-bit versions and 55 MB for 64-bit versions

Download Comodo Firewall Pro 3.0.21.329 – Vista 32/XP (Full)
Download Comodo Firewall Pro 3.0.21.329 – Vista 64 (Full)

CFP Comodo Personal Firewall version 3.0.21.329 – Changes:
* FIXED! CFP.exe could be terminated using EndTask API
* FIXED! When the firewall alerts were disabled, all the traffic was blocked.

Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet.

Songbird is a player and a platform. Like Firefox, Songbird is an open source, Open Web project built on the Mozilla platform. Songbird provides a public playground for Web media mash-ups by providing developers with both desktop and Web APIs, developer resources and fostering Open Web media standards, to wit, an Open Media Web.

Songbird 0.5 Final has entered the station with hundreds of bug-fixes and several new features:

Windows users have a shiny new MTP Add-on that introduces MTP Device Support! Most portable media players and cell phones integrate the MTP spec so try plugging in your device and share your findings on the MTP Device Compatibility Wiki Page. The extension requires Windows XP-SP2 or Vista, as well as WMP v11.

Media Views
Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets? Media Views provide new ways of displaying, manipulating, exploring, and contextualizing your media library. Songbird ships with two default views: a traditional playlist view, and a second playlist view with three filter panes. Developers can create new Media Views and upload them to the Add-ons site. This example media page replaces the standard playlist filters with tag clouds. To experience your music web 2.0 style, load your library, then select Tag Cloud from the View menu. Click the tags to toggle the filtering on and off.

Improved Filter Picker
Genre, Artist, and Album aren’t the only useful ways to filter your music collection. We’ve streamlined the filter picker list and fixed a few bugs that make it easier than ever to navigate your collection.

New List Background
After several requests from our community we’ve made our Library and Playlist backgrounds easier on your eyes. Keep sending us your ideas, suggestions, and requests, your feedback helps us improve the ‘bird!

Improved Rating UI
We’ve clarified the rating widget display by showing circles for unrated items and improved usability by allowing you to more easily change or un-rate a track.

Hot Keys on the Mac
Mac users, you can now use common hot-keys to quit, hide, or open Songbird preferences just like the rest of your applications. We also fixed the issue which allowed the application to be dragged under the menu bar, yay!

Always on Top
Never lose your Rubberducky Mini Player under a stack of windows! Now you can set it to always be on top. Any Feather developer can expose this feature in their feather.

Songbird 0.5 Download Page

Adobe Systems opened up Photoshop Express on Thursday, its long-anticipated Web-based image editor aimed at the millions of consumers that want a simple way to touch up, share, and store photos.

Photoshop Express, available for free with 2 gigabytes of storage at www.photoshop.com/express, is a significant departure from Adobe’s desktop software business and a big bet that it can make money offering Web services directly to consumers.

The application, which needs Flash Player 9 to run, pushes the limits of browser-based applications and will likely ratchet up the competition on the dozens of free and online photo-editing products available now (see our full review of Photoshop Express and gallery of screen shots of the application)…

The service will go live in beta test mode on Thursday. Mack said that the company intends to use the test period as a way garner feedback from customers.

Adobe intends to offer more features to consumers who pay a yearly fee. Some planned features include a printing service, more storage, support for audio and other media, and the ability to read additional image file types (the service works with .JPGs now.)

Adobe also plans to build an offline client using AIR (the Adobe Integrated Runtime) so that people can edit photos offline, executives said.

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Finally, we have some answers. Today we’re releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks.

How does this help you? Well, using these metrics, you can increase your videos’ view counts and improve your popularity on the site. For instance, you might learn that your videos are most popular on Wednesdays, that you have a huge following in Spain, or that new videos that play off previous content become more popular more quickly. With this information, you can concentrate on creating compelling new content that appeals to your target audiences, and post these videos on days you know these viewers are on the site. (Maybe even post your next video in Spanish?) And for those of you who are also partners, the more popular a video is, the more advertising revenue it can generate.

We’ll be making new features and additional information available fairly quickly — like a specific breakdown of how viewers discovered the video — so keep an eye out as we roll out new features. As for now, you can find currently available metrics by clicking under the “About this Video” button under “My account > Videos, Favorites, Playlists > Manage my Videos.”

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