Top Ten Best Video Games of 2008

In a year when most businesses tried to figure out how to stay alive, the video game industry thrived thanks to two things: great games, and you. So give yourself a pat on the back; your thirst for single-handedly saving the world with magic, guns, and fast thumbs has kept the gaming industry going strong when all else seems to be going wrong.

Of all the games that Time Magazine has reviewed so far this year, 10 games have a tremendous amount of momentum going into the awards.

1. Grand Theft Auto IV



It's ironic that GTA became a football in the debate over sex and violence in video games, because where it belongs is in the debate over whether video games count as art. No game developers are more radical and more passionate about the storytelling power of their medium than folks at Rockstar North, and GTA IV is the company's most ambitious work ever. It's the story of Niko Bellic, an Eastern European soldier-for-hire fighting his way up the organized crime ladder in an archly satirical version of New Yo— I mean, Liberty City. It's a grade-A shoot-'em-up that doubles as an interactive novel and triples as a sly critique of American consumer culture.

2. Braid



Of all the game genres to make a comeback this year, who would've picked the side-scrolling platformer? At first blush Braid looks like a standard old-school Super Mario Bros.-style game. But there's a twist: on top of standard game mechanics like running and jumping, Braid adds the ability to manipulate time: if you make a mistake you can wind back the clock and try again. It sounds simple, but as Portal proved last year, a simple mechanic in the hands of a brilliant developer can yield near-infinite entertainment.

3. LittleBigPlanet



The hero of LittleBigPlanet is a tiny person made out of some kind of coarse-textured fabric. His name is Sackboy. Like everything else in his world, he is a toy. He runs and jumps and slides through an endlessly inventive landscape made of cushions and weights and ramps and springs and glowing bubbles, all rendered with a gritty, high-res perfection which finally shows you why that PS3 you bought was so expensive. Nobody shoots at anybody. When you're done with the levels the game comes with — and that takes a long time — you can build and download more. LittleBigPlanet is not an adrenaline game; it's a restful, chill-out kind of experience. Let Sackboy do all the work. You have all the fun.

4. Rock Band 2



Hands down the best party game ever made, Rock Band 2 does what the first Rock Band did — simulate the experience of singing and playing drums, guitar or bass in an actual rock band — only better, faster, harder and with more songs to choose from. The key is Rock Band 2's candy-colored interface, which is so clear and intuitive that it feels like there's nothing standing between you and the music. Boot up, jack in, and rock out.

5. Gears of War 2



After all that time Marcus Fenix spent in Gears of War sawing Locusts in half the long way, you'd think he would have moved on to some less stressful activity like playing LittleBigPlanet. Actually not. Except for some new multiplayer modes, Gears of War 2 is remarkably similar to the first installment: lots of shooting and duck-and-covering and, yes, sawing, plus the usual hard-boiled gravelly-voiced dialogue. Not that this is in any way a problem. The main difference is that the backgrounds all this action happens in front of are now even more spectacular: ruined churches, soaring caverns, jagged mountains, airships made out of giant bugs. Sera never looked so good — maybe when Marcus is done killing Locusts he can finally retire there.

6. Dead Space



The hero of Dead Space obviously never saw Alien, or he'd know not to answer distress signals from remote mining spaceships. Turns out the ship has been taken over by an evil and really gross alien menace that turns human corpses into horrible deformed zombies. Your job is to figure out what happened and fix it and not die while doing so. Dead Space doesn't break new ground, it's just bloody, scary survival horror at its finest — cool weapons, amazing environments, fast action, fantastic zero-G combat, no letup, no mercy.

7. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed



Evil Jedi walks into a room. Room is full of anonymous Stormtroopers, Jawas, rancors, etc. Does he (a) shock them to death with Force Lightning, (b) grab them with the Force and throw them against the walls and each other till they die, (c) kill them with a sweet light saber combo, (d) pull a passing TIE fighter out of the sky and smash it into them...I could go on. This game has flaws, but it's so unbelievably satisfying to cut loose with the Force, Jedi honor be damned, that the flaws don't really register. This is Star Wars without any Ewokkish sentimentality, and it's the best thing to happen to the franchise in years.

8. Hunted Forever



The future is a terrible place, but at least it's pretty stylin' — it looks like an animated title sequence from a 1960s movie, all angular graphics and silhouettes and primary colors. You're a tiny running man sprinting, jumping and sliding through a post-apocalyptic landscape, relentlessly pursued by an enormous hovering robot. This is a free Flash game, and it's on this list both for its own merits and as a representative of all the beautiful, quirky Flash games that came out this year. Flash developers don't have $20 million budgets on the line when they make a game, which means they can take risks and try anything.

9. Fieldrunners



Fun fact: back in the 1970s, before they founded Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak helped create the original game of Breakout for Atari. But Apple has never really shown much fight when it comes to the gaming market. Now it doesn't have to. With the opening of the App Store and the release of development tools, third-party developers have converted the iPhone and the iPod Touch into handheld gaming devices that will soon be serious competition for the Nintendo DS and Sony's PSP. The pick of the first litter is Fieldrunners, a fast and furious tower defense game that looks great on those super-bright, super-crisp screens and seamlessly integrates the famous touchscreen as a game controller.

10. Spore



Sims creator Will Wright spent seven years writing, researching and designing this evolutionary epic, which may well be the most ambitious game ever made. Spore follows the history of a single species, designed by you, from a cute little single cell up through sentience, civilization and finally space exploration. The innovation here doesn't lie in the gameplay, which is merely entertaining, but in the sophistication of the animations that make your creation walk and move and dance, and in the game's hubristic, near-infinite scope.

Source: http://www.time.com/

Wordpress 2.7 Released

Wordpress 2.7 has been officially released and is available for download. There are many new features added in 2.7 and the first thing you will notice is the re-designed user interface and Dashboard.

Version 2.7 should be a major upgrade into the WordPress software. Here are some of the changes that it brings:

• new interface to make it easier to perform the admin tasks


• customization options on the admin screens


• the ability to reply to comments from the dashboard


• embed support for comments threading


• drag and drop support on some sections

The most exciting stuff is the automatic upgrade. From now when new versions get released all you will have to do is one click, and the software will take care of the rest. I am sure this will make WordPress a much more secure software, too.

Pownce is Shutting Down

Microblogging service Pownce, is closing down on December 15. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new pro accounts. The Pownce team has joined SixApart.

Pownce have built an export tool so users can save the content. Users can find the export tool at Settings > Export. Please export content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not be accessible after this date.

Top Ten Wordpress Security Tips

Below are 10 security tips that you can easily implement on your WordPress blog. Please share one or more life-savers you use permanently to help protect yourself from WordPress security issues.

1. Upgrade Wordpress - In general, keeping your Wordpress installation up to date is a great way to avoid known problems. Do note that the lastest version, especially in the case of major upgrades, may cause more problems then it resolves.

2. WordPress Version - The tag in your header.php that displays your current version of wordpress. Since everyone knows your wordpress version this way, your blog is prone to hackers if you have not upgraded to the new version.

3. WordPress Username - Every hacker knows Wordpress has a user “admin” with god-like administration privileges. Slow the hackers down by removing the “admin” user. Create a Wordpress user with admin privileges using the administration interface. Log out of Wordpress and log back in with the new user. Delete the admin user. The new admin user should be different than your normal post author.

4. WordPress Password - Are you still logging into your wp-admin page with the same default password that was emailed to you? If so, CHANGE IT! That password is only 6 characters and just numbers and letters. Make it complex and more than 10 characters if you can. Also, try not to use words, make it a nice jumble of letters, numbers, and symbols.

5. Prevent Directory Listing - In many Wordpress installations it is possible to view a list of installed plugins by navigating to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory. This is not a good idea as known plugin vulnerabilities can than be easily exploited. Add an empty default index file, such as index.html, to the directory. You can also protect it using an .htaccess file assuming you're using Apache.

6. Protect Your WP-Admin Folder - You can protect your Wordpress admin folder by allowing access to it from a defined set of IP addresses. Everything else will bring up a Forbidden error message. So if you only access your blog from one or two places routinely, it’s worth implementing. Also, you’re supposed to create a new .htaccess file inside your wp-admin folder, not replace the one at the root of your blog.

7. Protect From Search Engines - There is no need to have all of your filesWordpress files indexed by Google, so it’s best to block them in your robots.txt file. Add the following line to your list:Disallow: /wp-*

8. Install Login Lockdown WordPress Plugin - This plugin records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range.

9. Install WordPress Database Backup Plugin - You always have to take regular backups of your file directories as well as the database. WordPress Database Backup plugin creates backups of your core WordPress tables as well as other tables of your choice in the same database.

10. Install Wordpress Security Scan Plugin - The WP Security Scan plugin attempts to both to audit your blog security and to implement many of the suggestions mentioned above.

Disable WordPress Autosave Plugin

WordPress autosave is the best features which I hate in WordPress. AutoSave will auto save a copy of edited post or page every 60 seconds provided there is a change on the content in the editor. However, there is only ever a maximum of one AutoSave version for any given post. New AutoSaves created will overwrite old AutoSaves. Beside, AutoSaves are stored as a special type of revision so that the auto saved with a more recent version of data does not overwrite actual published content, and is used to restore unsaved work only when necessary.

While each Post Revisions is stored in its own database table, the auto-save is only stored once with previous versions being overwritten by the new auto-saved content. So, if you’re worried about your database growing to massive proportions because of auto-save, you can stop worrying.

These are methods that disable or delay the WordPress autosave functions.  The Most easy way is using plugin. The disabling plugin works with versions 2.3 through 2.7  while the delay configuration works with 2.5 and later.

Copy this text to a text file, name it whatever you want (using the .php extension, of course) and upload it to your WordPress plugin directory. Activate it and it works immediately, but you need to clear your browser cache:

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Disable autosave
*/
add_action('admin_print_scripts', 'plugin_deregister_autosave');
function plugin_deregister_autosave() {
 wp_deregister_script('autosave');
}
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS',false);
?>

Z-Blog URL Redirect Security Affected Spam Attacks

Z-Blog system contain a security issue that allows spam attack to Wikipedia by using url redirect.

The design of Z-Blog anti-spam encrypts the URL before redirect it. The name of the redirected file is c_urlredirect.asp. With the parameter of this page Z-Blog kann redirect to various pages. Sorrowfully the used encryption is very simple. One just need to put the odd characters together. With this methode blackhat SEO manipulates redirects from other Z-Blog websites to call its own website. Thus even if the original address is listed on the blacklist by Wikipedia, the manipulated redirect would still work and be used as spam.

The solution for this problem is not easy. The most simple way is to delete c_urlredirect.asp. But this method would also prevent the blogger himself make redirects.

Source . thanks for Wing translation

Google Earth Layer Blocked in China

China appears to have blocked access to the popular internet maps service - Google Earth. Google Earth is a virtual globe program that displays satellite images of varying resolution of the Earth's surface, allowing users to visually see things like cities and houses from a bird's eye view.

Google's map and satellite-photo service offered Chinese Internet users something they rarely could see: a bird's-eye view of the secret compound of Zhongnanhai(located west of the Forbidden City), where the country's top leaders live and work.

But in recent weeks, some layer of Google Earth(such as Google Earth Community) could not load and work in China. The Google Earth Community is an online forum which is dedicated to producing placemarks of interesting or educational perspectives. It may be found on the Google Earth webpage or under the Help section on the program itself. After downloading a placemark, it will automatically run Google Earth (if not opened), and fly to the area specified by the person who placed it. Once there, you can add it to your "My Places" by right clicking on the icon and selecting "Save to My Places". Additionally, anyone can post a placemark for others to download; as long as you have an account.



When I run a proxy program, and open Google Earth again, the Google Earth Community layer is right there, everything is ok.



Then I close the proxy program and click the layer again, it's tell me "Fetch of NetworkLink failed(http://mw1.google.com/): Connect Failed."



That mean the Weather,Gallery and Global Awareness layer is blocked in China. Google Earth Community is in the Gallery layer,  so it cannot be open again.

If the Chinese government is blocking its own citizens from seeing where their leaders live, whereas the rest of the world can see just fine, we're talking some major institutional paranoia.