"Microsoft Works." - Oxymoron

NetSwarm is now released! Posted by Dom on 6-12-2009, 1:01PM  |  3 Comments

NetSwarm, a network monitoring screen saver and desktop application from UberGames, is now officially available for download through the projects website: http://www.ubergames.org/projects/netswarm/

NetSwarm monitors all network activity which your computer receives and then compiles a logical swarm of the network nodes (machines/devices). This process visually demonstrates how your network communicates within itself and the outside world. NetSwarm can be ran as a monitoring utility (Stand Alone EXE) or as a screen saver.

NetSwarm uses colour coded nodes (circles) to inform you of the type of traffic you have communicating on your network. A green node indicates an internal IP address (including VPN addresses), where as a light blue node indicates a remote address. Yellow nodes represent either a broadcast or multicast address. NetSwarm can be configured through the settings window to ignore external IP addresses.

NetSwarm also changes the colour of the links (lines) between nodes depending on what transport protocol is being utilized between the two nodes. Red links indicate TCP traffic. Green links indicate ICMP traffic and blue links represent UDP traffic. If a mixture of protocols are being utilized NetSwarm will morph the colour of the link to represent the ratio of use for each protocol.

FileFront saved at the last second by FileFront! Posted by TiM on 4-2-2009, 3:57AM  |  13 Comments

Well uh... this is kind of a surprise haha, but thankfully it clears up the confusion we've been having since yesterday.

Apparently, just before Ziff Davis officially shut down the service, the original owners of FileFront swooped in and bought the site back off them!

So what this means is, although Ziff Davis is now totally out of the picture, FileFront will indeed continue and at the moment is in the middle of returning to normal operations.

I'm very happy to hear this. If it had indeed gone down, we would have lost much more than what we could have saved.

http://digg.com/gaming_news/FileFront_Acquired_by_the_Original_Founders

http://welcome.filefront.com

At the same time, I'm also a little sad as it means the time and resources we put into bringing our replacement community site online has been rendered moot. Ah well... I guess there's always next time.

So there you have it guys! Get back to it!

http://ef2.filefront.com

Game on!

-Tim

EFFiles Replacement Coming Soon Posted by Dom on 3-27-2009, 7:44PM  |  116 Comments

UberGames has a complete backup of all the star trek based FilesNetwork websites and is looking to setup a new site.

This site will have ALL the old content of EFFiles at a minimum. More information will come when we can tell you more.



UPDATE:
Due to the 11th hour buyout of FileFront by FileFront our efforts will be halted to prevent factoring the community, however we will keep the backups for any possible future.

Ziff Davis Media pulls the Plug on FileFront? Posted by AdmiralHocking on 3-25-2009, 1:34AM  |  86 Comments

I'm suspicious that this is some kind of early April Fools prank, however it seems that ZDM have finally pulled the plug on FileFront after filing for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy last year. Despite having been 'confirmed' by several presently serving members of staff - I am wondering if they are playing along with a rather odd joke.

None the less, if this happens and no one picks up FileFront; EFFiles is going to disappear. If there are any files you wish to salvage from any of the Network Sites - I would recommend doing so sharpish.

The FileFront Forums appear to already have been purged.

http://www.therogueforums.com/filefront-preservation-forum/

http://www.therogueforums.com/talk-up/84938-filefront-might-sinking-soon.html
http://www.therogueforums.com/hot-off-press-updates-announcements/85206-filefront-refugee-camp.html

Admin Edit: Help spread the word of this; http://digg.com/gaming_news/FileFront_to_close_it_s_doors_March_30

Update 2: UberGames has a complete backup of all EF1 Files from EFFiles. We also are getting backups of JKFiles, CnC Files, Armada, EAW and KOTOR Files

Update 3: I'm chatting with Jeff (N0e) who was the community manager at FileFront, he might beable to get more space to back up every site... More news soon

Crossing the Line Posted by TiM on 3-13-2009, 1:39PM  |  25 Comments

At this point, I'm seriously likening spambots to the Borg. Left unchecked, they permeate a forum and gradually assimilate it into their own little advert powered collective.

And even though we upgraded to vBulletin 3.8.1, they're still getting in, and they're still posting ads.

Anyway, I was doing some research today, and I came across a very interesting service someone online is volunteering. Basically, he and a group of volunteers are collecting spam incidents on forums and registering information about the offenders to a central database, which is then freely available for all to use.

http://www.stopforumspam.com/

I was really impressed at this database. It's been worked on since 2006, and when I tested the IPs of some of the Guests here whose status was 'Registering', it actually identified most of them as pre-established spammers.

So.... as of today, I've reorganized and restructured the user registration system on this forum to a 3 tier validation system:

1) reCAPTCHA As per a suggestion made to me on Twitter by one of the members of the vBulletin team, I've changed the Human Verification system to reCAPTCHA. If it looks like this is failing though, I might just stick it back to 'Question and Answers', but maybe make the questions rediculously geeky (ie, 'How many pips on Riker's uniform?' )

2) I've manually loaded all known spammer email domains from SFS.com into vBulletin's ban list. Domains such as '@mail.ru', '@chongsoft.com', as well as '@gmail.net', these are all domains that are owned by spammers, and are thus never likely to be legitimate users. By banning these, the spammers will be forced to buy new domains to come on here (costing them more money to do what they do ) The next trick is to make this dynamic somehow.....

3) Finally, this is the biggest one. I've written a little chunk of code and hooked it into the registration code. When a user clicks 'Sign me up!' now, their email address and IP will be sent to SFS.com and verified against the database. If that IP and/or email address has ever been logged as a spam account, it will automatically be denied. This is better than just the email domains since it means spammers who use legitimate email services (ie gmail.com, hotmail.com, yahoo.com) will be banned too.
(If I get the time, I'm also considering setting up a local cached copy of the SFS.com database... to make things more streamlined)

And finally, I've emailed the administrator asking to become a volunteer for the SFS.com database as well. That way, if any pesky spammers actually manage to get through all of that, then we can simply report them to SFS.com for inclusion in the database.

So there we have it... hopefully as of now, this place has become an anti-spam fortress.

Enjoy!