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Protect Your PC From Guys Like This! Behind every piece of malware—be it a virus, spyware, or any other form of hostile, destructive code—is a sneaky, scheming scoundrel, oftentimes someone you’d never suspect. Antivirus suites promise to defend your PC against all the baddies. We test 10 of the leading products to see which ones are best at keeping your PC safe. You don’t need a military background to recognize that the Internet has turned intoa war zone. Not only are you always under attack, but the bad guys possess a seemingly endless arsenal of weapons that are constantly changing. Set foot in the wrong website and you might be stepping into a booby trap of malicious Javascript code.

The Best of 2008: The 5 Most Significant MMO Trends [You thought we were done with year-end Gamasutra countdowns? Hardly! For this bonus end-of-year round-up, MMO expert Michael Zenke looks at 2008's five most notable trends in the online game space, from broadening microtransactions to WoW's clear dominance of the fantasy genre and beyond.]

Micro-Blogging Meets Micro-Payments, Courtesy Of Tipjoy’s API Social micro-payments enabler Tipjoy is releasing an API today that allows charities but also companies and individuals to handle relatively small payments from within their applications and spread the word through Twitter. This opens up a lot of opportunities for application developers who might benefit from small transactions, from e-commerce services selling content, subscriptions, etc. to charitable causes and non-profits accepting small donations online to peer-to-peer payments between individuals. Inserting payments made through Tipjoy into your Twitter stream can be an invaluable way to spread the message about what it is you’re buying or donating to, much like sharing your activities, digital media you like and applications you use can spread virally through social networking sites like Facebook. Making a payment involves posting a tweet under these formatting rules, e.g.

Use any version of Windows 7 free for 120 days By Woody Leonhard There’s an easy way to stretch Windows 7′s 30-day free-trial period to 120 days so you can determine whether Microsoft’s new operating system meets your needs. Even better — if you know the secret — you can try out any version of Win7, from Ultimate to the lowly Basic, using a single install disc. It’s fair to say that by now hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of copies of Windows 7 sit on DVDs and hard drives all over the world. Interview: Free Realms How you spread the word about a game like Free Realms, an ambitious, casually orientated free-to-play MMOG designed for anyone from children to adults? Sony Online Entertainment’s answer lies in Facebook and Twitter and distributing it through a vast array of web gaming portals. It adds up to what is, according to SOE, the biggest-ever launch in online distribution, a "new frontier" for videogame marketing, and SOE head John Smedley says that it has netted 1 million accounts in 18 days. We spoke with Torrie Dorrell, senior VP of marketing and sales, and Laura Naviaux Sturr, director of global brand marketing, to discover how online communities don’t like being talked at and why kids are so expensive to put the word to.What pressures did going outside the usual channels of marketing and distribution place on you?

There We Go Again. No, Micropayments Won’t “Save Journalism” If you’ve been following the headlines on Techmeme over the weekend, you’ve likely seen more talk about the whole blogger vs. online journalism debate, the short-sightedness of big media and the inevitable demise of its historical business model. Every time that debate heats up, someone somewhere will at some point bring up the unlikely savior of the publishing industry once more: glorious micropayments. This time, it’s The Guardian‘s Frank Fisher taking a stand, and he says not only will micropayments guarantee the newspapers a future, it can also downright “save journalism,” and oh, Google should be the one providing the infrastructure for it, too. Time to debunk “Saving journalism, a farthing at a time”.

New Organizing Institute The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the national party organization helping Democrats win office in state legislatures, trusts Salsa as its exclusive online organizing platform offering to over 8,000 campaigns. Keep Reading » CODEPINK, a women-initiated grassroots peace and social justice movement, creates a rapid response fundraising campaign using Salsa to raise $30K in 2 hours. Keep Reading »

Spare Change On Track To Process $30 Million In Micropayments On While advertising revenues have been disappointingly low for most applications on Facebook and other social networks, another option app developers are increasingly turning towards is micropayments for virtual goods or premium features. Both Facebook and MySpace have admitted that they are working on their own payment systems, and Apple could play a role as well since it already has a payment system in place for iPhone apps (although even Apple is running into some bumps). While the bigger players are fiddling with their payment system plans, nimbler startups are moving in to fill the gap. One of these is Spare Change Payments, which is trying to become the Paypal of micropayments.

HOW TO: Build the Ultimate Social Media Resume Dan Schawbel is the author of Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success, and owner of the award winning Personal Branding Blog. Social media resumes are important for attracting hiring managers directly to you, without you having to submit your resume, blindly, to them. The problem with submitting your resume online to job postings is that most job postings aren't even vacant, might not exist, and 80% of jobs offers are received through networking. With a social media resume, you're able to paint a completely different portrait of yourself for hiring managers and customize it to reflect your personal brand. With the inclusion of various multimedia elements, sharing options, integrated social networking feeds and the same elements you'd find in a traditional resume, you are better equipped for success.

Journalism Online LLC: saving newspapers with an iTunes-inspired New start-up company Journalism Online LLC has caused a significant stir in the media industry, and probably more behind the scenes. Founders Steven Brill, Gordon Crovitz and Leo Hindery have put together a proposal including promises to facilitate payment for online news, making it simple for publications to offer joint subscriptions as well as articles on a single basis using micropayment. They are also offering to negotiate on behalf of its members for licensing fees from search engines and other websites, and to provide member publishers with information on what tactics are working best in terms of building circulation and revenue. In conversation with the start-up's consultant Merrill Brown, what stands out is that despite its distinguished founders, this company really is a new start-up, and although its members are in discussion with many big publishers and technology firms, details about how the business will actually operate are not yet clear. Publishers decide pricing

Download the latest version With version 3.0, Pro Edition has been transformed into the SDExplorer Advanced A product comparison table is available on the Products page page. SDExplorer Advanced Current build: 3.5.2.1005 * * Microsoft Windows installation executable for 32/64 bit platforms Need Help Selecting a Payment Processor? Look No Further Than Pa More and more startups are finally focusing on real business models, ones that are based on actually selling a product or service. You know, for money. The irony is that many get pretty far down the development path before realizing that adding billing infrastructure to their offering may not be as simple as integrating with PayPal’s API or some other payment processor. Choosing the right processor, and many times, processors, from a confusing multi-layered vendor ecosystem can be tricky. Poor decision-making when it comes to issues such as terms of pricing, business fit, or processing capability, can each be a deep gash in any startup’s soft underbelly. Payments-R-Us is trying to alleviate the confusion by providing a payments vendor-to-merchant wizard that makes it a snap to choose the right payment processor.