I have created an Android game where I use TextureAtlas generated from the TexturePacker tool.
I have paid an artist to create good quality assets. So I have these nice large png files with alpha, containing all the assets, waiting to be stolen by anybody unzipping my apk. And I would like to protect them - at least a little - from hackers and thieves.
I have searched and found nothing except the usual "you will NEVER be able to fully protect your app" or "only thing you can do is to create you own cipher and encryption system from scratch by yourself" (yes, I am exaggerating a little here). I find these answers unseless for my case because:
- I know it is impossible to make an app, a piece of code or an asset 100% protected from hacking. The goal here is to protect it a little to make it hard for 95% of hackers.
- I know my assets are not the most beautiful piece of art ever made but I also know they are better than those of a majority of Android apps and any game cloning developper will see that.
Is there any way to remove the transparency from the png files but keep it in the game? Is there any way to add some kind of watermark that would be automatically removed in the app?
So thanks for sharing your thoughts
Related
I have a few problems with understanding of android tv development. First of all when i had launched android tv project and was trying to create custom interface for new activity, unfortunately i couldn't find any xml elements which could help me. From the example i got some ideas that whole interface provided by android SDK collected in many fragments. I just can modify colors, fonts, fonts size, transparency maybe animation and etc. But if i really need to customize structure of controls and WTF i wanna output "Hello World" inside label!!! Is it possible? I read all articles from this link https://developer.android.com/training/tv/index.html but it is still useless for me (maybe I am unique :) ). After this suffering with google guide, i have done a conclusion that the platform so new and there is no way to do some thing except only way that was provided by google. Am i right? If not, what should i do to find successful way?
The fragments provided by Google as part of the "leanback" framework are templates designed to make it easy for content providers to start publishing to Android TV without having to worry about the technical details of building a TV UI. The idea is that a content provider can create a channel just by feeding in their video content. This ease of use comes at a cost, customization is difficult or impossible with these templates.
However there is nothing preventing you from creating your own Activities and Fragments from scratch and implementing a completely custom UI for the TV, it works just like any other Android device. Add "android.intent.category.LEANBACK_LAUNCHER" to your manifest and see for yourself.
I am creating a whiteboard application using flex. I want to add a document sharing functionality to the application i.e, the user can upload the documents which will be loaded into the whiteboard and users can annotate over the document.
I googled a lot but still not sure where to start how to start. I only got the idea that the document can be converted to series of images on the server side and can be loaded in to flex app.
Can the experts help me get started with this. I am planning to use java for the server side.
Thanks all.
I'm not sure about uploading files to whiteboard itself. I think it's better to use loader and put your whiteboard on top of it.
What about software to convert documents. I'm not server side programmer, but I can share programs that we are using to convert documents:
Now we are using Print2Flash for almost all documents, but planning to give a chance for iSpring to convert Powerpoint presentations.
Both are live projects, getting improvements often enough and can convert documents to swf files. Personally I like the way Print2Flash provides ability to customize resulting swf with your own patterns and gives great flexibility to interract with it. As I know, nowadays iSpring added AS3 API to converted files, which is huge enhancement, but it's kinda expensive.
And don't forget about OpenOffice. It has not that good converter, but at least it is free. We've used it before, but gave preference to Print2Flash.
Hope my answer will give you a place to start.
Cheers.
I am considering using the MultiPowUpload control from element-it on a project, as well as perhaps on a second. Does anyone have any feedback on that particular control? Does it actually work as advertised, handle errors well, etc?
I've played with quite a few others, but that seems the best so far. The easiest for the junior members to get off and going with, nearly all features out of the box, etc.
Some of what I need to do:
Multi-select of files (from a single 'browse' click, not multi-textbox)
Progress bar (client requirement)
Queue for upload (it's ok if it can only upload immediately)
Feedback from server - custom error messages (permissions,etc)
Pass the session ID automatically, but I can use a URL hack for the upload page too
Be able to remove files from the queue
Support large files (~50MB, really up to 300mb would be perfect)
Accessible/usable JS api
Can change the view style a little bit at least!
Localizable - we need english, chinese, italian, and possible a few others
Resume incomplete transfers (eg, connection dropped, so on, not required, but ++)
I've been working with all of these below, and gotten most of them working in demo pages, finding issues as I go along.
Fancy Upload - quite nice, but no feedback from server, uses mootools not jq
MultiPowUpload - looks good, resumes, no flash cookie bug, $149
Uploadify - looks reasonable, real world though?
YUI - mostly custom code, will work but tedious
SWFUpload - no progress bar, otherwise pretty basic & good
JQuery Multifile (fyneworks.com) - inconsistent browser support
devex / telerek - missing to many required features, sadly
PL UPload - nice, but missing 'retry' and error reporting. may be able to add
So, does anyone have any real-world experience with MultiPowUpload, or have suggestions for a free or commercial option?
PL UPLOAD WON - for now! If we get complaints, or find it doesn't work in our real life scenarios, then we'll consider switching to MultiPowUpload. But it is good enough, and we can write some JS to do a few of the missing things. With chunking I had no problems with 300mb uploads. Yay.
Did U try this one.
Plupload
Allows you to upload files using HTML5 Gears, Silverlight, Flash,
BrowserPlus or normal forms, providing some unique features such as
upload progress, image resizing and chunked uploads.
First of all, I'm not asking about the process of the upload itself using a server side language.
I just want to know which safety considerations I should take when using an uploaded image as a css background on my site.
The feature is exactly the same as Twitter does, allowing user use its own background image.
For example, is it safe to just place the image on the server and start using it? Can they inject some kind of code on the pages using that background?
I usually resize the image to a lower size, is this enough to remove unwanted "meta" data included on it?
There have been plenty of browser security flaws over the years that have been buffer overflows triggered by specially crafted malicious image files.
I don't know that there's any known flaws of this nature in current browser releases, but plenty of people will have old versions without any security patches, and of course new flaws do come to light every now and then.
This is tricky to resolve (and virtually impossible to be 100% secure against), but you can do some basic checks that the file is actually an image of the type claimed when it's uploaded. And resizing an image will almost certainly mangle any malicious code embedded in it.
There's also the more obvious risk that an image may show unsuitable material that you wouldn't want associated with your site. This can only be resolved by vetting images manually before allowing them to be used.
So yes, there are risks. But the risks are much lower if the images are to be viewed by the person who uploaded them (ie as a personalisation feature, in the way you describe on Twitter), rather than to be viewed by anyone. Obviously a person is less likely to want to hack their own computer, so the malicious image issue would be reduced, and if someone wants to put a nasty image on your site, but only they get to see it.... well, they obviously know what it is, or they wouldn't be uploading it.
There are probably thousands of applications out there like 'Google Web Accelerator' and all kinds of popup blockers. Then theres header blocking personal firewalls, full site blockers, and paranoid cookie monsters.
Fortunately Web Accelerator is now defunct (I suggest you read the above article - its actually quite funny what issues it caused) but there are so many other plugins and third party apps out there that its impossible to test them all with your app until its out in the wild.
What I'm looking for is advice on the most important things to remember when writing a web-app (whatever technology) with respect to ensuring the user's environment isnt going to break it. Kind of like a checklist.
Whats the craziest thing you've experienced?
PS. I may have linked to net-nanny above, but I'm not trying to make a porn site
The best advice I can give is to program defensively. For example, don't assume that all of your scripts may be loaded. I've seen cases where AdBlocker Plus will block 1/10 scripts that are included in a page just because it has the word "ad" in the name or path. While you can work around this by renaming the file, it's still good to check that a particular object exists before using it.
The weirdest thing I've seen wasn't so much a browser plugin but a firewall/proxy configuration at a user's workplace. They were using a squid proxy that was trying to remove ads by replacing any image HTTP request that it thought was an ad with a single pixel GIF image. Unfortunately it did this for non-GIF images too so when our iPhone application was expecting a PNG image and got a GIF, it would crash.
Internet Explorer 6. :)
No, but seriously. Firefox plugins like noscript and greasemonkey for one, though those are likely to be a very small minority.
Sometimes the user's environment means a screen reader (or even a braille interface like this). If your layout is in any way critical to the content being delivered as intended, you've got a problem right there.
Web pages break, fact of life; the closer you have been coding and designing up against standards, the less your fault it is.
Something I have checked in the past is loading some of the more popular toolbars that people tend to install (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc) and seeing how that affects the users experience.
To a certain extent it is difficult to preempt which of the products you mentioned will be used by your users since there are so many. I would say your best bet is to test for the most frequent products that your user base may employ and roll with the punches for the rest. If you have the time to test other possible scenarios, by all means do.
Also, making it easy for your users to report possible issues also helps lessen the time it takes to get a fix in place should it be something you can work around.