Useful (freeware) apps - post them here

[ThePassenger]

Trooper2 said:

No placing of blame intended, just trying to be useful..

I'm just fooling around.


Anyway to be on topic.
Firefox 2, www.getfirefox.com

[peter hh]

Great Stuff..

[hornet]

Can anyone suggest some useful security type stuff for a Linux newbie? I'm using Linux more and more just to surf and whatnot, but although everyone says it's safer by default, is it really? I'm just using basic firewall settings (via Firestarter), but surely there's more to it than that? Have years of Windows updates, patches, viruses and spyware made me paranoid?

[ThePassenger]

hornet said:

Can anyone suggest some useful security type stuff for a Linux newbie? I'm using Linux more and more just to surf and whatnot, but although everyone says it's safer by default, is it really? I'm just using basic firewall settings (via Firestarter), but surely there's more to it than that? Have years of Windows updates, patches, viruses and spyware made me paranoid?

IPTABLES (which is what Firestarter is controlling) is pretty much the one stop shop you need, it doesn't look it but the thing is used in a lot of commercial firewalls (Watchguard being the most noteable off the top of my head).
Really how you go about patching depends on your distro. Suse (last time I used it) has YaST which can autoupdate from them, RedHat/Fedora has yum and an assortment of other utilities and Gentoo is a cow (but I love it so).

However, and people will yell at me for being blazaie about it, 90% of security alerts I've seen are local privledge escalations from a local terminal only; basically someone needs to be sat physically at the computer to make use of the flaw, so I don't tend to update that often.
Making sure your root account has a nice beefy password and can't login from a SSH shell will however kill off most threats.

Is Linux safer by default? Yes and no. If you're running a server with lots of oddbod scripting sites on it (say phpBB2, Wordpress 1.5.x, etc.) that aren't kept up to date then yeah bad juju can happen. But if your running it as a desktop with a decent iptables config telling everyone to bugger off who knocks on the door... your as safe as houses IMHO.

Edit.
If your running headless and facing the internet. It's a good idea to just tell SSH to only authenticate via key based systems, rather than risk someone managing to brute force a user account. PuTTY & Pagent are your friends in doing this.

Edited by ThePassenger on Sunday 5th November 02:19

[hornet]

Lost me with the last bit! I assume you're talking about remote access?

[ThePassenger]

hornet said:

Lost me with the last bit! I assume you're talking about remote access?

yep. Headless machines are just that, no monitor/keyboard/mouse attached to them (or attached via KVM devices).

[davidd]

I've just been using www.logmein.com which is remote control stuff. Works though firewalls, seems simple enough.

D

[page3]

A few freeware apps for you Mac users

Perian - Quicktime plug-in to play AVI, FLV, 3ivX, DivX, etc etc
http://perian.org/

ImageWell - quick capture and upload utility
www.xtralean.com/IWOverview.html

Adium - Instant Message App - AIM, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo etc
www.adiumx.com/

Azureus - excellent Java bittorrent client (use the beta for Intel Mac's)
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/

ffMpegX - video format converter - converts almost everything
www.ffmpegx.com/

TiVOTool - backup TiVo recording or stream over your network
www.tivotool.com/

OSXPlanet - very cool live earth images on your desktop
www.gabrielotte.com/osxplanet/main.html

SafariBlock - ad-blocking for Apple's Safari
http://fsbsoftware.com/

PureFTPd - powerful FTP server
www.pureftpd.org/project/pure-ftpd

CocoaMySQL - nice GUI MySQL editor
http://cocoamysql.sourceforge.net/

MacTheRipper - Backup your DVD's
www.mactheripper.org/

[ThePassenger]

Ever tried to install that latest forceware drivers and had them tell you that it can't find any valid hardware? Well that's because Nvidia don't officially support the Go chipsets, it's up to the OEM's to provide modified drivers for you to use. Which is pants, because Dell's latest driver for a Go 6800 Ultra has a date of 2005 on it (the 7000 series are also out of date).

www.laptopvideo2go.com/index.php?drivers

Download the drivers and the INF file. The driver package is a self-extracting zip file (I ran both it and the extracted contents through AVG and it's clean), extract the files to a directory and copy the nv4disp.inf you downloaded over to the same directory you extracted the files to; tell Windows to overwrite.

Run the setup executable and let the new drivers install and reboot when prompted.

[scared but happy]

site said:

PC WIZARD 2006 is also an utility designed to analyze and benchmark your computer system. It can analyze and benchmark many kinds of hardware, such as CPU performance, Cache performance, RAM performance, Hard Disk performance, CD/DVD-ROM performance, Removable/FLASH Media performance, Video performance, MP3 compression performance.

PC Wizard 2006.

Edited by scared but happy on Thursday 9th November 19:13

[Loteuk]

Anyone know if there is such an application that will filter spam mail from Outlook.
I get about 60% crap mail,
Thanks

[trooperiziz]

Loteuk said:

Anyone know if there is such an application that will filter spam mail from Outlook.
I get about 60% crap mail,
Thanks

This should sort you out:

http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/

[ThePassenger]

AVG-Free

Grisoft are ceasing support for version 7.1 of AVG-Free at the start of 2007. This does NOT mean that Grisoft are ceasing to provide a free anti-virus solution.

They have updated the AVG-Free edition website to download the newer 7.5 series, for which they will continue to provide anti-virus updates at regular intervals just like they did with version 7.1.

If you receive the message that support for your version is about to end do the following:

1. Download the newer client from AVG.
2. Uninstall your current version of AVG-Free.
3. Install the new version you just downloaded.
4. Run through the configuration, making sure to use the updater several times until it tells you that you are using the latest version and no more updates are available.
5. Wipe hands on trousers.

[sheepy]

ThePassenger said:

AVG-Free

Grisoft are ceasing support for version 7.1 of AVG-Free at the start of 2007. This does NOT mean that Grisoft are ceasing to provide a free anti-virus solution.

They have updated the AVG-Free edition website to download the newer 7.5 series, for which they will continue to provide anti-virus updates at regular intervals just like they did with version 7.1.

If you receive the message that support for your version is about to end do the following:

1. Download the newer client from AVG.
2. Uninstall your current version of AVG-Free.
3. Install the new version you just downloaded.
4. Run through the configuration, making sure to use the updater several times until it tells you that you are using the latest version and no more updates are available.
5. Wipe hands on trousers.

Only problem is that there isn't a free version of 7.5 (or am I being thick?)

[ThePassenger]

sheepy said:

Only problem is that there isn't a free version of 7.5 (or am I being thick?)

there is. I'm running it. Download from http://free.grisoft.com/doc/5390/lng/
Current version (as of this post) "avg75free_430a848.exe" aka. AVG 7.5 free build 430a858 :P

Edited by ThePassenger on Sunday 19th November 12:18

[tvrski]

for spyware removal use Hitman Pro www.hitmanpro.nl/hitmanpro/ (program is all in one, also english)

[vex]

on line calendar - fully shareable and emails you each morning - www.google.com/calendar/render


pda and phone sync for google diary - www.goosync.com/Default.aspx

[robinhood21]

If anyone is using Windows Defender beta version, it is now time to upgrade.
Microsoft has released the finalised version, and will discontinue updates of the beta version as of 31st December.
Windows defender can be downloaded--> www.microsoft.com/security

[benojir]

Hi all,

anyone know a good adobe acrobat freeware replacement?

cheers,

ben

[hornet]

benojir said:

Hi all,

anyone know a good adobe acrobat freeware replacement?

cheers,

ben

Only one I can think of is Foxit, although I haven't tried it - got mixed reviews from what I've read.