Welcome to the Linux Security Blog section! We continually scour the blogosphere to find informational and well-written blogs that cover Linux and Security. To give you a better idea of how we come to our choices here's some of our criteria:

• Must have Linux/Open source as a component in >50% of all posts.
• Must have security as a component in >50% of all posts.
• Must be updated at least twice a week. We are looking for blogs, not conveniently updated sites. This is tracked, and if no post is made for 2 weeks, we remove it.

Additionally, each month, we will feature three of the best stand-out blogs for each month, highlighting the best of what the Linux and security Blogosphere has to offer. Feel free to contribute one of your favorite sites by sending an email to contribute@linuxsecurity.com

Samsung Planning To Merge Bada OS With Tizen

Samsung will be merging their homegrown Bada OS for smart phones with Tizen. No time frame has been set for the merger however, it is expected that Samsung will be releasing at least two new smart phones this year(2012) itself running on the Tizen platform.

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For more news, tips, and reviews on all things Linux, Open source and Free software, visit Linux Help blog.



PC-BSD 9.0 - Isotope Edition - Released

PC-BSD 9.0 (Isotope edition) has been released. PC-BSD is a FreeBSD variant operating system that is targeted specifically at desktop users / end users. One of the uniqueness of PC-BSD is its PBIs or Push Button Installers that allow you to install and uninstall applications just like you are used to in Windows.

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For more news, tips, and reviews on all things Linux, Open source and Free software, visit Linux Help blog.



FreeBSD 9.0 Released

FreeBSD engineering team has released FreeBSD ver 9.0. This is the first release from the stable/9 branch, which improves on stable/8 and adds many new features.

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For more news, tips, and reviews on all things Linux, Open source and Free software, visit Linux Help blog.



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WordPress Thrashing Authorisation Bypass

Thomas Mackenzie has reported a vulnerability affecting Wordpress >= 2.9. Versions before 2.9 are not vulnerable. tmacuk quote: Since version 2.9 a new feature was implemented so that users were able to retrieve posts that they may have deleted by accident. This new feature was labelled ?trash?. Any posts that are placed within the trash are only viewable [...]


WordPress Trackback < 2.8.5 Denial of Service

If you are running WordPress < 2.8.5 and finding your blog inaccessible at times this post may be for you. A denial of vulnerability was released back in Oct 2009 that affects < WordPress 2.8.5. The exploit sends a continuous stream of POST requests with overly large blog titles to wp-trackback.php. This could result in the [...]


Distributed WordPress Password Guessing

One of The Internet Storm Center readers recently discovered a malicious WordPress hacking script. The script is nothing more then a password guessing tool. However, what makes it unique — as pointed out by ISC, is the fact that it uses a MySQL database backend to store password attempts. This means the script could be executed [...]


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At Last ? Adobe Launches Sandboxed Flash Player For Firefox

Finally a proactive measure from Adobe to try and remedy the horrible security flaws they have introduced to Firefox with their Flash Player. There have been some massive hacks recently due to Flash - - Hackers Exploiting Latest Adobe Flash Bug On Large Scale - Adobe Patches Latest Flash Zero Day Vulnerability - Adobe Promises [...]

Read the full post at darknet.org.uk




theHarvester ? Gather E-mail Accounts, Subdomains, Hosts, Employee Names ? Information Gathering Tool

theHarvester is a tool to gather emails, subdomains, hosts, employee names, open ports and banners from different public sources like search engines, PGP key servers and SHODAN computer database. This tools is intended to help Penetration testers in the early stages of the project It’s a really simple tool, but very effective. The sources...

Read the full post at darknet.org.uk




Super Powered Malware Sandwiches Found In The Wild ? Frankenmalware

Now this is quite a fascinating story, especially if you know anything about Malware and have interests in that area. It seems the latest development is the accidental development of new super-malware strains created by viruses infecting executable files of worms. Worms are generally executable files and well, viruses infect executables – so...

Read the full post at darknet.org.uk




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Hackers force us to make JSF more secure

There's been some commentary on the recent article, "China's Role in JSF's Spiraling Costs." TaoSecurity (Richard Bejtlich?s) has an excellent blog on this, whichfollows up on a tweet by @4n6ir.


However, I have a different take:
?Before the intrusions were discovered nearly three yearsago, Chinese hackers actually sat in on what were supposed to have been secure,online program-progress conferences, the officials say.?
This sounds a lot like ?FBI Admits Hacker Group?s Eavesdropping.? So after at least three years we still haven?t learned howto keep our secure conference calls, well, um, actually secure ? but that?s adigression.


The article on the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) goes on: ??needfor redesign of critical equipment. Examples include specialized communicationsand antenna arrays for stealth aircraft, as well as significant rewriting ofsoftware to protect systems vulnerable to hacking.?
The JSF?s software systems had serious vulnerabilities: ?Defenseanalysts note that the JSF?s information system was not designed withcyberespionage, now called advanced persistent threat, in mind.? The JSF?s MultifunctionAdvanced Data Link (MADL) was dropped entirely because of reported ?moneyissues.?



We were building one of the most ?computerized? and?networked? fighter planes in the world. Imagine if the plane went intoproduction with those serious software vulnerabilities and it was open toattack via it?s own aerial network? It?s not like adversaries haven?t alreadydemonstrated their ability to hack our communications channels in the field tohijack drone telemetry, video, and perhaps to crash them.
If there is a silver lining here, it?s that when the JSFdoes fly it?s systems will be better protected against software vulnerabilitiesand it won?t be broadcasting a SSID, although a Mach-2 WAP would have beenpretty cool.


I?ll tell you what I want, what I really, really want from a Cloud Provider



If you want mybusiness, you better make it fast
Self-service: 7x24 add, remove, change resources, workloads, andconnectivity
Elastic: scale up or down automatically within the limits I set
Available: stand up to hurricanes, DDOS, and replication storms.Your mistakes should never be my problem.
If you want my data,you better make it secure
Auditing: network and management
Network ? I need to audit and or inspect all the traffic between mysystems. This includes but is not limited to traffic between users, systems,and applications even where they share the same physical host and virtualswitch.
Management ? I need to see all management events that may impactthe security or configuration of my systems. This includes but is not limitedto privileged access to my systems or data through the hypervisor or cloudmanagement APIs.
Control: policy and assurance
Policy ? I need to express and apply security policies via a methodthat is both human understandable and translatable into a machine-interpretedlanguage.
Assurance ? I need to know when an event or incident occurs thatviolates a policy and I need a method for testing that controls exist and areeffective for enforcing my policies.
Metrics: continuous and interoperable
Continuous ? Per our agreed standards of measurement I must be ableto quantify the security attributes of my system. This may include but is notlimited to measurements for: vulnerability, configuration, performance,incident detection, incident response, and incident containment.
Interoperable ? All security relevant data and events must beavailable in a documented machine-readable format. It should either comply withstandards such as Cyberscope and SCAP or my preferred GR&C system.
If you want my money,you better not ask for much
Value ? Not just cheaper than if I do it myself. Your servicesshould give my organization new capabilities to meet our objectives. Thesecapabilities could include user experience, logistic support, and accessibility?
No lock-in ? I should be able to easily move my data and workloads backinside my enterprise or to one of your competitors.


Tell me again where these devices are made?

I?ve been ?upgrading? my home infrastructure:

Seagate GoFlex Network Storage
Netgear WNDR3800
(other stuff)

All my toys run linux, so imagine my surprise when this starts showing in my logs:
[LAN access from remote] from 210.51.17.227:40986 to 192.168.35.119:22, Thursday, January 19,2012 16:56:47
[LAN access from remote] from 210.51.17.227:39316 to 192.168.35.119:22, Thursday, January 19,2012 16:56:36
[LAN access from remote] from 210.51.17.227:37023 to 192.168.35.119:22, Thursday, January 19,2012 16:56:32
[LAN access from remote] from 210.51.17.227:34192 to 192.168.35.119:22, Thursday, January 19,2012 16:56:28
[LAN access from remote] from 210.51.17.227:50809 to 192.168.35.119:22, Thursday, January 19,2012 16:56:21
[LAN access from remote] from 210.51.17.227:47558 to 192.168.35.119:22, Thursday, January 19,2012 16:56:16
[LAN access from remote] from 210.51.17.227:44530 to 192.168.35.119:22, Thursday, January 19,2012 16:56:11
[LAN access from remote] from 210.51.17.227:42159 to 192.168.35.119:22, Thursday, January 19,2012 16:56:07
[LAN access from remote] from 210.51.17.227:39236 to 192.168.35.119:22, Thursday, January 19,2012 16:56:02
(repeat about 500 times)

whois 210.51.17.227?
Answer someone inside a /16 registered to Beijing Tongtai IDC of China Netcom.

Turns out my Seagate device was advertising port 22 via upnp and my Netgear was helpfully port mapping it to the Internet.

Go figure.


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Professional Video Editing in Linux with Kdenlive

It’s easy to learn the basics of video editing, especially in Linux! This software is based on the FFMPEG and MLT frameworks so it can handle almost any video file format you throw at it. This quick tutorial will teach you how to put together a video complete with titles, transitions and effects, the program I used is called Kdenlive; It’s like Sony Vegas, except it’s free and open-source!

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Unleash The Power of the Find Command

Unfortunately in Linux, certainly Ubuntu, the default GUI file search is not always useful. With just a small amount of patience you can find files quickly and easily using the command line, and your options for this are really powerful if you want to learn a bit about it.

The easy, quick command is called "locate." To use this command at the terminal you simply type:
$ locate -i searchstring
This will search for all files and directories with "searchstring" in the name, and -i means the search is not case sensitive (i.e. it will find searchstring, Searchstring, sEaRcHsTrInG, and so on). The results are instantaneous because the system has created a database (also known as an index) to tell you where files are located. The only problem is that newly created or moved files may not be found correctly until the next database update, and you don’t have many options to choose from for your search.  (forcing locate to update the database/index is done with $ sudo updatedb, and it doesn’t take a lot of time)
Example:
$ locate -i kdenlive.desktop

There is a much more powerful command available to you called "find." You can tell "find" where to look, what criteria to use in its search, and what actions to take once you have found what you are looking for. The syntax for "find" is:
$ find
If you don’t add any parameters, find will default to searching the current working directory (or "."), uses no search criteria (defaults to showing all files), and -print (which, despite its name, displays, or "prints," the results on screen) as the only action to take.
Two examples:
$ sudo find / -type f -mmin -10
This example will find (starting at the root directory, or /, and recursively search subdirectories) all normal files (-type f means normal files, without this it will find normal files + special files + directories) which were modified less than ten minutes ago (-mmin -10), and then display the results for you. This would be useful if you know you edited a file recently but don’t know where you put it, or have to find a log file for a program that crashed. I use sudo here because find does not search files/directories that the current user does not have permissions for, and it will return error messages. However, you should use caution when using sudo.
$ find ~ -iname "*xxx*" -exec mv -v {} /media/pr0n/ \;
This will find everything in your home directory (~) with a name, case insensitive (-iname), containing xxx ("*xxx*") and execute (-exec) a move (mv) of the results ({}) to /media/pr0n/ ( \; is required by -exec to show the end of the command to be executed). So all your downloaded porn will be moved to the same place. mv -v displays the results of the move command with (-v)erbose messages. Another warning with -exec, though it is powerful, when used without care you can overwrite your whole home directory or whole disk – so be careful!
For those of you who simply can’t do without a GUI, you can find the program catfish in the repositories – this enables you to run both locate and find from a graphical front-end, but it is very limited in options. Think of it as an equivalent to Windows Search. If you want the full power of find, you’ll need to run it from the command line!
A big thanks to BigWhale (http://www.twm-kd.com/) for helping me find my footing with the find command.
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Installing Themes in Linux

This guide works for the gnome desktop manager (used by Ubuntu and other Linux distributions).
First we go to Gnome-looks. This is a large collection of themes and other artwork that can be used to make gnome look any which way you like. From there we select and download a theme. Since many people have asked what theme I use, I chose my theme, SlicknesS-black, for the example. Once we’ve downloaded our theme and saved it to the desktop, we will then extract it to the desktop.

Once it is extracted, in the terminal we enter the following commands to copy the theme files to the shared theme directory (where the themes manager looks for it) and change the permissions to make it available to all users of the computer:
$ sudo cp -r $HOME/Desktop/SlicknesS-black /usr/share/themes
$ sudo chmod 755 /usr/share/themes/SlicknesS-black/Sluckness-black.jpg
Remember, file and directory names are case-sensitive in Linux, so be careful to use the correct case.
Next we open the theme manager (in this case System -> Preferences -> Appearance -> Themes) and we should see our new theme listed there!
For Ubuntu users only – you may notice if you choose to install SlicknesS-black an error that states the engine “ubuntulooks” is not found. If that is the case enter the following command in the terminal to install the missing theme engine:
$ sudo apt-get install gtk2-engines-ubuntulooks
Enjoy your new theme!
(The wallpapers I use can be found at beautifulfractals and are available under the Creative Commons license)
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Twitter: Could You Quit Anytime? - You say ?addiction?; I say ?healthy interest?.

Often I hear myself explaining to people that I use social media as a primary part of my livelihood, justifying my seemingly always-online presence. A recent study could blow the cover off a bigger issue that even I am not completely ready to admit. This research shows that for many checking e-mail, posting to Twitter and updating Facebook is not just a pastime; it is more like an addiction. An addiction that researchers say could be harder for some to kick than cigarettes and alcohol. According to an article in The Guardian (the same study was also reported in Medical Daily), a study of 205 people aged between 18 and 85 revealed that it may be more difficult for people to ignore the desire to tweet, post and e-mail than it is to resist the urge to drink alcohol and smoke tobacco. The study tested the willpower of participants and required they report their ?desire episodes,? according to The Guardian article. Other cravings such as sleep or sex could be stronger than the urge to use social media, the study team reported, but people are more likely to give into the desires for social media. That could be because the stronger desires simply aren?t feasible, say, if an individual is at the work place. But study leaders said resisting the lesser desires to give into tobacco or alcohol could be because of perceived long-term consequences.


Balancing Act: A Framework for IT Transformation

IT organizations worldwide are juggling to keep services running at expected availability and performance levels AND to execute new IT projects, such as adding new customer services, building out the network and enhancing old services. If you too are being squeezed like this, then it is worth your time to compare notes with others who are keeping all the balls in the air at once. One such enterprise customer (call them ?Company X?) is a leader in its field, is highly profitable and has a lean and mean IT workforce that amounts to only 1% of the total 12,000 company employees. That?s only about 160 IT professionals. They have three main groups within IT: Application Development, Help Desk/PC Support Group and Operations. The Operations Team, which manages infrastructure and applications, has less than 60 employees. Besides using commercial enterprise applications, the company builds a lot of their own applications. They have more than 1,000 network devices, more than 1,000 servers and more than 50,000 devices on customer premises that they remotely monitor and control. Their overarching strategy for IT excellence has three vectors:
1. Drive customer and employee value by offering new services;
2. Assure availability and performance of new and old services; and
3. Prepare the IT organization to support long-term business growth.


Is Your Klout Score Higher Than a 12-Year-Old?s

I broke into hysterical laughter last night and couldn?t stop when I discovered that my son?s Klout score is higher than mine. His score is higher than all of the people I work with that engage in social media on a daily basis. Mind you, I severely restrict his online access and he does not have a Facebook, Tumblr or MySpace account. I did allow him to have an e-mail account and post content on YouTube. He?s not allowed to show his face, name, age, where he goes to school or his residence. My son?s misfortune is that his parents are very tech-savvy, which limits his ability to outsmart us when it comes to technology. Well, at least in the near term. Despite all the precautions I take, my son has more online influence (according to Klout) than me and most professional social marketers. While my ego took a hit and I questioned Klout?s influence algorithm, I couldn?t help but think about what I could learn from my son. He didn?t understand the humor and irony of the situation. He patiently told me all kinds of things about search engine optimization techniques without actually using the vocabulary or having the awareness that it?s exactly what he was doing. I was amazed and quickly realized that social media is second nature to him and his peers. He reassured me that what he told me was common knowledge amongst his school buddies. While busy adults and professionals devise all kinds of organization and naming schemes to help each other understand social media and its impact better, their kids are busy living it. It dawned on me that the next generation and future workforce is so social technologically savvy that it will no longer be a debate whether social capabilities should be a part of an enterprise application. It will be a basic requirement. I don?t know of many popular applications for the younger set that lack social capabilities. Even stuffed animals now have online profiles. These kids expect every app they touch to give them the capability to connect, share and promote content and ideas. And why shouldn?t they?


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Security Implications of "Lower-Risk Aircraft"

Interesting paper: Paul J. Freitas (2012), "Passenger aviation security, risk management, and simple physics," Journal of Transportation Security. Abstract: Since the September 11, 2001 suicide hijacking attacks on the United States, preventing similar attacks from recurring has been perhaps the most important goal of aviation security. In addition to other measures, the US government has increased passenger screening requirements to...
Solving the Underlying Economic Problem of Internet Piracy

This essay is definitely thinking along the correct directions....
Error Rates of Hand-Counted Voting Systems

The error rate for hand-counted ballots is about two percent. All voting systems have nonzero error rates. This doesn't surprise technologists, but does surprise the general public. There's a myth out there that elections are perfectly accurate, down to the single vote. They're not. If the vote is within a few percentage points, they're likely a statistical tie. (The problem,...
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Review: Online Logo Maker (and the online icon maker)


I'm always excited to undertake sponsored reviews because it forces me to look objectively at a website, piece of software or service that I may not have encountered otherwise. This time I've been approached by the creator of the Online Logo Maker.

One of the most important things to announce when looking at this application is that it's a free web-app. It's not even monetized so that always helps me calibrate how I review. If someone is charging $100 for a license then you expect it to be brilliant, whereas free things you are willing to accept flaws. It's simple.

So what is the Online Logo Maker?
It is what it says on the tin. It's a basic online application with allows you to drag together uploaded images, stock clip-art and text into a downloadable logo.



How much control do you get?
You can adjust the size, layout, colour and rotation of any element you add to the stage. You can add basic geometric shapes (although while you can increase their size, the rounded corners don't adjust to these changes, so it is very basic vector based work). You can upload images to, which would help you break out of the fairly basic clip-art on offer.

Is it useful?
This is the important question here. It's a fantastic tool, easy to use and fairly customisable and yes, I would say it's useful, but only for a certain tier of work. Ultimately an online application is never going to have the level of quality and control that you'll need to create a fully accomplished logo for a proper business. Let me explain in greater detail;hellip;

Fonts
It's hard to understate the importance of fonts and typography in logo design. The impressive functionality of the tool not withstanding, it needs more professional fonts. The ones on offer are more suitable for low-end local business logos than they are polished organisations or websites. Whether it's a licensing issue (fonts can be tricky), introducing the same set that Google offer as part of their web fonts would be a great addition. The selection on offer are too restrictive to be useful - aside from Arial there are no fonts I'd consider suitable for a professional organisation. So my constructive criticism here would be to improve the offering in line with the ones Google offer.

Clip-art
While a great addition - allowing you to draft a logo together quite rapidly, the selection covers a wide range of topics but unfortunately, they are absolutely representative of the clip-art stereotype. Imagine the ones you're offered inside Microsoft Office and you're somewhere in the right ballpark. If the set could be increased with a new/wider set, even if some fairly generic shapes were added (such as cubes, orbs; the kind of things you see in generic logos) then it would be more useful.

What is it useful for?
Well, it is a good product and whilst not perfectly suited to professional logo creation, it's a great platform for drafting together quick logos (for concepts, wireframes, etc). You can very quickly start pulling ideas together using this tool and the level of customisation means you really can create multiple concepts rapidly. Until the font situation improves I think you'd struggle to use it as part of a legitimate design strategy.

Online Icon Maker
In parallel to the online logo maker there is the online icon maker, which is a beautifully simple free tool which takes a strict set of icons and modifies them with your required text and colours - which is actually probably more useful than the tool I was asked to review. There are six icons on offer and the customisation is perfect. You can adjust the text (and text colour) and the two gradient colours used on the icons. Simple! As with the logo maker, this tool is also free.



In summary, two excellent tools but the first flawed by a predictable clip-art set and restrictive fonts. Definitely useful, both of them and definitely items to keep an eye on. Visit the Online Logo Maker. Visit the Online Icon Maker.




Goodbye Steve Jobs - inventor, innovator and icon


Today the world lost one of the most celebrated innovators; someone who catalysed technological advance, polarised opinion and helped architect the modern world. Today, I'm mourning the (somewhat inevitable, but no less upsetting) loss of Steve Jobs, Apple CEO at the young age of 56.

The iPod completely changed the music industry (albeit not the first mp3 player, the marketing and product made it an instant hit). The iPhone brought revolution to the mobile phone market and painfully dragged competitors into creating better devices, platforms and frameworks. The iPad utilised the huge success of the iPhone and leveraged the growing tablet market. The "post PC" world as Steve called it was entirely dominated by products created during his tenure.


I have huge respect for the man. A man whose passion for technology transcended his visably deteriorating health. A man who - as CEO - was more convincing than some of the best PR and sales people I've seen. A man who deserves his place alongside celebrated inventors such as Edison.

Five years ago I wrote an article explaining why you should respect Steve Jobs and while I won't repeat the obvious business credentials he harboured, the fact that post pre-dates the announcement of the iPhone shows how much he's influenced the modern world before his crowning achievement. The iPhone has sold more than 100 million units worldwide - completely changing the market.

I'm not even accounting for the might of the myriad of Apple products available today, but his legacy goes beyond these consumer goods. The way items created during his tenure changed the way people interacted with technology and changed their expectations of competitors has opened the door to a bright computing future.

Five years ago I wrote an article stating that "as a Windows/Linux user I find it hard to accept that Mr. Jobs has done marvelous things to Apple and I think that there are more people in my position who maybe don't appreciate how successful he has been". I sit here as someone who uses an iPhone, iPad and Macbook Pro, completely enamoured with the quality of Apple products.

I think president Obama said it best in his wonderful, heartfelt statement:


"Steve was among the greatest of American innovators ;ndash; brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it."

"The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve;rsquo;s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented."


If the world was filled with more people who shared his passion for a given topic and wished to challenge the boundaries of what is possible.

RIP Steve Jobs 1955-2011.


I leave this as one of my favourite presentations Steve made. Thanks for everything, today is a sad day.




100+ awesome free and open source applications

It has always amazed me quite how many incredible, varied and useful applications are available for free on the Internet. Be it free, open source, web-based or merely passive trials - the number of top quality items on offer is huge.

The purpose of this list is to help people realise that the free and open source software communities are expansive and generous. In these tense economic times, raising awareness of such projects is something I'm more than happy to do. If you feel that I've missed something good off the list, please leave a comment at the bottom - I read absolutely every one.

Index - what types of software I cover in this list
Image, Image Editing and Graphics
Office
Web and web development
Development Applications (IDE's)
Operating Systems
Video Playback and Editing
Audio
Anti-Virus and Security
Downloading and Download Managers
Remote Access
Useful Applications that don't get their own category
Communications
Servers and Techie Stuff
Games


Image, Image Editing and Graphics
GIMP ;ndash; http://www.gimp.org
The GNU Image Manipulation Program is a Photoshop replacement that doesn;rsquo;t have "quite" as much functionality but it;rsquo;s excellent for free. It comes installed by default on many Linux distros and is also available in Windows. Worth a look.

Inkscape - http://www.inkscape.org/
Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Paint.net - http://www.getpaint.net
A really good, lightweight alternative to Photoshop. It offers layers, unlimited undo, special effects and a wide variety of useful tools. The download is around 2mb too so absolutely worth a look ;ndash; I use this when Photoshop is playing up.

XnView - http://perso.orange.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enhome.html
XnView is software to view and convert graphic files, apparently really simple to use and supports more than 400 graphics formats.

ImageMagick - http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php
A lesser known application but it offers the ability to "create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (about 100)". Use it to "translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and B?zier curves."

Irfanview - http://www.irfanview.com/
IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative freeware graphic viewer for Windows. IrfanView was the first Windows graphic viewer worldwide with Multiple (animated) GIF support. One of the first graphic viewers worldwide with Multipage TIF support. The first graphic viewer worldwide with Multiple ICO support.

Google Sketchup - http://sketchup.google.com/
SketchUp is a 3D modeling program designed for professional architects, civil engineers, filmmakers, game developers, and related professions. Sketchup may also be used to design buildings to be displayed on Google Earth. It was designed to be more intuitive, flexible, and easier to use than other 3D modeling programs, which often have steep learning curves.

Blender - http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
A 3D Studio Max alternative, very comprehensive and full-featured.

Artweaver - http://www.artweaver.de/index.php?en_version
Artweaver is a simple Freeware program for creative painting, i.e. Artweaver offers you all artistic effects which you need for your work. You can create sketches from photos and experiment with a wide range of brushes. The brush simulation is thereby so realistic as possible.


Office
OpenOffice ;ndash; http://www.openoffice.org
It;rsquo;s basically Microsoft Office so you need little else with this installed. It has MS Office support (in both reading and writing) so this fantastic suite is fully compatible.

Wink - http://www.debugmode.com/wink/
Wink is a freeware screen-capture and tutorial-creation program written by Satish Kumar. It supports many features such as input-based capture and text annotations. Navigation buttons can be added to any presentation and the bitmaps for all presentation controls can be edited. Wink also has multilingual support and can be used in English, French, German, Italian, Danish, Spanish, Serbian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified/Traditional Chinese.

Scribus - http://www.scribus.net/
Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

Google Documents - http://docs.google.com/
Google documents is a free service that simply requires registration in order to use it. You create Microsoft-Office-esq documents in an online environment and they store them on their servers. You can export them and save the files to your hard drive too. In addition, Google allows multiple user collaboration which means numerous people can all be working on the same document at the same time and it will update in real time. Very cool stuff.

Foxit - http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 2.1 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Foxit Reader supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7.


Web and web development
Firefox - http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/products/firefox/
Firefox is arguably the second most popular browser available (sitting behind the various Internet Explorers). It's extendable, customisable, secure and massively popular. You can develop plugins for it, other people develop plugins for it - it's just worth having. You almost certainly already have it.

Opera - http://www.opera.com
This is my personal browser of choice, sexy tabbed browsing, customisable, standards complient and fast. As they put it themselves: "The award-winning Opera Web browser The coolest, fastest, and most secure free Web browser available."

Opera web developer toolbar - http://operawiki.info/WebDevToolbar
The web developer toolbar is a menu and toolbar setup for Opera which brings together functions related to web development, validation services and links to standards and other documentation.

Amaya - http://www.w3.org/Amaya/
Amaya is a Web editor to create and update documents directly on the Web. Browsing features are seamlessly integrated with the editing and remote access features in a uniform environment. This follows the original vision of the Web as a space for collaboration and not just a one-way publishing medium. Amaya started as an HTML + CSS style sheets editor. Since that time it was extended to support XML and an increasing number of XML applications such as the XHTML family, MathML, and SVG. It allows all those vocabularies to be edited simultaneously in compound documents.

Notepad++ - http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
Notepad++ is a free source code editor (and Notepad replacement), which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.

Kuler - http://kuler.adobe.com/
A very powerful colour-picking tool, allowing for the easy creation of colour schemes.

Aptana - http://www.aptana.com/
The Aptana IDE is a free, open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript-focused development environment for building Ajax applications. It features code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS languages, FTP/SFTP support and a JavaScript debugger to troubleshoot your code.

Color Cop - http://colorcop.net
A very handy tool for capturing colours anywhere on your screen. Color Cop makes it quick and easy in those situations where you need to know what colour is being used.

Firefox web developer toolbar - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock, Mozilla and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Internet Explorer Toolbar - [another long url]
The Microsoft Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides a variety of tools for quickly creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages. This version is a preview release and behavior may change in the final release.

Firebug - http://www.getfirebug.com/
Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
Wave - http://wave.webaim.org/
With the demise of Watchfire Bobby and WebXact, WAVE has become a great automated online accessibility tool. Either link to a site, paste in the code or upload a file and it will give you a detailed breakdown of how accessible your work is.

JsUnit - http://www.jsunit.net/
JsUnit is a Unit Testing framework for client-side (in-browser) JavaScript. It is essentially a port of JUnit to JavaScript. Also included is a platform for automating the execution of tests on multiple browsers and mutiple machines running different OSs.

Xenu - http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Xenu;rsquo;s Link Sleuth (TM) checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on "normal" links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

Vischeck - http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php
Vischeck is a way of showing you what things look like to someone who is color blind. You can try Vischeck online- either run Vischeck on your own image files or run Vischeck on a web page. You can also download programs to let you run it on your own computer.

Feng GUI - http://www.feng-gui.com/
Find out how people View your website or image and which areas are getting most of the attention. The ViewFinder Heatmap service, is an artificial intelligence service which simulates human visual attention and creates an attention heatmap.

Fiddler - http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/
Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.

browsershots.org - http://browsershots.org/
Browsershots.org is a free open-source online service providing screenshots of your web site in a multitude of different browsers. It is not as advanced as BrowserCam but a fantastic tool none the less.

Expresso 2.1 - http://www.ultrapico.com/Expresso.htm
Expresso is useful tool for learning how to use regular expressions and for developing and debugging regular expressions prior to incorporating them into your code. It provides a very cut down version of RegexBuddy but most importantly it is simple to use and free.

ColorJack - [very long url]
ColorJack is an amazing online application providing users with the ability to match colours that work well together. Perfect for those developers who struggle to get a good colour scheme together.


Development Applications (IDE's)
Eclipse - http://www.eclipse.org/
Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. It;rsquo;s quite hardcore in my personal opinion so certainly not one for beginners.

NetBeans - http://www.netbeans.org/
All the tools software developers need to create cross-platform Java desktop, enterprise and web applications. Runs on Windows, Linux, MacOS, as well as Solaris. I never got on well with NetBeans but it is a good application, just not one I choose.

Geany - http://geany.uvena.de/
Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment. It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It supports many filetypes and has some nice features

Code::Blocks - http://www.codeblocks.org/
A free c++ IDE built to meet the ;ldquo;most demanding needs of its users;rdquo;.

SharpDevelop - http://www.sharpdevelop.net/OpenSource/SD/Default.aspx
A free IDE for C#, VB.net and Boo projects on Microsoft;rsquo;s .NET platform.
Zend Studio - http://www.zend.com/products/studio
While not strictly free, once your trial period expires only a subset of the functionality gets turned off. The really useful bits such as code compete, syntax suggestion and its own SVN client remain fully operational. In reality the only stuff I've found frustrating is that the rename functionality is removed unless you buy the license. Alternatively you could obtain Zend certification and in turn receive a free license - your call.

Operating Systems
Ubuntu - http://www.ubuntu.com
The most popular Linux distro at the moment - offering astonishing performance, usability and support (from a massive online community) all for free.

PCLinuxOS - http://www.pclinuxos.com/
One of my favourite Linux releases; PCLinuxOS is very different to Ubuntu but powerful and usable in equal measures. I find it a lot more intuitive but purely though personal preference. It too is supported by a healthy community.

Fedora - http://fedoraproject.org/
I'm not a Fedora user but there are an awful lot of them. Fedora was the daddy long before Ubuntu appeared on the scene and therefore it inherits a lot of excellent features from how long these guys have been doing it. Excellent software, strong communities and worth a look. This is Linux too incase you didn't know.

openSUSE - http://www.opensuse.org/
Quoted as being one of the more fully featured, usable editions of Linux - openSUSE has a lot of users and is one of the major players in the scene today.

Lots more Linux! - Distrowatch has info on lots more
Linux is free and it is becoming a viable alternative to Windows these days; here is Distrowatch - a site that links to reviews on each release as well as offering a brief description, background and links.


Video Playback and Editing
Media Player Classic - [long url]
Amazingly lightweight and incredibly durable - MPC succeeds where most others fail. It really will play anything and doesn;rsquo;t even need installing.

MPlayer - http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/news.html
A decent video player for Linux.

Kaffeine - http://kaffeine.kde.org/
Another decent video player for Linux (KDE).

Apple Quicktime - http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/
If you've managed to get this far through life without experiencing Quicktime, then you're probably suffering from Alzheimer's. Quicktime is a commonly used media playback application (you probably already have it installed).

VLC Media Player - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
A very popular application; a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats. It will play just about anything too.

VirtualDub - http://www.virtualdub.org/
It's a bit like a really cut down, free version of Adobe Premier... VirtualDub is mainly geared toward processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and also handle sets of BMP images. Worth a look.

Youtube - http://www.youtube.com
Youtube is maybe an odd choice to put into the video playback area but there's a good reason for it. You can upload your videos to Youtube quite happily for free and there are hundreds upon thousands of hours of footage on there. From the illegal to the completely random Youtube has more video playback options than your wildest dreams.

CamStudio - http://camstudio.org/
This is actually a screencasting utility so it doesn't really fit into this category very well... CamStudio is able to record all screen and audio activity on your computer and create industry-standard AVI video files and using its built-in SWF Producer can turn those AVIs into lean, mean, bandwidth-friendly Streaming Flash videos (SWFs).


Audio
Audacity - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Songbird - http://www.songbirdnest.com/
Songbird is a desktop media player mashed-up with the Web. Songbird is committed to playing the music you want, from the sites you want, on the devices you want, challenging the conventions of discovery, purchase, consumption and organization of music on the Internet. Songbird is a popular alternative to Apple's iTunes.

iTunes - http://www.apple.com/itunes/download/
iTunes is one of the world's most popular audio applications, although it breaks through that label by allowing users to purchase media online, schedule podcasts, view artist information etc. Very popular.

Winamp ;ndash; http://www.winamp.com
While not open source, it is free and very good indeed. Far better than iTunes in my personal opinion.

MusikCube - http://www.musikcube.com/
Another iTunes alternative - very good, just really a matter of personal taste in the end.

Amarok - http://amarok.kde.org/
This is one of the best media players I have ever encountered, unfortunately it's purely limited to Linux (KDE environments only) so it's beyond the reach of Windows users and the "Ubuntu mainstream". It's amazing though and I highly recommend it.

Foobar2k - http://www.foobar2000.org
Foobar2000 is an advanced audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.


Anti-Virus and Security
AVG - http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1
A popular and comprehensive, free anti-virus application. I use it. Simple.

Avast! Home edition - http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html
Also quite popular and available for free.

Antivir - http://www.free-av.com/
A free antivirus application (although it doesn't detect spyware). It apparently has one of the best detection rates out of the free antiviruses on offer.

Clamwin - http://www.clamwin.com/
A free antivirus with a high detection rate for infected files. It's not very invasive because it doesn't do on-access virus scanning - you specifically need to say which folders to scan. This is both good and bad - good if you're IT savvy because you don't need on access scanning because you're not stupid enough to do "dodgy" things unprotected. It's bad if you're not because it won't tell you that there's a problem until you tell it to look.

Comodo Firewall - http://www.comodo.com/products/free_products.html
Comodo Firewall, rated by PC Magazine Online as an Editor's Choice, constantly monitors and defends your PC from internet attacks. It's easy to install and use and passes the industry's most stringent firewall "leak" tests.

Windows Defender - http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx
Windows Defender is a free program that helps protect your computer against pop-ups, slow performance, and security threats caused by spyware and other unwanted software. It features Real-Time Protection, a monitoring system that recommends actions against spyware when it's detected and minimizes interruptions and helps you stay productive. It's Microsoft though, but good enough I suppose. Not my sort of thing but a lot of people use it.

Spyware Terminator - http://www.spywareterminator.com/
Does exactly what it says on the tin. Spyware gets terminated. End of.

Arovax Antispyware - http://www.arovaxantispyware.com/
Another free antivirus, another one that does what it says on the tin.


Downloading and Download Managers
Orbit - http://www.orbitdownloader.com/
Orbit Downloader, leader of download manager revolution, is devoted to new generation web (web2.0) downloading, such as video/music/files from Myspace, YouTube, Imeem, Pandora, Rapidshare. And to make general downloading easier and faster.

Utorrent - http://www.utorrent.com/
The single best torrent application available. I've used many many alternatives and this is the single greatest one around. It has a tiny footprint (only a few Kb of RAM) and doesn't need installing. Excellent.

Filezilla - http://filezilla-project.org/
An awesome FTP client; the one I use the most on a day-to-day basis.

SmartFTP - http://www.smartftp.com/
SmartFTP is an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client which allows you to transfer files between your local computer and a server on the Internet. With its many basic and advanced features SmartFTP also offers secure, reliable and efficient transfers that make it a powerful tool.

eMule - http://www.emule-project.net/home/perl/general.cgi?l=1
eMule is one of the biggest and most reliable peer-to-peer file sharing clients around the world. Thanks to it's open source policy many developers are able to contribute to the project, making the network more efficient with each release.

Azureus - http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
One of the most popular torrent clients available, this Java built monster does the job very well. My gripe with it is that it munches it's way through your RAM at an alarming rate (being a Java application). Good though, just a bit hungry for machines are left online 24/7/365 like mine is.

Flashget - http://www.flashget.com/en/download.htm
FlashGet is a leading download manager and has the highest amount of users on the internet. It uses MHT(Multi-server Hyper-threading Transportation) technique, supports various protocols and has excellent document management features. FlashGet is a freeware without any adware or spyware.

Freedownloadmanager - http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/
FDM is a powerful, easy-to-use and absolutely free download accelerator and manager. Moreover, FDM is 100% safe, open-source software distributed under GPL license.


Remote Access
rDesktop - http://www.rdesktop.org/
rdesktop is an open source client for Windows NT Terminal Server and Windows 2000/2003 Terminal Services, capable of natively speaking Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) in order to present the user's NT desktop. Unlike Citrix ICA, no server extensions are required.

TightVNC - http://www.tightvnc.com/
TightVNC is a free remote control software package derived from the popular VNC software. With TightVNC, you can see the desktop of a remote machine and control it with your local mouse and keyboard, just like you would do it sitting in the front of that computer.

UltraVNC - http://www.uvnc.com/
UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location.

LogMeIn - https://secure.logmein.com/home.asp?lang=en
Their website states "20 million users trust LogMeIn solutions for remote support, access ;amp; backup" so that probably says enough.

Putty - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
I wasn't quite sure where to put Putty but I was certain that it needed to be in this list - I use it on a daily basis for remoting into servers, connecting to MySQL databases etc... It's simple and a vital application.


Useful Applications that don't get their own category
CDBurnerXP - http://cdburnerxp.se/
This is an amazingly useful, free burner application. Although I don't believe it works on Vista yet...

AutoHotKey - http://www.autohotkey.com/
AutoHotkey is a free, open-source utility for Windows. With it, you can automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. It's a very useful application and worth a look - especially good for those with limited finger dexterity - because it can automate short-hand typing into long-hand (if set up correctly).

Visuwords - http://www.visuwords.com/
This isn't an installable application but rather a very cool online dictionary/thesaurus. You enter a word and it graphically models that word, with various uses and synonyms mapped around it like a mind-map. A very cool free "service" for writers.

Notepad2 - http://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html
It's basically notepad but more helpful for doing code and stuff in. It's just notepad with more functionality; which makes life a bit easier. Code highlighting is handy and it doesn't need installing and it doesn't touch your registry. It's safe, simple and very useful.

VIM - http://www.vim.org/
Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. It's useful whether you're already using vi or using a different editor.

Synergy - http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s).

Quicksilver - http://qsapp.com/
When opened, it will create a catalog of applications and some frequently used folders and documents. Activate it, and you can search for and open anything in its catalog instantly. The search is adaptive, so Quicksilver will recognize which items you are searching for based on previous experience. It also supports abbreviations, so you can type entire words, or just fragments of each. When not in use, Quicksilver vanishes, waiting for the next time you summon it. OSX only though...

7Zip - http://www.7-zip.org/
WinRAR and Winzip need paying for (eventually), 7zip is free and does the same thing. That's it really.

JZip - http://www.jzip.com/
Create, open and extract Zip, TAR, GZip and 7-Zip. Open and extract from RAR and ISO. No surprises then.

Google Desktop - http://desktop.google.com/
This is a surprisingly useful application to have. It has desktop search (it searches through all your files and folders for what you've searched for, including your email - which is VERY useful). It will also do RSS updates straight to your desktop, news updates, weather information, to-do lists, notepads, you name it. It does it all.

GNU Cash - http://www.gnucash.org/
GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. This powerful little app manages scheduled calculations, graphing and any number of things that those too lazy to master a spreadsheet will find useful.


Communications
Skype - http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/
Make calls from your computer ;mdash; free to other people on Skype and cheap to phones and mobiles around the world. Enough said really.

Thunderbird - http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/products/thunderbird/
Mozilla's alternative to Outlook. It's just brilliant, possibly the best email client I've ever used; which I use on a day-to-day basis.

Pidgin - http://www.pidgin.im/
Pidgin is a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once. Pidgin can work with: AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC, SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo! and Zephyr.

mIRC - http://www.mirc.com/
A little old school now but IRC is still going strong and this is the most popular client in the world.

Trillion - http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/
Trillian is a proprietary multiprotocol instant messaging application for Windows created by Cerulean Studios that can connect to multiple IM services, such as AIM, ICQ, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Bonjour, Jabber, and Skype networks (the latter four with Trillian Pro which allows for additional plugins).


Servers, techie stuff
Apache - http://www.apache.org/
Apache really doesn't need any explanation as it is the god of the Internet. I'll just include this and no further deriviatives such as Tomcat/JBOSS/whatever.

XAMPP - http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html
XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. XAMPP is really very easy to install and to use - just download, extract and start. It comes for Windows, OSX, Solaris and Linux.

MySQL community server - http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html
This version of the MySQL database server is free, quite obvious really.

PostgreSQL - http://www.postgresql.org/
PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source relational database system. It has more than 15 years of active development and a proven architecture that has earned it a strong reputation for reliability, data integrity, and correctness. It runs on all major operating systems. I used this for the majority of University - it's excellent.

Nagios - http://www.nagios.org/
Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external "plugins" which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.

EasyPHP - http://www.easyphp.org/?lang=en
EasyPHP is a complete software package allowing to use all the power and the flexibility that offers the dynamic language PHP and the effecient use of databases under Windows. Package includes an Apache server, a MySQL database, full PHP as well as easy development tools for your web site or your applications. This is comparable to XAMPP (see above).

WINE - http://winehq.org/
Again, one I wasn't quite sure what to classify it as (it's definitely NOT an emulator though, heh). Wine is a software application which aims to allow Unix-like computer operating systems on the x86 architecture to execute programs that were originally written for Microsoft Windows. Wine also provides a software library known as Winelib which developers can compile Windows applications against in order to port them to Unix-like systems.


Games
FreeCiv ;ndash; http://www.freeciv.org/index.php/Freeciv
A free development of the popular Civilisation games created by Sid Meier.

FreeCol - http://www.freecol.org/
Exactly the same but for Colonisation.

Also here is a massive list of open source games for Windows that's absolutely worth checking out.

This list of 100+ applications barely scratches the surface of what is out there; but it's a start. If you think I've missed something awesome off this list, let me know via email or in a comment below and I'll add it to the next iteration of this list. I hope this was useful to at least one person.


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