Best Free Software Suite

The Open CD site [1] offers for free a wonderful collection of just about every application software product you need to run a PC including the latest version of OpenOffice. Many of these freebies substitute admirably for expensive commercial products. There is Abi Word as an alternative for MS Word, OpenOffice for MS Office XP, Thunderbird for Outlook, The Gimp for Adobe Photoshop, 7-zip for WinZip and many more. If you then add to this collection some of the other utilities from my "46 Best-ever Utilities" collection you will have all the software you'll ever need without spending a cent. Note: All of the Open CD utilities can be downloaded for free as a CD ISO image. If you have a slow connection you can purchase the CD for a as little as $1.99.

The Open CD project was a great idea but updates have been slow coming. OpenDisc is a follow-on project with a similar objective, but it aspires to be more up-to-date and responsive to user needs. The early signs look encouraging, with an impressive download package [2] and a reasonably active blog and forum [2]. This is an extraordinary collection of software containing everything you could want to fully set up your PC. Do note, though, that the ISO download [4] is 555MB.

[1] http://theopencd.org
[2] http://theopendisc.com/programs/
[3] http://www.theopendisc.com/forum/
[4] http://theopendisc.com/latest-version/
[5] https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
[6] http://www.paulstamatiou.com/2005/10/24/how-to-ubuntu-linux-for-novices/

Best Freeware Utilities Unleashed

Best Free Registry Editor

I've used the full version of Resplendent Registry Editor for years and have never had any reason to look for an alternative. Recently a subscriber asked me what was the best free registry editor and that made me realize I've never looked at that particular product category. The first product I checked out was Registrar Lite [1], the free version of Resplendent Registry Editor and I'd have to say it's an impressive freebie. To start with, it works totally reliably - an essential feature for any registry editor. On top of that, the user interface is simple, the functionality excellent and, perhaps most importantly, it has a really fast search. I did, however, miss a "search and delete" option - that's unfortunately only available on the full product. That said, it leaves Regedit for dead. If you know a better free registry editor, drop me an email. NOTE: Locating the Lite version on the Resplendent site is tricky. Go to the download page [1] and locate the heading "Registry Tools." On the right hand side in faint gray letters there is a link "download free lite version." You can also get it though from various download sites including MajorGeeks [2].


[1] http://www.resplendence.com/downloads Freeware, All Windows versions, 2.0MB.
[2] http://www.majorgeeks.com/download469.html

Protect Yourself While Shopping Online

When you shop at crowded brick-and-mortar stores this year, you know how to protect yourself - look for well-lit parking lots, be alert, and go shopping with a buddy. But do you know how to protect yourself while shopping online?

Tony Bradley, About's guide to Internet and Network Security, provides tips on ensuring your holidays don't get hacked. Tony's advice can help you avoid phishing scams, charity scams, identity theft, and viruses, worms, and other malware. Read Don't Let Your Holidays Get Hacked for tips on safely shopping online this year.

Add a toolbar to the Vista desktop

Windows Vista gives you a new option for putting the files, folders, and shortcuts you use the most at your fingertips. Desktop toolbars are like constantly open folders that sit on your desktop. Instead of having to open the folder first, your files, subfolders, and shortcuts are immediately available. Learn how to create a Vista desktop toolbar.

Microsoft Vista's IPv6 Raises New Security Concerns:

Members of the Internet engineering community have raised several new security concerns about Teredo, a mechanism for sending IPv6 traffic over IPv4 networks that comes turned on by default in Microsoft's Vista software.

Symantec and Ericsson security experts who called attention to the issue say they are concerned that Teredo bypasses network security through such devices as firewalls. Microsoft officials could not be reached for comment.

IPv6 is a long-anticipated upgrade to IPv4, the Internet's primary communications protocol.
IPv6 fixes the lack of IP addresses found in IPv4. IPv6 has a virtually unlimited number of IP addresses, while IPv4 has 4.3 billion IP addresses, the majority of which have been handed out.

Teredo is a tunneling technique used to send IPv6 traffic through IPv4 network address translators (NAT). Because of the lack of IPv4 addresses, NATs are commonly used in enterprise networks to mask many private IPv4 addresses behind a single public IPv4 address.

With Teredo, IPv6 packets are sent as IPv4-based User Datagram Protocol messages to go through IPv4 NATs. Teredo provides IPv6 traffic with address assignment and host-to-host automatic tunneling. A network using Teredo requires Teredo clients, Teredo host-specific relays, Teredo servers and Teredo relays.

Teredo is enabled by default in Windows Vista, but it won't be enabled by default in Windows Server Code Name 2008, according to Microsoft.
In a 20-page document titled "Teredo Security Concerns," James Hoagland of Symantec and Suresh Krishnan of Ericsson, outline several new security concerns about running Teredo in managed, corporate network environments. The document is the result of an independent analysis of Teredo's security implications that was conducted by Symantec.

"Teredo is not recommended as a solution for managed networks," the document states. "Administrators of such networks may wish to filter all Teredo traffic at the boundaries of their networks. . . . The easiest mechanism for this would be to filter out incoming traffic with Source Port 3544 and outgoing traffic with Destination Port 3544."

The Hoagland/Krishnan document was discussed at a meeting of the IETF's IPv6 Operations Working Group held here this week. It is in draft form and has not been approved yet by the group.
Because of the new security concerns about Teredo, the authors recommend that network managers turn off Teredo. "Security administrators should disable Teredo functionality unless their network-based security controls adequately recognize the tunneled traffic," the document says. The IETF previously cited security concerns about Teredo in the original Teredo RFC 4380, which was published by the IETF in February 2006.

The Symantec and Ericsson engineers now write: "IPv6 traffic tunneled with Teredo will not receive the intended level of inspection or policy application by network-based security devices, unless the devices are specifically Teredo-aware and capable.This reduces defense in depth and may cause some security gaps. This applies to all network-located devices and to end-host based firewalls whose hooking mechanisms would not show them the IP packet stream after the Teredo client does decapsulation."

The authors say that vendors of firewalls, intrusion-detection systems, intrusion-prevention systems and routers must add support for the Teredo protocol to ensure they can inspect Teredo packets. A network device that's unaware of Teredo will inspect only the IPv4 layer of a Teredo packet but won't recognize there is an IPv6 packet hidden inside to inspect or to apply a security policy.

Another concern of the authors is that the Teredo tunnel is open-ended and supports bidirectional traffic. To make sure networks are secure when sending IPv6 traffic via Teredo, network managers need to bolster the security of client hosts sending Teredo traffic. "One implication of the security control bypass is that defense-in-depth has been reduced, perhaps down to zero unless a local firewall is in use," the authors say. "However, even if there are host-based security controls that recognize Teredo, security administrators may not have configured them with full security-control parity even if all the controls that were maintained by the network are available on the host. Thus there may be some gaps in desired coverage."

Yet another problem is that network managers may not be aware that some of their hosts are using IPv6 through Vista and are now globally addressable. "Unlike what would be the case for native IPv6, some network administrators will not even be aware that their hosts are globally addressable," the authors say. They add that "it may not be efficient to find all Teredo traffic for network devices to examine."

The document lists the following additional security problems with Teredo and offers these recommendations:
-- Teredo bypasses inbound-destination-address and outbound-source-address filtering unless "extraordinary" measures are taken. In this situation, either routers or clients need to be upgraded to handle this filtering for Teredo-tunneled IPv6 addresses.
-- Teredo clients may forward IPv6 packets to another destination, thereby bypassing network-based source-routing controls. One solution is to have Teredo clients by default discard IPv6 packets that specify additional routing.
-- No mechanism exists to filter all Teredo packets efficiently or immediately. One suggestion is for network administrators to block all Teredo use.
-- There's no efficient mechanism for deep packet-inspection of Teredo traffic as there is for native IPv6 traffic. This is one reason the authors do not recommend Teredo as a transition mechanism for network administrators who want to monitor IPv6 traffic.
-- The opening created in a NAT device by Teredo can be used by network attackers. The recommendation here is to minimize Teredo use.
-- It may be easier for network attackers to guess Teredo addresses because these addresses reveal some information about the corresponding clients. The document suggests randomizing the server settings or Teredo client ports in use to alleviate this concern.

Even more alarming to the document's authors is that Teredo's original RFC 4380 specification argues that Teredo improves security for IPv6. "This misleading or inaccurate claim can be taken out of context and used to downplay Teredo security implications," the new document states.
The Hoagland/Krishnan document does not address the use of Teredo in unmanaged networks.

Die, Spyware, Die!

Spyware remains a continuing hassle and a potentially serious intrusion on your privacy. We tested the top antispyware programs to see which ones do the best job.

In the beginning, antivirus software fought viruses and worms, and antispyware software fought spyware and adware. That clean distinction has largely disappeared. The decline of the macro virus and the e-mail worm sent antivirus companies looking for something else to fight, and the complexity of spyware makes it a formidable foe. (See "The Italian Job," for an example of how sneaky spyware can get.)
As we discussed in our recent antivirus roundup, "Virus Stoppers," several antivirus products are effective at fighting Trojan horses and backdoor programs--typically classified as spyware--as well as adware. So the question arises: Are specialized antispyware tools particularly effective at fighting today's threats?

The Contenders:

To find out, we looked at six well-known programs. We tested five--Grisoft's AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5, Microsoft's Windows Defender 1.1, PC Tools' Spyware Doctor 5.0, Safer Networking's Spybot Search & Destroy 1.4, and Webroot's Spy Sweeper 5.5--on Windows Vista systems.

The sixth program, Lavasoft's Ad-Aware 2007 Plus, wasn't available in a Vista version during our testing period, so we evaluated its performance on a Windows XP SP2 PC; for this reason, its results are not directly comparable with those for the other apps.

German research company AV-Test.org conducted the malware portion of our tests, bombarding the applications with samples of current adware and spyware. AV-Test.org gauged the products' ability to recognize about 110,000 inactive adware, spyware, and rootkit samples. An inactive sample is like an application you've downloaded and haven't yet installed. You'll want your antispyware product to recognize it--based on a match to a signature database of known threats--before the sample unpacks itself and activates in various areas of your PC.

To learn how the tools would react in such a case, AV-Test also measured each product's ability to recognize the behavior of and subsequently clean up 20 active pieces of adware and spyware. Since each threat can break down into more than 100 components, disinfection can be a tough job. We looked for the programs to clean up major file and Registry changes.

We also looked at the programs' behavior-based capabilities for detecting and blocking changes to key areas of an infected system without having to recognize anything about a specific invader. Spyware writers are continually releasing new threats, and security companies typically take some time to release signatures to catch those threats. An antispyware product's behavior-based detection protects the user during this critical window. We also tested for false positives and for speed; and we evaluated each software's design, price, and ease of use.

The Results:

PC Tools' Spyware Doctor 5.0 outperformed its Vista competitors. Grisoft's AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5 and Webroot's Spy Sweeper 5.5 finished some distance behind. Neither Spybot Search & Destroy nor Windows Defender adequately protects against today's threats. And on Windows XP, Lavasoft Ad-Aware, in several performance areas, did not impress us.
For comparative results of the five Vista programs, see our chart, "Best Vista Antispyware." And for further discussion of the results we obtained, see our video, also titled "Die, Spyware, Die!"

Products Reviewed:

 PC Tools Spyware Doctor 5.0
 Grisoft AVG Anti-Spyware 7.5
 Webroot SpySweeper 5.5
 Microsoft Windows Defender 1.1
 Safer Networking Spybot Search & Destroy 1.4
 Lavasoft Ad-Aware 2007 Plus 7.0 (XP version)

Myspace Features

MySpace is a social networking website offering an interactive, user-submitted network of friends, personal profiles, blogs, groups, photos, music and videos internationally. It is headquartered in Beverly Hills, California, USA,where it shares an office building with its immediate owner, Fox Interactive Media; in turn, the owner of Fox Interactive and therefore MySpace, News Corporation, is headquartered in New York City.

According to Alexa Internet, MySpace is currently the world's sixth most popular English-language website and the sixth most popular website in any language,and the third most popular website in the United States, though it has topped the chart on various weeks.The service has gradually gained more popularity than similar websites to achieve nearly 80 percent of visits to online social networking websites.

The company employs 300 staff and does not disclose revenues or profits separately from News Corporation. With the 100 millionth account being created on August 9, 2006,in the Netherlands and a news story claiming 106 million accounts on September 8, 2006,the site reportedly attracts new registrations at a rate of 230,000 per day. As of September 7, 2007, there are over 200 million accounts.

MySpace features:

Bulletins:
Bulletins are posts that are posted on to a "bulletin board" for everyone on a MySpace user's friends list to see. Bulletins can be useful for notifying an entire, but usually a portion of the friends list (depending on how many friends are added), without resorting to messaging users individually. Some users choose to use Bulletins as a service for delivering chain messages about politics, religion, or anything else and sometimes these chain messages are considered threatening to the users, especially the ones that mention bad luck, death, or topics similar to that.[16] They have also become the primary attack point for phishing. Bulletins are deleted after ten days.

Groups:
MySpace has a Groups feature which allows a group of users to share a common page and message board. Groups can be created by anybody, and the moderator of the group can choose for anyone to join, or to approve or deny requests to join.

MySpaceIM:
Main article: MySpaceIM
In early 2006, MySpace introduced MySpaceIM, an instant messenger that uses one's MySpace account as a screen name. A MySpace user logs in to the client using the same e-mail associated with his or her MySpace account. Unlike other parts of MySpace, MySpaceIM is stand-alone software for Microsoft Windows. Users who use MySpaceIM get instant notification of new MySpace messages, friend requests, and comments.

MySpaceTV:
In early 2007, MySpace introduced MySpaceTV, a YouTube look-alike video sharing website.

MySpace Mobile:
There are a variety of environments in which users can access MySpace content on their mobile phone. American mobile phone provider Helio released a series of mobile phones in early 2006 that can utilise a service known as MySpace Mobile to access and edit one's profile and communicate with, and view the profiles of, other members.[17] Additionally, UIEvolution and MySpace developed a mobile version of MySpace for a wider range of carriers, including AT&T[18], Vodafone[19] and Rogers Wireless[20].

MySpace News:
In the month of April 2007, MySpace launched a news service called MySpace News which displays news from RSS feeds that users submit. It also allows users to rank each news story by voting for it. The more votes a story gets, the higher the story moves up the page.

MySpace Classifieds:
Full service classifieds listing offered beginning in August 2006. Has grown by 33 percent in one year since inception.