Just a list of 20 (now 28) tools for the command line. Some are little-known, some are just too useful to miss, some are pure obscure — I hope you find something useful that you weren’t aware of yet! Use your operating system’s package manager to install most of them. (Thanks for the tips, everybody!)
via Cool, but obscure unix tools :: Software architect Kristof Kovacs.
WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client, FTP client, WebDAV client and SCP client for Windows. Its main function is file transfer between a local and a remote computer. Beyond this, WinSCP offers scripting and basic file manager functionality.
via Introducing WinSCP :: WinSCP.
This is a very useful program to get files off a PC and onto a Linux server which supports these services out of the box. I find Samba to be too clunky, unreliable, and very noisy on an open network by broadcasting packets to everyone. Only now did I have a need for something like this and SCP solves my problem and is more secure and easier to use than standard ftp. I still map drives using Samba on my closed network but I may try out the windows version of sshfs sometime in the future. The user interface on this tool is very intuitive and works well.
EMET, short for the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, is a free tool from Microsoft that can help Windows users beef up the security of commonly used applications, whether they are made by a third-party vendor or by Microsoft. EMET allows users to force applications to use one or both of two key security defenses built into Windows Vista and Windows 7 — Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP).
Put very simply, DEP is designed to make it harder to exploit security vulnerabilities on Windows, and ASLR makes it more difficult for exploits and malware to find the specific places in a system’s memory that they need to do their dirty work.
via Tools for a Safer PC — Krebs on Security.
By creating a free account at OpenDNS.com, changing the DNS settings on your machine, and registering your Internet address with OpenDNS, the company will block your computer from communicating with known malware and phishing sites. OpenDNS also offers a fairly effective adult content filtering service that can be used to block porn sites on an entire household’s network.
F.B. Purity is a browser extension / add-on that lets you clean up and customise Facebook. It filters out the junk you don’t want to see, leaving behind the stories and page elements you do wish to see. The list of story types that FBP hides is customizable to your taste.
Console based applications are light on system resources very useful on low specified machines, can be faster and more efficient than their graphical counterparts, they do not stop working when X Windows is restarted, and are great for scripting purposes. When designed well, console applications offer a surprisingly powerful way of using a computer effectively. The applications are leaner, faster, easier to maintain, and remove the need to have installed a whole gamut of libraries.
via Pick of the Bunch: Console Internet Applications – Linux Links – The Linux Portal Site.
We consolidate location and information of wireless networks world-wide to a central database, and have user-friendly java, windows, and web applications that can map, query and update the database via the web.
Via WiGLE – Wireless Geographic Logging Engine – Plotting WiFi on Maps.
RStudio provides open source and enterprise-ready professional software for the R statistical computing environment. We started RStudio because we were excited and inspired by R. RStudio products, including RStudio IDE and the web application framework RStudio Shiny, simplify R application creation and web deployment for data scientists and data analysts.
via RStudio – About.
When using the Cordova APIs, an app can be built without any native code (Java, Objective-C, etc) from the app developer. Instead, web technologies are used, and they are hosted in the app itself locally (generally not on a remote http server).
And because these JavaScript APIs are consistent across multiple device platforms and built on web standards, the app should be portable to other device platforms with minimal to no changes.
via Apache Cordova.
What you’re looking at in the image above is a little device about the size of a cigarette packet running a piece of firmware known as “Jasager” (which over in Germany means “The Yes Man”) based on OpenWrt (think of it as Linux for embedded devices). Selling for only $100, it packs Wi-Fi capabilities, a USB jack, a couple of RJ45 Ethernet connectors and implements a kernal mode wireless feature known as “Karma”.
via Troy Hunt: The beginners guide to breaking website security with nothing more than a Pineapple.
But why on earth would a victim connect to the Pineapple in the first place?! Well firstly, we’ve become alarmingly accustomed to connecting to random wireless access points whilst we’re out and about. When the average person is at the airport waiting for a flight and sees an SSID named “Free Airport Wi-Fi”, what are they going to do? Assume it’s an attacker’s honeypot and stay away from it or believe that it’s free airport Wi-Fi and dive right in? Exactly.
Tor, the most popular anonymizing network on the Internet, gained over 10,000 new users this week in Turkey alone as protesters fought back against a government ban on Twitter.
via As Turkey bans Twitter, Tor usage skyrockets – Patrick Howell O’Neill | The Daily Dot.
Users can download the Tor program at TorProject.org.