But tweak the right settings and you could make it faster still, more than doubling your speed in some situations, all for about five minutes work and for the cost of precisely nothing at all. Here’s what you need to do.

1. Enable pipelining

Browsers are normally very polite, sending a request to a server then waiting for a response before continuing. Pipelining is a more aggressive technique that lets them send multiple requests before any responses are received, often reducing page download times. To enable it, type about:config in the address bar, double-click network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining so their values are set to true, then double-click network.http.pipelining.maxrequests and set this to 8.

Keep in mind that some servers don’t support pipelining, though, and if you regularly visit a lot of these then the tweak can actually reduce performance. Set network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining to false again if you have any problems.

2. Render quickly

Large, complex web pages can take a while to download. Firefox doesn’t want to keep you waiting, so by default will display what it’s received so far every 0.12 seconds (the “content notify interval”). While this helps the browser feel snappy, frequent redraws increase the total page load time, so a longer content notify interval will improve performance.

Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click (Apple users ctrl-click) somewhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.notify.interval as your preference name, click OK, enter 500000 (that’s five hundred thousand, not fifty thousand) and click OK again.

Right-click again in the window and select New > Boolean. This time create a value called content.notify.ontimer and set it to True to finish the job.

3. Faster loading

If you haven’t moved your mouse or touched the keyboard for 0.75 seconds (the content switch threshold) then Firefox enters a low frequency interrupt mode, which means its interface becomes less responsive but your page loads more quickly. Reducing the content switch threshold can improve performance, then, and it only takes a moment.

Type about:config and press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Integer. Type content.switch.threshold, click OK, enter 250000 (a quarter of a second) and click OK to finish.

4. No interruptions

You can take the last step even further by telling Firefox to ignore user interface events altogether until the current page has been downloaded. This is a little drastic as Firefox could remain unresponsive for quite some time, but try this and see how it works for you.

Type about:config, press [Enter], right-click in the window and select New > Boolean. Type content.interrupt.parsing, click OK, set the value to False and click OK.

5. Block Flash

Intrusive Flash animations are everywhere, popping up over the content you actually want to read and slowing down your browsing. Fortunately there’s a very easy solution. Install the Flashblock extension (flashblock.mozdev.org) and it’ll block all Flash applets from loading, so web pages will display much more quickly. And if you discover some Flash content that isn’t entirely useless, just click its placeholder to download and view the applet as normal.

6. Increase the cache size

As you browse the web so Firefox stores site images and scripts in a local memory cache, where they can be speedily retrieved if you revisit the same page. If you have plenty of RAM (2 GB of more), leave Firefox running all the time and regularly return to pages then you can improve performance by increasing this cache size. Type about:config and press [Enter], then right-click anywhere in the window and select New > Integer. Type browser.cache.memory.capacity, click OK, enter 65536 and click OK, then restart your browser to get the new, larger cache.

7. Enable TraceMonkey

TraceMonkey is a new Firefox feature that converts slow Javascript into super-speedy x86 code, and so lets it run some functions anything up to 20 times faster than the current version. It’s still buggy so isn’t available in the regular Firefox download yet, but if you’re willing to risk the odd crash or two then there’s an easy way to try it out.

Install the latest nightly build (ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/), launch it, type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Type JIT in the filter box, then double-click javascript.options.jit.chrome and javascript.options.jit.content to change their values to true, and that’s it – you’re running the fastest Firefox Javascript engine ever.

8. Compress data

If you’ve a slow internet connection then it may feel like you’ll never get Firefox to perform properly, but that’s not necessarily true. Install toonel.net (toonel.net) and this clever Java applet will re-route your web traffic through its own server, compressing it at the same time, so there’s much less to download. And it can even compress JPEGs by allowing you to reduce their quality. This all helps to cut your data transfer, useful if you’re on a limited 1 GB-per-month account, and can at best double your browsing performance.

By Mike Williams
http://www.techradar.com

“There seems to be a myth that Microsoft limits security updates to genuine Windows users,” wrote Microsoft’s Paul Cooke, who works in Windows Client Enterprise Security. “Let me be clear: all security updates go to all users.”

“Not only do all security updates go to all users’ systems, but non-genuine Windows systems are able to install service packs, update rollups, and important reliability and application compatibility updates,” Cooke continued in the blog entry. “In addition, the users of non-genuine Windows systems can also upgrade a lot of the other software on their computer. For example Internet Explorer 8 has numerous security- oriented features and improvements, and it is available to all users.”

That’s not to say that non-genuine copies of Windows are allowed to run completely free. Certain updates and software may be blocked at Microsoft’s discretion, such as value-adding updates and non-security-related software.

Bootlegged copies of Windows Vista can still access updates through the Windows Update control panel. A non-genuine Windows XP system can only access updates through Automatic Updates, but not through the update websites.

Microsoft said that it won’t be changing this policy for Windows 7, meaning that pirates will still be as protected as legit users. While this might seem a little strange for any software company to provide software support to pirates, keeping even illegal copies patched up is in the interest of the entire computing ecosystem.

While it may be mildly entertaining to laugh at illegal installations of Windows fall at the hands of a computer worm, an epidemic is still an epidemic – especially if it affects legitimate users who simply haven’t applied the current patches or security software.

Source : Tom’s Hardware US

Enjoy!
Office Suite

1. OpenOffice.org – OpenOffice.org is a viable alternative to Microsoft Office – even for professional use. It can do just about anything Office can.
2. AbiWord – A lightweight version of Microsoft Office. Simple, straightforward interface; easy to use.
3. Jarte – A word processor based on the Microsoft WordPad. It can be run directly from a USB flash drive.
4. Notepad++ – A free source code editor and Notepad replacement, which supports several programming languages, running under the MS Windows environment.
5. EditPad Lite – A general-purpose text editor, designed to be small and compact, yet offer all the functionality you expect from a basic text editor.


Security

6. avast! 4 Home Edition – A complete antivirus solution that is able to find computer viruses, create and check the integrity of programs installed, test executed programs and opened documents, to test and check email and other functions.
7. AVG Anti-Virus – A free security solution that is easy to use, has low system resources, automatic update functionality and ability to protect as files are opened and programs are run.
8. Comodo Firewall – A free firewall that constantly monitors and defends your PC from internet attacks. It is a fully functional product that comes with continual updates that are free forever!
9. McAfee SiteAdvisor – A plugin for Firefox and IE browser that shows safety rating as you browse the Web.
10. SpyCatcher Express – A free anti-spyware program that allows novice PC users to remove aggressive spyware, stops next-generation, mutating spyware, blocks reinstallation of aggressive spyware and removes spyware safely and automatically.
11. StartupMonitor – A small monitoring program that keeps a constant eye on your system’s startup entries. When ever a change is made, you will be notified and given a choice to either allow the change or not to change.
12. SuperStorm Freeware – This software allows you to hide your confidential files and folders in a wide variety of media files such as pictures, audio, video, executable programs among many other file types.
13. Windows Defender – A free program that helps protect your computer against pop-ups, slow performance, and security threats caused by spyware and other unwanted software.
14. HijackThis – A malware remove tool that makes a detailed log of what’s going on in your Registry and gives you the opportunity to remove things that might be suspect.
15. Zone Alarm – This software lets you block uninitiated and unwanted traffic, even while your PC is unattended or while you’re not using your connection.

Desktop management

16. Google desktop – A desktop search application that gives you easy access to information on your computer and from the web.
17. Yahoo Desktop – Yahoo Desktop enables you to search and instantly find information, preview it in its native format, and take action on it immediately.
18. TweakUI – This software reduces the Windows annoyance without having to meddle with the registry. It gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more.
19. Pretty run – A small program that can search your start menu, desktop or any other folder for shortcuts.
20. RoboForm – RoboForm memorizes and securely stores each user name and password the first time you log into a site, then automatically supplies them when you return.
21. AutoHotkey - This open-source utility can automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write macros by hand or use the macro recorder. You can also create hotkeys for keyboard, mouse, joystick, and handheld remote controls.
22. Keepass safe – A password manager which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key-disk.
23. Clipomatic – A clipboard cache program that remembers what was copied to the clipboard and allows you to retrieve it, even after you’ve copied something else to the clipboard.

Browser

24. Firefox – Firefox includes tons of useful features such as tabbed browsing, built-in and customizable search bars, a built-in RSS reader and a huge library of extensions developed by thousand of developers.
25. Opera – Opera introduces Speed Dial which vastly improves navigation to your favorite sites. In addition, there’s Fraud protection, an anti-phishing detection keeps browsing safe and secure.
26. Crazy browser – A browser that allows users to collect tabs into groups and then load an entire group at once. This feature is very useful for research, as you can summon a set of related sites as needed, without manually opening each one.

Fun and Games

27. Banshee Screamer Alarm – A snoozeable alarm clock designed to wake you up. Play MP3s, execute programs, or shut down your computer at the time you set.
28. BZFlag – An online multiplayer cross-platform open source 3D tank battle game. It runs on Irix, Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac OS X, and many other platforms. It’s one of the most popular games ever on Silicon Graphics machines.
29. ConWare IconArt – An easy-to-use icon & cursor editor that allows your to design your own, edit previous icons, create cursors, capture icons from programs and DLL files or import an image for your icon.
30. Google Earth – Google Earth combines the power of Google Search with satellite imagery, maps, terrain and 3D buildings to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips.
31. Tux Racer – Getting bored and sick of the Windows game? Tux Racer lets you take on the role of Tux the Linux Penguin as he races down steep, snow-covered mountains. Enter cups and compete to win the title!
32. ZSNES – A Nintendo emulator on your desktop. ZSNES is built to run on Windows, DOS, Linux and FreeBSD Unix and it is by far the best SNES emulator available.
33. Cartes du Ciel – A sky map that allows you to find out what constellations and planets are visible tonight.

Graphics Editing

34. GIMP – A complete image editing software with capabilities not found in any other free software product. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert-quality photo-retouching program, a mass production image renderer, or an image-format converter.
35. Paint.net – A free image and photo editing software that features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.
36. Google sketchup – A powerful yet easy-to-learn 3D software tool that combines a simple, yet robust tool-set with an intelligent drawing system that streamlines and simplifies 3D design.
37. IrfanView – A fast and compact image viewer/converter that is simple for beginners and powerful for professionals.

Video and Audio

38. Audacity – A complete recording and sound editing software that is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.
39. Media Monkey – A music manager and jukebox for serious music collectors and iPod users. It offers an intelligent tag editor which looks up missing Album Art and track information via Freedb and the Web.
40. CDex – An application that records audio tracks from CDs and saves them to a disk as regular WAV files or as encoded sound files.
41. iTunes – One of the highest downloaded digital-jukebox software. Comes with the iTunes Music Store that offers music at 99-cents-per-song.
42. Winamp – A multimedia player that supports numerous audio and video formats. It also plays streamed video and audio content, both live and recorded, authored worldwide.
43. VLC – A highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
44. QuickTime Alternative – This application let you play QuickTime or Real videos without Apple or Real’s bloated, in-your-face proprietary players.

PDF creator

45. PrimoPDF – A free tool for high-quality PDF creation, comprising a user-friendly interface that enables printing to PDF from virtually any Windows application.
46. PDF creator – A simple PDF creation tool for those who just want to skip the technical steps and produce a PDF file. If you know how to print, then you know how to use this software.
47. doPDF – Using doPDF, you can create searchable PDF files from virtually any application. You can search for text within the created PDF file, and search engines will also index the text from the PDF.

Virtual Server

48. VMware Server – VMware Server installs on any existing server hardware and partitions a physical server into multiple virtual machines by abstracting processor, memory, storage and networking resources, giving you greater hardware utilization and flexibility.
49. LogMeIn Hamachi – A VPN that allows you to access your home PC from work (or vice versa) as though you’re sitting right in front of it.
50. OpenVPN – OpenVPN is a tried and true VPN solution. It is totally secure and infinitely configurable. You can install and run this software without relying on a third party.

Instant Messaging

51. Windows Live messenger – The next generation MSN Messenger. It comes with everything that were already available in Messenger, and a new i’m Initiative that makes helping your favorite charity as easy as sending an instant message.
52. Pidgin – 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, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo!, MySpaceIM and many more.
53. Trillian – A fully featured, stand-alone, skinnable chat client that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC.
54. Skype – A software that enables you to make free calls anywhere in the world.

Download manager

55. Download Accelerator Plus – A download manager that can enhance your download experience. Features include a search tab, security check for every site and application you download, more speed per connection, resume broken download and preview file when you download.
56. Internet download manager – A tool for increasing download speeds by up to 5 times, and for resuming, scheduling, and organizing downloads. The program will resume unfinished downloads due to network problems, or unexpected power outages.
57. Getright – As a download manager, GetRight supports BitTorrent downloads too. In addition, you can use GetRight to schedule your downloads for later; it can dial your modem (if needed), download the files you want, then hang up or even shut down your computer when it is done.
58. DownThemAll – A powerful yet easy-to-use Mozilla Firefox extension that adds new advanced download capabilities to your browser.
59. Flashgot – A Firefox extension that allows you to handle single and massive downloads using the external download managers of your choice.

File Management

60. Eraser – An advanced security tool for Windows that allows you to completely remove sensitive data from your hard drive by overwriting it several times with carefully selected patterns.
61. Restoration – An easy to use and straight forward tool to undelete files that were removed from the recycle bin or directly deleted from within Windows (we were able to recover photos from a Flash card that had been formatted).

Torrent Manager

62. Azureus – A popular torrent manager that allows you to install plug-in and tweak your own settings.
63. µTorrent – A very, very tiny BitTorrent client that packs enough features into that small package to compete with beefier applications like Azureus.
64. Bitcomet – A bit torrent manager that allows videos files to be previewed while they’re still being downloaded, and there’s a built-in chat tool that lets users chat with other peers in the swarm.

Backup Program

65. Cobian Backup – A multi-threaded program that can be used to schedule and backup your files and directories from their original location to other directories/drives in the same computer or other computer in your network.
66. Back4Win – A backup program that uses industry standard ZIP compression to ensures that your data will be accessible regardless of which PC operating system. Does not have 4Gb and 65535 file limit of other ZIP backup programs.
67. DriveImage XML – This software allows you to backup logical drives and partitions to image files, browse these images, view and extract files, restore these images to the same or a different drive and copy directly from drive to drive.
68. JaBackup – JaBackup allows advanced automation features. You can schedule backup tasks by the second or minute, or on a hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
69. Xdrive Desktop – Xdrive gives you 5GB of online storage space to store and backup your files. The Xdrive desktop software allows you to backup and synchronize your data with the web server with few mouse clicks.
70. Gmail Space – Use your Gmail account as storage by uploading and downloading files through a browser-based interface.

File Compression

71. 7-zip – This software compresses files in new 7z format with LZMA compression. It supports multi formats, including 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR, RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS.
72. Winzip – Using WinZip, you can quickly and easily compress and decompress files, folders, and entire folder trees to save storage space and reduce e-mail-transmission time, as well as encrypt and decrypt your sensitive documents.
73. AutoUnpack – This is designed to unpack your compressed file in a single quick step. You merely point to a folder containing your ZIP or RAR files and choose an output directory. Press one button to start a process that ends with your archive perfectly unpacked, or let the program automatically unpack that directory every set number of minutes.
74. ExtractNow – A simple program allows you to extract more than one archived file at a time, with one click of a button, making extracting files quicker and easier.

System Optimization and Diagnostic Tool

75. CCleaner – A system optimization and privacy tool that removes unused files from your system and allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space.
76. Security Process Explorer – An enhanced task manager, that provides advanced information about programs and processes running on the computer. It displays all the standard information, including file name, directory path, description, CPU usage etc. as well as a unique security risk rating.
77. CPU-Z – This mini software allows you to find out everything about your computer. You can find information such as processor name and vendor, core stepping and process, processor package, internal and external clocks, clock multiplier, partial overclock detection, and processor features including supported instructions sets.
78. EULAlyzer – This takes your EULA agreement and analyze it in seconds, and provide a detailed listing of potentially interesting words and phrases. Discover if the software you’re about to install displays pop-up ads, transmits personally identifiable information, uses unique identifiers to track you, or more. It is great for picking out privacy issues.
79. Process Explorer – An advanced process management utility that picks up where Task Manager leaves off. It will show you detailed information about a process including its icon, command-line, full image path, memory statistics, user account, security attributes, and more.
80. Auslogics Disk Defrag – This software was designed to remedy system sluggishness and crashes caused by disk fragmentation. It is fast, simple to easy and what’s more, it is effective.
81. SmartDefrag – SmartDefrag boasts a system checker that continually defrags the files that you use the most, and does it without becoming a persistent drag on your system resources. The “Install It and Forget It” feature works automatically and quietly in the background on your computer and it only eats up 14MB of RAM, so it’s possible to run it smoothly on older machines.
82. Local Cooling – Fight global warming from your desktop! Local Cooling automatically optimizes your PC’s power consumption by using a more effective power save mode.
83. Belarc Advisor – Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware and analyzes elements such as whether antivirus software is up to date, or whether all the security flaws in Windows have been patched.

Email Client

84. Thundrebird – Thunderbird makes e-mailing safer, faster, and easier than ever before with the industry’s best implementations of features, such as intelligent spam filters, a built-in RSS reader, and quick search.
85. Eudora – A robust e-mail client whose features include multiple address-book-formatting options and the ability to filter, redirect, and forward mail. It supports QuickTime- and HTML-enriched e-mail, letting you include stylized, formatted text and in-line graphics in your messages.
86. Opera Mail – Opera Mail is integrated with the Opera browser, and lets you send, receive, sort and search your e-mails quicker and easier than with conventional e-mail programs.
87. Sylpheed – A surprisingly versatile email client. ‘Surprisingly’ because it has a friendly, easy to use interface to its many useful features.
88. PopTray – The premier pop-up mail checker for standard POP3 and IMAP mail accounts, including Gmail, and it can be coaxed to work with HTML-only mail such as Hotmail by following the instructions at the PopTray site.

Photo Organizer

89. Google Picasa – A free software that helps you locate and organize all the photos on your computer, edit and add effects to your photos with a few simple clicks and share your photos with others through email, prints and on the web.
90. Xnview – A fast multi-format graphics browser, viewer, and converter. It has an Explorer-like browser that allows quick and simple browsing of directory contents.
91. FxFoto – This software provides a single tool for automatically organizing, enhancing, annotating, e-mailing, printing, uploading, and archiving your digital photos.
92. Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition 3.0 – This software makes it easy to find, fix, and share your digital photos. Instantly fix photo flaws in just a click or two.
93. Jalbum – A gallery software that makes web albums from your digital images.

Video Converter

94. Free FLV Converter – This free software let you search youTube and dailyMotion videos without opening your browser and you can even watch the videos using the built-in video player.
95. Free Video To iPhone Converter – Convert video files to Apple iPhone MP4 video format. Convert the whole movie or select a partition from the movie to convert (trim video).
96. Any Video Converter – An all-in-one video converting freeware with easy-to-use graphical interface, fast converting speed, and excellent video quality.
97. iPod Video Converter – Free iPod Video Converter provides an easy and completed way to convert all popular video formats to iPod video.

FTP client

98. Filezilla – A full-featured FTP client that supports Secure FTP, SSL, and other protocols in a slick interface, complete with a tree-structured site manager that lets you store settings for multiple sites.
99. SmartFTP – An FTP client which allows you to transfer files between your local computer and a server on the Internet. SmartFTP offers secure, reliable and efficient transfers that make it a powerful tool.
100. FireFTP – FireFTP turns your browser into an FTP client, with a two-pane file manager for uploading and downloading.

EyeCandy

101. Yahoo Widget – A small, specific applications that you can run on your Windows or Mac OS desktop. You can download tons of useful widget from the widget gallery.

---

Thanks to Frank for recommending another free software. Here is it:
102. Process Scanner – This application gives you a complete analysis of all the processes running on your PC, along with a risk analysis of each one.

By Damien

The about:config page contains most (if not, all) of Firefox configuration options. It is so far the most effective, and the most powerful way to tweak and enhance your Firefox performance. Here are 28 of the popular tweaks.

Accessing your about:config page

In your Firefox, type about:config in the address bar.

You will be shown a warning page. Click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button to proceed.

On the main page, you will see a long list of configuration entries. Enter the name of the key you want to update in the “Filter” field. The list will narrow to only the entries that match your keyword as you type.

To modify the value, simply double click on the entry value field and update the entry. That’s all!

Isn’t that simple? Now, let’s get to the tweaking.

1) Adjust the Smart Location Bar’s Number of Suggestions

In Firefox 3, when you start typing in the location bar, a drop-down list of suggestion URLs will be shown. If you want it to show more than 12 suggestions (12 is the default), you can adjust the browser.urlbar.maxRichResults keys and get it to show the number you want.

Config name: browser.urlbar.maxRichResults
Default: 12
Modified value: Set to your desired number of suggestion. If you want to disable it all together, set it to -1

2) Disable the session restore function

Firefox 3 automatically saves your session every 10 secs so that whenever it crashes, it can restore all your tabs. While this is a useful feature, some of you might find it irritating. To disable this function, toggle the value of browser.sessionstore.enabled to False

Config name: browser.sessionstore.enabled
Default: True
Modified value: False if you want to disable the session restore function

3) Adjust the Session Restore Saving Frequency

Same as above, if you decided to keep the session restore feature on, but want to reduce the session saving frequency, change the value of browser.sessionstore.interval so that Firefox will save the session at a longer interval.

Config name: browser.sessionstore.interval
Default: 10000 (in msecs, equivalent to 10secs)
Modified value: Set it to your desired value. 1000 means 1 sec and 60000 means 1 minute.

4) Enable Advanced Color Profile Support

Firefox has this advanced color profile features that display higher image quality. It is not enabled by default as it has a negative effect on the performance of the browser. If you are concern with the image quality rather than the performance, you can activated it via the gfx.color_management.enabled setting

Config name: gfx.color_management.enabled
Default: False
Modified value: True (if you want to activate the color profile support feature)

5) Disable Antivirus Scanning

This is mainly for Windows users. By default, Firefox 3 automatically scan the downloaded file with the default anti-virus application to make sure it is free of virus. If you download a big file, it could take a long time for the whole scanning process to complete. To increase the performance of the browser, you might want to consider disabling the anti-virus scanning via the browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone key.

Config name: browser.download.manager.scanWhenDone
Default: True
Modified value: False (if you want to disable it)

6) Configuring The Scrolling Tabs

When you opened many tabs, Firefox will not keep on reducing the tab width. Instead, it shows a scrolling bar so that the min width (100px) is conserved and you can scroll to find your tabs. If you are those who don’t like the scrolling tab function and prefer Firefox to show all the tabs, regardless how small it is, you can set the value of browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0 to disable it. Similarly, if you want Firefox to display more tabs before showing the scrolling button, you can reduce the default value to a lower value, say 75 pixels.

Config name: browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
Default: 100
Modified value: 0 if you want to disable the scrolling functions, other values to set the min width value

7) Show/Disable Close button on Tabs

Some people love to see the Close (the red X) button on every tabs, but some hate it. Whatever is it, you can configure it to your preferences via the browser.tabs.closeButtons setting.

Config name: browser.tabs.closeButtons
Default: 1
Modified values:

• 0 – display a close button on the active tab only
• 1- display close buttons on all tabs
• 2- don’t display any close buttons
• 3- display a single close button at the end of the tab strip

Extend Scripts Execution Time

In Firefox 3, a script is only given 10 seconds to respond, after which it will issue a unresponsive script warning. If you are hooked on a slow network connection, you might want to increase the script execution time via dom.max_script_run_time to cut down on the frequency of the no script warning.

Config name: dom.max_script_run_time
Default:10 (in secs)
Modified value: 20, or any values greater than 10

9) Handling JavaScript Popups

When you come across a site that executes a javascript open new window function, and if the popup window is without all the usual window features, i.e. back/forward/reload buttons, status bar etc, Firefox will automatically treat it as a popup and will not open it as a new tab. However, if you find this to be a nuisance and wanted to open all new windows in a new tabs, you can specify it via the browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction setting.

Config name: browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction
Default: 2 – Open all JavaScript windows the same way as you have Firefox handle new windows unless the JavaScript call specifies how to display the window
Modified values:

• 0 – open all links as how you have Firefox handle new windows
• 1 – do not open any new windows
• 2- open all links as how you have Firefox handle new windows unless the Javascript specify how to display the window

10) Enable Spell Checking In All Text Fields

The default spell checking function only checks for multi-line text boxes. You can get it to spell-check for single line text box as well.

Config name: layout.spellcheckDefault
Default: 1 (spell checker for multi-lines text boxes only)
Modified values:

• 0 – disable the spell checker
• 2 – enable the spell checker for all text boxes

11) Open Search Box Results In New Tab

When you search using the search box at the top right hand corner of the browser, it will display the search results in the current tab. If you don’t want the search to interfere with your current tab, you can tweak the browser.search.openintab to make it open in a new tab.

Config Name: browser.search.openintab
Default: False
Modified value: True (open search box results in new tab)

12) Lower The Physical Memory Used When Minimized

This tweak is mainly for Windows users. When you minimize Firefox, it will send Firefox to your virtual memory and free up your physical memory for other programs to use. Firefox will reduce its physical memory usage, when minimized, to approximately 10MB (give or take some) and when you maximize Firefox it will take back the memory that it needs.

The preference name does not exist and needs to be created.

Right click on the background and select New->Boolean.

Enter the name when prompted: config.trim_on_minimize
Enter the values: True

13) Speed up your Firefox

Several tweaks required for this

Config name: network.http.pipelining
Default: False
Modified value: True

Config name: network.http.proxy.pipelining
Default: False
Modified value: True

Config name: network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
Default: 4
Modified value: any value higher than 4, but not more than 8

Config name: network.http.max-connections
Default: 30
Modified value: 96

Config name: network.http.max-connections-per-server
Default: 15
Modified value: 32

14) Increase/Decrease the Amount of Disk Cache

When a page is loaded, Firefox will cache it into the hard disk so that it doesn’t need to be download again for redisplaying. The bigger the storage size you cater for Firefox, the more pages it can cache.

Before you increase the disk cache size, make sure that browser.cache.disk.enabled browser.cache.disk.enable is set to True.

Config name: browser.cache.disk.capacity
Default: 50000 (in KB)
Modified value:

• 0 – disable disk caching
• any value lower than 50000 reduces the disk cache
• any value higher than 50000 increases the disk cache.

15) Select all text when click on the URL bar

In Windows and Mac, Firefox highlights all text when you click on the URL bar. In Linux, it does not select all the text. Instead, it places the cursor at the insertion point. Regardless which platform you are using, you can now tweak it to either select all or place cursor at insertion point.

Config name: browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll
Modified value:

• False – place cursor at insertion point
• True – select all text on click

16) Autofill Address in URL Bar

Other than the smart location feature, you can also get your URL bar to autofill the address as you type the URL.

Config name: browser.urlbar.autofill
Default: False
Modified value: True (Have Firefox autofill the address as you type in the URL bar)

17) Same Zoom Level For Every Site

Firefox remembers your zoom preference for each site and set it to your preferences whenever you load the page. If you want the zoom level to be consistent from site to site, you can toggle the value of browser.zoom.siteSpecific from True to False.

Config name: browser.zoom.siteSpecific
Default: True
Modified value: False (enable same zoom preferences for every sites)

18) Setting your zoom limit

If you find that the max/min zoom level is still not sufficient for your viewing, you can change the zoom limit to suit your viewing habits.

Config name: zoom.maxPercent
Default: 300 (percent)
Modified value: any value higher than 300

Config name: zoom.minPercent
Default: 30 (percent)
value: any value

19) Configure Your Backspace Button

In Firefox, you can set your backspace to better use by getting it to either go back to the previous page or act as page up function.

Config name: browser.backspace_action
Default: 2 (does nothing)
Modified value:

• 0 – go back previous page
• 1- page up

20) Increase Offline Cache

If you do not have access to Internet most of the time, you might want to increase the offline cache so that you can continue to work offline. By default, Firefox 3 caches 500MB of data from supported offline Web apps. You can change that value to whatever amount of your choice.

Config name: browser.cache.offline.capacity
Default: 512000 (in KB)
Modified value: any value higher than 512000 will increase the cache value

21) Auto Export Firefox 3 bookmarks to bookmarks.html

Unlike the previous version, Firefox 3 backup the bookmarks file in places.sqlite rather than the usual bookmarks.html. Since bookmarks.html allows us to export and sync our bookmarks with other browser, it will be very useful if Firefox 3 can backup the bookmark to the bookmarks.html as well.

Config name: browser.bookmarks.autoExportHTML
Default: False
Modified value: True (auto export bookmarks file to bookmarks.html)

22) Disable Extension Compatibility Checks

This is useful if you want to use an extension that is not supported by your version of Firefox badly. It is not recommended, but you can still do it at your own risk.

Right click and select New->Boolean. Enter extensions.checkCompatibility in the field. Enter False in the next field.

Right click again and select New->Boolean. Enter extensions.checkUpdateSecurity into the field and enter False into the next field.

23) Disable Delay Time When Installing Add-on

Everytime you wanted to install a Firefox add-on, you will have to wait for several secs before the actual installation starts. If you are tired of waiting, you can turn the function security.dialog_enable_delay off so that the installation will start immediately upon clicking.

Config name: security.dialog_enable_delay
Default: 2000 (in msec)
Modified value:

• 0 – start installation immediately
• any other value (in msec)

24) View Source in Your Favorite Editor

This is very useful for developers who are always using the ‘view source‘ function. This tweak allows you to view the source code in an external editor.

There are two configuration need to be made:
Config name: view_source.editor.external
Default: False
Modified value: True ( enable view source using external text editor)

Config name: view_source.editor.path
Default: blank
Modified value: insert the file path to your editor here.

25) Increasing ‘Save Link As‘  timeout value

When you right click and select the ‘Save Link As…‘, the browser will request the content disposition header from the URL so as to determine the filename. If the URL did not deliver the header within 1 sec, Firefox will issue a timeout value. This could happen very frequently in a slow network connection environment. To prevent this issue from happening frequently, you can increase the timeout value so as to reduce the possibility of a timeout.

Config name: Browser.download.saveLinkAsFilenameTimeout
Default: 1000 (1 sec)
Modified value: any value higher than 1000 (value is in msec)

26) Animate Fullscreen Toolbar Collapse mode

In Firefox’s fullscreen mode, toolbars and the tab strip are hidden at the top of the screen and only shown on mouseover. To draw attention to this, there is an animation of the toolbar sliding upwards and off-screen when fullscreen mode is toggled on. For performance issue, the animation of the collapse of the toolbar only appear for the first time. For some reason that you may love/hate the animation, you can adjust Browser.fullscreen.animateUp to switch it on/off for every collapse.

Config name: Browser.fullscreen.animateUp
Default: 1 (animate the toolbar collapse only the first time)
Modified value:

• 0 -disable the animation
• 2- enable the animation for every collapse

27) Autohide Toolbar in Fullscreen mode

In fullscreen mode, the toolbar is set to autohide and appear upon mouseover. If you have a need to view the toolbar at all time, you can toggle the value of browser.fullscreen.autohide to False to always show the toolbar.

Config name: browser.fullscreen.autohide
Default: True (always autohide)
Modified value: False (always show the toolbar)

28) Increase Add-On search result

If you go to Tools->Add-ons->Get Add-ons and perform a search there, Firefox will only fetch and display 5 matching results. If you want Firefox to show more than 5 results (say 10), you can adjust extensions.getAddons.maxResults to get it to display more results.

Config name: extensions.getAddons.maxResults
Default: 5
Modified value: any value more than 5

This list of about:config is definitely not the complete list. If you have any tricks not listed here, please add it in the comment.

by Damien

Record Using VLC

You won’t see the record button in the default view so we need to make it available in the control panel by going to View and selecting Advanced Controls.

Now you can see the Record button along with a couple other handy controls like snapshot and looping.

Now when you start up a DVD or other video simply click on the record button and hit is a second time to end the recording.

While it is recording notice that the record button will be blue.

The recorded video is in MPEG format and stored them in the Documents folder labeled as VLC Record with the date and time.

This is a great way to save entire movies or specific scenes you want to watch later on your hard drive.

Of course VLC won’t burn the recorded MPEG file to DVD but you can certainly use other programs for that.  This is a much different process than “ripping” and you will need to play the video while it records.

Download VLC 1.0 for Windows, Linux, OSX

Source: http://www.howtogeek.com/

1. S3Sync – It easily transfers directories between a local directory and an S3 bucket. s3sync runs on linux and Windows.
2. Quillen S3 Backup – Quillen backs up your important files to Amazon S3 with minimum data transfer and storage. Support command line interface.
3. WinS3fs Allows access to Amazon S3 Storage by implementing a local virtual SMB server. Supports Windows filesystem.
4. S3Tools – It has OpenSource tools to access Amazon S3 file storage. s3cmd is a unix-like tools to manage stored files from command line. s3browser allows you to view stored files in a browser and s3fuse helps you in mounting the S3 storage locally.
5. Js3Tream – You can easily backup files to the Amazon S3 Web Service Storage using Windows, Linux or OSX and allows you to transfer files to and from Amazon. Great for backups using TAR or ZIP.
6. River Drive – The tool helps you to store files and taking backup of your files to a safe, encrypted environment. River Drive is a Windows and Linux GUI and CLI interface to Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3).
7. Bonkey – Tool for backing up files to multiple locations, including Amazon’s S3. Runs on Windows, OS X and Linux.
8. Memba Velodoc Outlook Add-In – This Amazon S3 plugin allows you to send large files from within Microsoft Outlook 2003 or above using various server platforms including Velodoc XP Edition, Velodoc Enterprise Edition, BITS servers, FTP servers, UNC file shares and Amazon S3.
9. S3 Bucket Master – Allows you to create or delete Amazon S3 buckets, browse stored keys, upload or download encrypted or compressed files and helps you in managing Access Control Lists in amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service (S3).
10. S3-Util – Command line utility to manage data and buckets on an Amazon S3 account. It provides a getopt interface and portable xml configuration for easy usage and integration with scripts.
11. Google Desktop File Storage – Allows you to drag and drop files onto it for storage and retrieval. Files are stored in various backing store implementations, including Local File System, Amazon S3 etc. Supports Windows.
12. S3Fish – It is an open source bucket explorer tool for Amazon S3.
13. cloudbuddy – An open source, windows based bucket explorer tool for Amazon S3.
14. S3cmd – Command line tool to upload, retrieve and manage data in Amazon S3.
15. S3Fuse – Tool to mount S3 buckets as local resource on  Unix/Linux systems.
16. S3Drive – Allows you to access Amazon S3 web storage space as a local network drive. S3Drive is a Windows application.
17. S3Fox – It is a Firefox browser extension using which you can synchronize files between local folder and Amazon S3 automatically. Resembles with any FTP client with two windows to operate. You can upload and download multiple files, manage S3 Cloud Front Distributions, synchronize folders with local system, modify Access Control Policies, create time limited urls and create or edit and use multiple S3 accounts. S3Fox Supports Windows, Linux and Mac.
18. Sync2S3 – Commercial tool that helps you to manage S3 buckets and resources through the browser.
19. S3Browse – You can use this website to manage your Amazon S3 account.
20. Amazon S3 plugin for Wordpress – Allows you to easily use Amazon S3 with your WordPress blog. S3 Bucket can be easily accessed from the Wordpress admin screen.
21. FlickR to S3 backup Tool – This open source tool allows you to backup your FlickR photos to your Amazon S3 account.
22. JetS3t – It is a Java toolkit for using Amazon S3 that comes with two tools, Synchronize and Cockpit. Synchronize sync files between your S3 account and local computer. Cockpit (GUI Interface) lets you upload and download files as well as manage ACLs.
23. Amazon S3Fox – This Firefox add-on provides a FTP like interface (Windows Explorer) to upload and manage files on S3.
24. S3 Backup – As the name suggest it is an encrypted free online backup solution for uploading or downloading files from S3 – just pick a file or a folder on the local hard drive to put it to S3.
25. Transmit – It is a popular FTP client for Mac OS X that allows you to upload, download and manage your Amazon S3 storage like a Mac app.
26. Jungle Disk – It provides a web interface to manage your files on S3 and is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. Jungle Disk helps you in taking backup of files and folders from your local hard drive onto Amazon S3 automatically. Excellent tool for slower bandwidth connections.
27. WordPress Plugin – This WordPress plugin allows you to use Amazon’s Simple Storage Service to host your media (files,images, video or audio files) for your WordPress powered blog. The plugin helps you in browsing Amazon S3 hosted files, upload new files, and create new folders without having to leave the WordPress edit screen.
28. Bucket Explorer – Bucket Explorer is the best of all the “front ends” for S3. It helps you in browsing buckets and the files stored at Amazon S3 and scheduling of upload, download, and copy operations. Files and folders can easily be copied or moved within same S3 account or to different account. The utility also track account activities with bucket logging and SimpleDB audit report. Public URLs and signed URLs can be created to share the files. If you accidental delete a file or a bucket from your S3 account you can recover it from Bucket Explorer’s recycle bin, which is a unique feature not available elsewhere. This powerful S3 tool is not free and cost about US$49.99 for single license.
29. S3 Browser – Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to upload or download files to and from Amazon S3. You can easily browse, create or delete Amazon S3 Buckets. The S3 utility allows you to edit custom headers and set Access Control on Buckets and Files easily. You may also keep the backed up data on Multiple Data Centers.
30. Cross FTP – Tool to transfer files from Amazon S3 storage space and your local computer like the FTP file transfer client You can create buckets, set access control ,Schedule batch transfer or even change the CloudFront distribution settings of individual files with Cross FTP.
31. S3 for Live Writer – Plugin to upload images, documents and other files to your Amazon S3 account directly from Windows Live Writer. You can also browse the existing files on your Amazon S3 account. Handy tool for Bloggers.
32. CloudBerry Explorer – With this tool you can manage files in Amazon S3 storage easily by providing a user interface to Amazon S3 multiple accounts, files, and buckets. You can set up bucket logging to track usage, control, file permissions and delete or temporarily disable CloudFront distributions Full review here.
33. Gladinet – The tool helps you in mounting Amazon S3 folders to Windows Explorer. You can then access S3 buckets and files to drag and drop files between Amazon S3 and Windows Explorer. Integrates well with SkyDrive, Google Docs, Google Picasa, ADrive and many more.
34. S3Anywhere – It is an Amazon S3 file manager for Google Android Handsets. It allows you to manage S3 buckets, download and upload files to Amazon S3. File managers allows renaming, deleting, and copying files. You can view permissions (ACL) on each file.
35. OpenS3 – The utility allow you to synchronize your S3 files on iPhone / iPod Touch and edit any office documents (Word, PowerPoint, Excel), via integrated Zoho office. You can also view your PDF’s instantly through their integration with iPaper, and also view photos, share files, and collaborate using business groups easily.
36. Bucket Upload – It is a free application for smart mobile devices like Nokia N Series that allows uploading files to an Amazon S3 bucket. BucketUpload provides a file browser to list folders from local file system, phone memory and SD card.
37. S3 Solutions – It is a list of other S3 related tools on the Amazon Developer Connection.

Basically, what we found is that Firefox tends to eat a lot of RAM in exchange for quicker launching and handling of the browser. It’s a pretty steep trade-off, and for those of us with tons of RAM and a broadband connection usually end up seeing no difference or at times, even slower performance than if these restrictions weren’t enabled by default. Here’s how to take them off and harness the full power of Firefox:

Reduce the amount of RAM Firefox uses for it’s cache feature

Try this:1) Type “about:config” (no quotes) in the address bar in the browser.
2) Find “browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers”
3) Set it’s value to “0“;(Zero)

Increase the Speed in Which Firefox loads pages

1) Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit Enter. (Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.)2) Alter the entries as follows:
Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 10.

This means it will make 10 requests at once.

3) Lastly, right-click anywhere and select New->Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0“;.(Zero)

This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives. If you’re using a broadband connection you’ll load pages faster now.

Optionally (for even faster web browsing) here are some more options for your about:config (you might have to create some of these entries by Right Click –> New– >Interger or String

“network.dns.disableIPv6”: set “false”
“content.notify.backoffcount”: set “5”; (Five)
“ui.submenuDelay”: set “0”; (Zero)

Reduce RAM usage to 10mb when Firefox is minimized

This little hack will drop Firefox’s RAM usage down to 10 Mb when minimized:1) Open Firefox and go to the Address Bar. Type in about:config and then press Enter.
2) Right Click in the page and select New -> Boolean.
3) In the box that pops up enter “config.trim_on_minimize”. Press Enter.
4) Now select True and then press Enter.
5) Restart Firefox.

These simple tweaks will make your web browsing with Mozilla Firefox at least twice as fast and it’s a pretty simple thing anybody can do. Enjoy and let us know if these steps helped you!

Update: If you’re looking to reverse these settings, try the steps listed here.

[via Gnoted]

Whenever we discuss numerous Firefox add-ons, we like to remind you that we do not recommend you install ALL of them unless you like your browser slowing down.

Messaging

ChatZilla! – In a time before instant messengers exploded in popularity, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was all the rage, and it is still quite popular.  This extension will add an IRC client to your browser so you don’t have to open a separate program.

Gabbly Chat Sidebar – A sidebar client for Gabbly chats hosted on any Web page or community.

Google Talk – Allows you to add Google Talk integration to your browser.

GTalk Sidebar – This sidebar extension allows you to use Google Talk in your window without having to stay on GMailGmail reviews all the time. It also lets you save yourself the effort of installing the stand alone GTalkGtalk reviews application for your desktop.

Meebo – Adds integrated instant messaging via the Meebo system inside of your browser.  In the sidebar you can see which buddies are online, as well as which system they are using, and when need be, you can drag links and images over to them.  You can learn more about Meebo in this episode of Mashable Conversations.

SamePlace – Works in Firefox, FlockFlock reviews and Thunderbird to give you the ability to chat with your contacts on AIM, GTalk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, TwitterTwitter reviews and Yahoo.

SMS Sidebar – This extensions gives you the ability to send SMS messages to just about any phone in the world.  It does cost money after the first 50 text messages, but seems to be reasonably priced and offers numerous features.

WataCrackaz AutoSMS – Allows free two-way SMS text messaging to phones all around the world and actually allows you to receive replies.

Yaplet – Adds the Yaplet chat system to your sidebar so you no longer have to switch tabs while you chat and can continue to surf as you talk.

YoonoYoono reviews – The Yoono sidebar can be updated with widgets for all major instant messengers.

Microblogging

FirePownce – An official extension from Pownce that allows you to update your account via a button added to Firefox.

Fownce -Allows you to post the current URL you are viewing to Pownce or just post a general update to your account.

Mahalo Share – Lets you recommend a page across numerous services, including Pownce and Twitter.

Shareaholic.com – Lets you update numerous services from one handy plugin, including Pownce and Twitter.

Twitkit – Highly customizable Twitter application that allows you to choose colors, look up your account information, manage your followers and more.

TwitterBar – An interesting extension for Firefox that allows you to use the browser’s address bat to also send Tweets to your account on Twitter.

TwittyTunes – Feel a burning desire to tell Twitter what you are listening to via FoxyTunesFoxyTunes reviews?  This extension will solve your dilemma.

Twitzer – Twitzer is not a Twitter client, but a tool to help you get more than the 140 characters into that little box.

by Sean P. Aune

This is an article on SSH, the marvelous secure socket shell that can be used a myriad of remote login and file transfer ways. The focus of my article is the OpenSSH software package specifically: it’s feature-rich, I am the most familiar with it, and lastly (and most importantly) is very prevalent in the Linux world — it’s installed by default in just about every Linux distribution (and Mac OSX, BSD, etc.) Some other client applications for Windows like PuTTY or SecureCRT have some of these features implemented, but that’s beyond the scope of this article.

Within this article, I’m going to focus on SSH keys and their uses, and some tools that we can use to manage these ssh keys. I’m planning to release more articles related to SSH, such as scp usage, port forwarding, and so on as time goes on.

History

SSH came into being as a replacement for the older methods of remotely logging into a terminal, which were telnet, rsh and the like (unencrypted, simple protocols.) These older commands and protocols were not designed for the Internet, as it was easy for a malicious user with network access to sniff the the valid users login credentials (username, password, etc.) Far worse, they could even hijack a remote session of someone (even root) being logged in as they’re using it, and not need to sniff your password at all. Dave Dittrich wrote this article to break down how this session hijacking can be preformed: session hijacking.

In the beginning, SSH v1 was developed, and there was great rejoicing. Your communications were now encrypted; your user name, your password; the information being sent and received. However, it was still possible to hijack an existing SSH connection, which brought about the … *drum roll* … SSH v2 protocol, which patched that bit of nastiness and allowed SSH to become a de-facto standard for accessing remote terminals. As the OpenSSH software package has grown, so has its feature set, including features like: ssh keys, scp (secure copy), and port forwarding; all things that make it very useful.

SSH keys

To start it off — I’ll talk about SSH keys. In layman’s terms, they’re a pair of files that match each other with some mathematical mumbo-jumbo, one of the files is a private key (which you never share with anyone) and another is a public key (which you can give to anyone.) They’re a keypair you can use for authenticating to other SSH servers, allowing you to store the public key on a server you connect to, and using the private key located on the computer you’re connecting from, authenticating. For more information you can check out this simple article at Wikipedia: public-key cryptography. What do ssh keys mean in even simpler terms? They make it possible to have password-less logins to remote servers. While this is not recommended, it is a great way to allow cronjobs to run on remote servers.

Here’s an easy way to generate an SSH key (-b 4096 creates a high-security 4096-bit key, -q keeps the messages quiet):

Press enter twice for each of the password prompts so the key isn’t encrypted with a password, and your screen should look like this:

We now have an unencrypted private SSH key, and a public key. If you ever create one of these unencrypted SSH keys, and want to encrypt it (ie, put a password on it) you can do it with this command ( -p puts ssh-kegen in a password-setting mode, and -f .ssh/id_rsa is the path to your private ssh key):

This looks like so:

Copying your SSH key to servers

Now, we upload your public key to a server so that you can authenticate using your ssh key. Run this from your client computer (-i specifies the path to your public ssh key):

This looks like:

This great command will copy your public key to the remote server, and automatically add it to the authorized_keys file. It will automatically create the file and needed permissions, if this hasn’t been done previously.

If all of the above has worked properly, connecting to a remote host is as easy as this:

Tada!

Unless you’re using your SSH key to allow cronjobs to execute on remote servers, you should have all of your ssh keys encrypted with a password. This has a few benefits — to gain access to multiple systems, you can just change the password on the ssh key. Now you don’t need to update your user password on all of the systems, since they’re not authenticating against the local password, they’re authenticating against your ssh key. You can alter the password on your private key without affecting the public key you’ve distributed.

Keychain

I’ll iterate again: you should always have your ssh keys encrypted, unless you have an explicit reason not to. However, here’s a great way to keep your keys safe, and it keeps us from having to type passwords all of the time: keychain. This wondrous little tool manages your SSH keys so that you only have to type your password once per reboot (although you can configure how often it times out.) It’ll decrypt your ssh key and store in it a secure memory page, so you don’t need to worry about that. Add this code blurb to the bottom of your ~/.bashrc:

Now run:

You should get a prompt to type the password for each of your SSH keys, decrypting them for reuse. Now you can try logging into those remote servers and not have to type passwords over and over. It’s really slick. Just make sure you always lock your workstation after you’re finished, otherwise that wouldn’t be good (if you don’t, anyone sitting at your computer will have access to anything you have ssh keys setup on.) Make sure you’re careful with this, always get in the habit of locking your desktop when you’re away from it, and having a good password set on your desktop computer.

Hashing your known_hosts file

Last up in our little whirlwind tour is making sure that your known_hosts file is hashed, which is a good step you should take. If someone else gains access to your account, they can view that file to see which servers you connect to, and if you have password-less ssh keys setup on them, they could log into them… that could be dangerous. We can hash this file so an intruder can’t determine what servers you’re connected to:

It looks like this:

It’s a good idea to delete that old file:

You’ve reached the end of this article. You can now go forth, create ssh keys, and be happy.

By Phil Dufault

There’s been a vigorous debate going on in the little “cbox” message box (in the sidebar) over which freeware antivirus program is best. This posting will explore this issue more closely. The objective is to go beyond the ubiquitous “I have used program x for y years now and it has kept me completely virus free” to a more substantial comparison.

The findings presented here are not my original work but come from a single source: AV-comparative.org’s antivirus comparison tests conduced in Nov 2008 (test #20) and Feb 2009 (test #21), which are the latest as of this writing. It is somewhat difficult to reference these as sources because the av-comparatives site disallows direct linking to the test results and requests that all links be to its root domain (presumably because new tests are always published and they do not want links to results that may be obsolete).

The choice of programs: Antivir, Avast and AVG are the most used and most well known freeware antivirus programs, and I use or have used all three for long periods of time. They are also most likely the top three best freeware antivirus programs. The reason I am not expanding this discussion to other programs is because it is much easier to limit the scope to software tested in AV-comparative.org’s tests, where there are hard numbers to back up any claims. Having said that I would have personally liked the addition of at least two more: Comodo Antivirus and Rising Antivirus (both of which have a lot of fans).

By way of comparison and to provide some perspective I will also include some of the numbers for two of the best paid antivirus programs: Kaspersky and ESET NOD32.

Summary of findings: Antivir and Avast and both have excellent and comparable detection rates. Not only are these on par with the best commercial program, Antivir in fact has the best detection of any program free or paid according to AV-comparatives.org’s numbers. AVG, however, lags behind the other two somewhat in that area (although it is still by all means an excellent program). Antivir has what seems to be a significant advantage in terms of predictive, behavioral-based “heuristic” detection (for brand new threats that are so new they have not yet been added to the antivirus program’s database).

Where AVG has a good advantage is in the number of false positives (lower than both Antivir and Avast, both of which exhibit comparable numbers of false positives). However, AVG scores another strike against it in terms of its scanning speed, which is significantly slower than the other two.

The freeware version of Antivir displays an advertisement on every update, which is rather undesirable; however, this can be easily disabled (look here, here, or here). It also “does not support email scanning”; however, this is also a non-issue in my opinion, a red-herring designed to scare less tech-savvy users into purchasing the paid version. The reason I say this is a non-issue is because although Antivir may not scan your email for virus as it downloads, it will still protect you from it afterwards, not just during normal scans as it will also intercept it once it is on-disk and/or if and when it tries to act up.  In fact email scanning as such may be completely redundant and a waste of time; see this article for more info.

Antivir is my favorite freeware antivirus. It is best in terms of performance and, with the recent addition of an antispyware component it has become even more desirable. However, if asked to recommend a freeware antivirus Antivir comes with too many caveats and explanations (the nag screen, the email scanning (non)issue). It is easier to recommend Avast, as it provides comparable protection and performance, and is an excellent product.

AVG is my third choice. It also provides excellent protection and has the edge with respect to the least number of false positives, but its performance and detection rates lag behind the other two.

The numbers (and other issues considered):

1. Detection Rate / on-demand scans
2. Detecton Rate / predictive “heuristic” detection
3. Number of false positives
4. On-demand scanning speed
5. Versions tested
6. Links and downloads

1. Detection Rate / on-demand scans: this data comes from AV-comparative.org’s Feb 2009 test (#21). The programs tested were subjected to 1,274,928 instances of malicious code collected between Apr 04-Apr 08. The reason: any malware collected prior to this is considered fairly well known by now

• Avira Antivir: 99.7% detection rate
• Avast: 98.2%
• AVG: 93.0%
• Kaspersky (*): 97.1%
• ESET NOD32 (*): 97.6%

* Note: no free version of these offered. They are listed here to give ’perspective’.

The data seems to show that overall the detection rates are very similar (the differences are unlikely to be meaningful), with the exception of AVG which has a somewhat lower rate of detection than the others.

2. Detection Rate / predictive “heuristic” detection: this measures the program’s ability to detect new threats (based on their behavior), before they becomes known and are included in the program’s updates. The data in this section comes from AV-comparative.org’s NOV 2008 test (#20). The programs tested were subjected to 45,831 “new” instances of malicious code collected between Aug 4th-31st 2008 (4 weeks in total).

• Avira Antivir: 71% (over 1 week), 67% (over 4 weeks)
• Avast: 40% (over 1 week), 39% (over 4 weeks)
• AVG: 43% (over 1 week), 40% (over 4 weeks)
• Kaspersky(*): 71% (over 1 week), 60% (over 4 weeks)
• ESET NOD32(*): 54% (over 1 week), 51% (over 4 weeks)

The results above seem to show that when handling yet unknown threats (malicious code that is so brand new that it has not been added to the program’s database), Antivir and Kaspersky have an advantage over the others.

3. Number of false positives : false positives can be as much of a problem (or even more) than undetected malware, in that deleting innocent files can cause unpredictable errors and problems. This data comes from AV-comparative.org’s Feb 2009 test (#21).

• Avira Antivir: 24
• Avast: 28
• AVG: 17
• Kaspersky (*): 14
• ESET NOD32 (*): 13

Interestingly, Avast and Antivir have significantly higher false positives than the two paid programs, with AVG having the lowest number of false positives of all three freeware antivirus programs.

4. On demand scanning speed : this data comes from AV-comparative.org’s Feb 2009 test (#21). The throughput rate is in MB/sec.

• Avira Antivir: 13.6 MB/sec
• Avast: 15.4 MB/sec
• AVG: 6.8 MB/sec
• Kaspersky (*): 13.3 MB/sec
• ESET NOD32 (*): 13.2 MB/sec

On this metric AVG significantly lags behind the others, who are otherwise very similar, with Avast having a slight overall advantage.

5. Versions tested: note that the versions tested were the paid versions. I am assuming that the basic engine is the same in the free version as well, and that the results apply there. For Antivir, the freeware version is different in that it does not perform email scanning and displays a nag screen, but these have already been addressed above. Also, as of this writing the newer version of Antivir includes an antispyware component.

• Avira Antivir: 8.2.0.374 (test 21), 8.1.0.362 (test 20)
• Avast: 4.8.1335 (test 21), 4.8.1229 (test 20)
• AVG: 8.0.234 (test 21),  8.0.156 (test 20)
• Kaspersky (*): 8.0.0.506a (test 21), 8.0.0.454 (test 20)
• ESET NOD32 (*): 3.0.684.0 (test 21), 3.0.669.0 (test 20)

6. Links and downloads: go to the respective program pages to download the latest version. Note that the freeware versions are for single computer home use. License(s) required for commercial use.

• Avira Antivir free: see my Mar 2007 review of Antivir here.
• Avast free: free registration required
• AVG free.

by Samer