PC CyberTekThe cyberspace visitor’s information center

Yes, that’s right. The essential network scanner, nmap, has made it to version 5. If you are unfamiliar with nmap, it’s a must have tool for anyone who does anything with networks. It’s the greatest port scanner around. And you can get it for just about any OS. But nmap is much more than just a port scanner. It can be used for more than just seeing what ports are open. You can also use it for its OS detection, among other things, and you can even use it to find the conficker virus on remote computers. It’s available as a command line tool and for those who prefer a gui, it also comes with zenmap which is a graphical front end for it.

My thanks to Fydor and the nmap development team for constantly updating this awesome tool and never being satisfied with the status quo. Now let me quote insecure.org

July 16, 2009 — Insecure.Org is pleased to announce the immediate, free availability of the Nmap Security Scanner version 5.00 from http://nmap.org/. This is the first stable release since 4.76 (last September), and the first major release since the 4.50 release in 2007. Dozens of development releases led up to this.

Considering all the changes, we consider this the most important Nmap release since 1997, and we recommend that all current users upgrade.

You can find a list of the changes here and be sure to download it.

Time for another free software post. One of the coolest free software downloads ever, is google earth. I don’t think I’ll waste your time telling you about it because you have either used it or at least have seen it. The new interface is clean. The thing I noticed right off is it is much faster and the map data is even better. They say that 30% of the world’s population can now see their homes. If you run windows, mac or linux, which should cover pretty much everyone, you can download it here.