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At one time I was going to make at least one free software recommendation a week. At some point I realized that in order to do this, sooner or later I would either run dry of suggestions, or make suggestions of products I really haven’t throughly tested. So I changed my mind and decided to only write about programs I have used for quite some time and really like. One of the first was Miro

Tonight’s pick is an all in one Instant Messenger, E-mail and Social Network client called Digsby. I’ve been running Digsby for around a year and it is really nice. I’ve set it up to connect to my AIM, MSM, Yahoo Chat, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter and all my various e-mail addresses. It sits nicely in my system tray and when I click on it, it pops up a sidebar on the left side of my screen that lists all the services I have it monitoring. If I click on the MSM bar it expands so I can see who is online and if I click on anyone who is online, I’m chatting with them just like I was running MSM. Instead of having to load all those different chat programs, I just run Digsby. Of course there are other programs like this, I use to run Trillian but it felt kinda clunky me and I haven’t tried the newer version of Trillian which now also supports Twitter and E-mail. However, I see Trillian still offers a pro version which isn’t free so it doesn’t totally fall into my “Free Software” category. Digsby also has several options for notification. Mine is configured so it pops up a little alert window. This is real handy for Twitter. I see the complete tweet and have options to retweet or reply to it. If I click on the notification window it will take me to that tweets page and I will already be logged in to Twitter. The same goes for any notification window, by clicking on it. If it’s one of my webmail accounts, I will be logged in and taken to that e-mail, or if it’s a pop mail account, it will launch whatever application you have chosen for your e-mail, such as Outlook.
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t’s been about a year since one of the best pen testing tools has seen an upgrade to the framework. Metasploit Framework 3.3 is now available. Not only does it support Linux, Windows, OS X, and many versions of BSD, but now it also supports Windows 7. And according to the website this release has 446 exploits, 216 auxiliary modules, and hundreds of payloads, including an in-memory VNC service and the Meterpreter. However one of the new features that I’m pleased about is you can now run a full console version in Windows using Cygwin which is how I like to run nmap when I’m on my Windows computers, and RXVT. To be honest, I haven’t fired up any of my Linux machines in a while. I just boot from a Linux Live CD most the time but I digress.
The Windows installer works on all versions of Windows from 2000 to Windows 7 and the Linux installer works on most versions of Linux released in the last five years.
I’d like to point out, this is not a toy. This is the bad boy of penetration testing tools. I love using this because I know that if I can’t get into the system I’m testing with it, I can feel pretty confident that system is pretty secure. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m 100% secure because I’ve been doing this long enough to know there is no such thing. But if you can’t successfully attack one of your computers with this, then chances are neither can the script kiddies.