Antivirus:Fun and/or Funny:
- AV Comparatives.org, yet another antivirus review site. You'll note that Antivir is rated quite well.
- AV-Test.org, a good antivirus review site.
Microsoft Defender. Starting in late 2019, Microsoft finally got Windows Defender working well, and it is a viable antivirus product. It does not have the granular features as most retail software, but it works well and is free. Other free antivirus software I recommend:
- avast!, by alwil, a free (for personal use) antivirus product.
- AntiVir® PersonalEdition Classic by Avira. This is another free (for personal use) antivirus product. Reviews tend to show it to be the best with respect to antivirus functionality. I gave it a try, and it allows exclusions AND scheduling of both signature updates and scans, so it is superior to some other free products. You can manually update the DATs here. I found three downsides to this product so far:
- Slow update downloads due to Europe-based servers. This is not that big a deal, but I mention it to be thorough.
- Limited license time (4 months for me). It seems to automatically update itself, so this is not a big issue.
- Pop-up window advertising that comes up as a result of online updating. I found some solutions on the web, the best of which is here, if your OS supports it.
- AVG, by AVG Technologies (formerly Grisoft), a free (for personal use) antivirus program. Intel bought them back in 2005, so I would not be surprised if it loses its free status at some point.
- Immunet, a totally free (even for business use, I think) antvirus product that is a combination of ClamAV and Immunet Cloud AV.
- E-Trust, a decent antivirus product for the money (it is cheap). While not as full-featured as McAfee or Norton, it is much cheaper. If you have the money, I prefer McAfee (especially the Enterprise edition) or NOD32. Under no circumstances buy Norton; it is bloatware. Trust me.
- NOD32 by eset. Very small footprint, fast, few false positives, probably one of the best products available. Although I have not personally used it, it seems like it may be a viable replacement for McAfee. Thus, if you need a commercial product and have the money, NOD32 would be an excellent choice.
- Most of the products here are "traditional" antivirus products. They download definition files, they have large libraries and intercept reads/writes, etc. As a result, they can interfere with system performance. Next-gen antivirus has been becoming more popular since 2016 or so. These products are typically cloud-based, do not have local definitions, do not intercept all read/writes, have a very small footprint, and have the potential to be awesome. They typicically look at "bad behavior" and intercept any process (virus, malware, trojan, command-line, whatever) that breaks the rules. CrowdStrike (business) and Webroot (retail) are examples of such products. Amazon has awesome sales on Webroot, but given that Microsoft Defender is free, it is hard to recommend the next-gen products, especially since the consumer-level stuff has iffy reviews.
- Bit Defender, free virus recovery program.
- HijackThis, another good spyware removal program (free).
- Secunia Personal Software Inspector, a cool utility that will scan your computer for all kinds of vulnerabilities and provide a nice summary.
- Spybot Search & Destroy, the best (free) spyware removal program out there. For the very few items it cannot remove, use HijackThis and/or Ad Aware. Between these three, you can remove pretty much any spy-/ad-ware out there.
- Virus Bulletin, for antivirus software reviews (your software may not be as good as you think...).
Games:
- Calvin and Hobbes snowman collection.
- Crack spider; don't be the biatch.
- The Darwin Awards, a testament to social evolution.
- Great Mobile Homes of Mississippi. If you don't have QuickTime installed, turn up your own copy of "Dueling Banjos" and enjoy.
- Heathrow airport, English people with a sense of humor.
- Olé Olestra -- all of the flavor, none of the calories, and with just a touch of anal leakage.
- Upside-down internet: For when you want to let people steal your WiFi.
- Triumph, the insult comic dog
- http://triumph14.tripod.com/theatre.htm
- http://www.insultcomicdog.com/
- http://www.mavericktimes.com/triumph.html
- http://www.triumphtheinsultcomicdog.com/
- Triumph at the Star Wars premier.
- Videos:
- Ameriquest Super Bowl XXXIX commercial (bloody cat).
- Budweiser Swear Jar.
- Bridgestone Tires MPEG.
- The Lord of the Rings spoof with Jack Black.
- Matrix Ping Pong. You have to see it to understand.
- Nokia's cat commercial.
- The infamous Oregon exploding whale.
- The first and second Suburban trunk monkey videos.
- Riley Rainbow Locks SNL doll sketch.
- Stop It sketch from MADtv.
- Terry Tate Super Bowl XXXVII commercial, full length.
- TROOPS: the Star Wars and COPS parody. The creators created TROOPS 2, which got renamed to IMPS - The Relentless
- Yoga sketch from MADtv. Michael McDonald is just awesome.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a free web-based version of the classic.
- PlayStation 3 information, my personal notes on the PS3.
- SubSpace (aka Continuum)... think of multiplayer asteroids where you try and kill each other.
- The Underdogs, the site that keeps abandonware alive.
- Voodoo Extreme, the game site with attitude.
- Warframe
- Wing Commander Saga (free). The classic Wing Commander series remade with the FreeSpace 2 engine.
Get your Portable ID!
Hardware:Networking:
- AnandTech, another great place for hardware reviews.
- ArsTechnica, the hardware site with so much technical information it makes my brain hurt.
- Price Watch, for price-conscious people buying stuff via the internet.
- Tom's Hardware Guide, a great place for hardware reviews.
Windows Applications and Utilities:
- Blue's Port Scanner, my favorite free port scanner. No installation needed (just run the EXE); it is simple and wicked fast.
- IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Need information on port number and protocols? Go to IANA.
- IP Security: A simple way to protect your system by creating secure (encrypted) tunnels, blocking ports, etc. They are relatively simple, and there are many examples on the web; look at this this link for some basic assistance, and this link for more advanced assistance. Here is a great referece on how to use IPSec to block specific ports. Here is a sample SMB rule you can play with; it secures SMB (port 445) using a preshared key for only remote connections, allowing unsecured LAN connections (i.e., local connections will not use IPSec).
- OpenVPN in AWS, my instructions for setting up a free VPN server in AWS.
- PuTTY, an SSH (secure telnet) client. Also check out WinSCP, a secure copy/ftp (scp/sftp) client.
- SSH (secure shell), a secure telnet server for win32 and UNIX. I prefer copSSH Also, WinSCP is a GUI SCP/sFTP (secure copy) program so you don't need to tunnel FTP, as is FileZilla. Don't forget about PuTTY. All this is free, by the way. Here is my documentation on how to tunnel almost anything, including SMB (really NetBT), over SSH on Windows XP.
- TOR (The Onion Router), a freeware utility originally designed by the U.S. Navy that protects certain network activity (such as browsing) by constantly hiding and changing the route by which you access resources.
- VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is an open-source remote control program. Since it is open-source, there are many varieties, each with their own special set of features. I won't bore you with all the details of my decision, but there are basically three versions I recommend. All three will communicate with each other; indeed, all VNC products should be able to communicate with each other, you just lose version-specific special features if you aren't using the same client and server.
- RealVNC: Considered to be the gold standard of VNC versions. Supports lots of OSes, is very stable, but does not have any fancy features. It is a good vanilla product, but I prefer either of the two below.
- TightVNC: A version of VNC that has special compression that utilizes network bandwidth more efficiently, thereby allowing it to be used over low bandwidth connections (e.g., modems, broadband connections, etc.). It has some special features like file copying, and supports lots of OSes. This is my application of choice for non-Windows systems, or for heterogeneous environments where you want just one flavor of VNC.
- UltraVNC: A Windows-only version of VNC that allows compression like TightVNC, but also has tons of extra features. It even supports Tight compression, so you can use it with TightVNC in low bandwidth situations. It is not quite as efficient as TightVNC, so it does not work as well as TightVNC in low-bandwidth conditions, but it is still pretty good. They also have a "Single Click" version for you to give to your friends for simple installation (just run the EXE, no real installation involved, detailed instructions here, online EXE creator here). Thus, for Windows environments, UltraVNC is probably the best solution, since it can communicate fine with all other VNC products, and can even use the same compression as TightVNC to connect to its clients.
- VNCCon: Not a VNC viewer per se. Rather, it is a free utility that manages multiple VNC connections in a nice GUI, as well as allowing you to deploy VNC executables. Thus, you can use this utility to deploy, manage, maintain, and use a large VNC network.
- WireShark, a freeware sniffer utility (arguably one of the best).
- 7-Zip, a free ZIP utility (my preference).
- Disk defragmentation has been a thing for decades. With the advent of Windows 10 and SSDs, I find the stock defrag.exe program to work just fine. Non-Microsoft options include Auslogic Disk Defrag and UltraDefrag. Both are free
- C-Net Downloads, your one-spot shopping for good retail software, shareware, and freeware.
- VeraCrypt, an open source solution.
- BitLocker, available by default on select Windows OSes. If you have Windows, this should be your option of choice.
- Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, which allows you to change your Windows password if you forgot it (or don't know it).
- Open source alternatives to many retail applications. Some I use, some I do not. This entire section contains alternatives as well (e.g., 7-Zip, Pegasus Mail, etc.).
- Apache instead of IIS.
- Burn Aware (supports Blu-Ray) and/or Infrarecorder instead of Nero. ImgBurn is a simple ISO burning program.
- Dia instead of Microsoft Visio.
- Firefox or Firefox instead of Microsoft Internet Explorer. Microsoft Edge is now based on Chromium, so that is an option...
- OpenOffice or LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office. Of course, there are cloud-based solutions like Google Docs/Slides/Sheets/Forms.
- Paint .NET, GimPhoto, or GimpShop (GIMP being too complex for most) instead of Photoshop.
- Pegasus Mail instead of Outlook.
- Squid instead of Microsoft Proxy.
- Somarsoft, various useful Windows utilities.
- Sandboxie, a free sandbox utility. I typically use the Windows Sandbox and a simple .wsb file.
- UNIX utilities for win32. Also check here for older versions.
- Virtual machine products create virtual computers that allow you to install an OS, configure things, install/remove applications, etc., all without affecting a real system. The virtual system creates virtual devices (NICs, hard drives, etc.), and allows you to install nearly any OS. They are thus ideal for testing and development. They are also perfect for creating honeypots. There are three products I can recommend:
- AWS offers a free account (with limitations) where you can build VMs.
- Microsoft has their Hyper-V product (include on Windows 10 for free).
- VirtualBox, and open source (free) virtual machine product now owned by Oracle. It is my application of choice..
- VMWare, which has a variety of products, the top-of-the-line version being ESX Server, a UNIX-based commercial application used by companies around the world to virtual production systems because of its robust nature. Their free products include VMWare Server and Workstation Player. VMware has a cool (and free) utility to convert a real system into a VM system called vCenter Converter. Wondering how to create and configure a VMWare Workstation (v4.5.2) virtual machine so that you can cluster Windows 2003 on it? I hunted down and/or discovered the steps.
These pages, and the opinions contained therein, are mine, and do not reflect the views of MCI/WorldCom/Verizon, CISE, UF, the State of Florida, the USA, the planet Earth, the Sol System, the Milky Way, or any other person or organization. Bite me.This page is only occasionally maintained, and is usually coded via a text editor...
© 1996 Joe Granto. All rights reserved.
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