After the tremendously successful 2000 and 2003 security tools surveys, Insecure.Org is delighted to release this 2006 survey. I (Fyodor) asked users from the nmap-hackers mailing list to share their favorite tools, and 3,243 people responded. This allowed me to expand the list to 100 tools, and even subdivide them into categories. Anyone in the security field would be well advised to go over the list and investigate tools they are unfamiliar with. I discovered several powerful new tools this way. I also will be pointing newbies to this site whenever they write me saying “I don't know where to start”.

Respondents were allowed to list open source or commercial tools on any platform. Commercial tools are noted as such in the list below. No votes for the Nmap Security Scanner were counted because the survey was taken on a Nmap mailing list. This audience also means that the list is slightly biased toward “attack” tools rather than defensive ones.

I dunno if this is accurate.

Top 100 Network Security Tools

lowfat - document viewing with a twist

created at February 7th, 2006 |
Contents:

The problem
A solution
Arising challenges
Potential usage
Current status
Screenshots/Videos
Near term goals
Far ahead future
Sponsoring
FAQ
The problem:

Todays file-management interfaces are more or less the same for the last 10 years. Ok we have thumbnail-previews in our icons to reflect the actual file-contents, but it is still only a stand-in or substitution for the real thing. But it’s not very real-world-like, where you have e.g. a bunch of photos or document-sheets that you just can look at to see what’s in them. It’s not really a seamless experience. On the other hand there are desktop search-tools like beagle and Spotlight, which help us find the kind of things we are currently interested in from our huge heaps of personal data. Thus we don’t see the unhandy clutter of hierarchical file-systems. Would it not be great if the computer could show us just the stuff we currently interested in, in a natural fashion where there’s only our documents and hardly any UI at all?
A solution:

Enter “lowfat”. Its goal is to bring that life-like and natural display to the desktop, alongside with a flat hierarchy of our files, when combined with todays search-engines. The aim of lowfat is to be an engine to view and handle your documents with life-alike behaviour allowing for example to seamless zoom, pan and rotate them. Furthermore it should support the user by making sorting and arrangement - according to certain criteria - of the currently viewed documents available.

Current (and even not so current) hardware is capable enough to allow these kind of things. Common graphics-hardware and CPUs are mostly idle during general desktop-usage, when you are looking through your files in your file-manager. This processing-power can be put to good use by “lowfat”.

Another potentially FOSS super-desktop.

digital home of MacSlow » lowfat - document viewing with a twist

Amusing map.

Map of Software Wars : Microsoft V FoSS

The 3D desktop prototype for Windows, called BumpTop, does some must-see-to-believe wrangling of digital documents as if they were physical pieces of paper. Reminds me of the touchscreen prototype I saw at ETech in March. Words don't do this justice; just hit that play button.

The icons need to be more verbose, but this is really neat. Is this what Vista should have been, something interesting?

BumpTop desktop emulates physical documents - Lifehacker

When does After Effects save out vector objects?

There are four cases where AE saves out elements as vector objects:

1) Solid layers with Masks
2) Illustrator files (without gradients)
3) The Path Text plug-in
4) The Audio Spectrum and Waveform filters

Tips on generating Flash from After Effects, for all your technical animation for the web needs.

Using After Effects and Flash

Nice javascript that converts regular tables to sortable tables.

SortedTable example

In this discussion, we will look at experimental source code for programmatically performing the following operations on a MacBook Pro.

* Retrieving readings from the ambient light sensor
* Retrieving and setting the LED brightness value of the backlit keyboard
* Initiating an LED fade to a target brightness value over a specified duration
* Retrieving and setting a display's brightness

This guy is cool, but he doesn't allow any redistribution of his code without permission.

Experimenting With Light On Apple Notebook Computers

Got a couple of minutes? Want to get started with 3D modeling? These quick tutorials will teach you how to model in SketchUp and placing your work in Google Earth. For best performance, please make sure your browser is up-to-date.

Sketchup is neat.

SketchUp - Tutorials

This is an outline of Edward Tufte's pioneering work on the use of graphics to display quantitative information. It mainly consists of text and ideas taken from his three books on the subject along with some additional material of my own. This page is in text only format: in order to understand the concepts you need to read the books because the concepts cannot really be grasped without the illustrations, and current video monitor technology is too low in resolution to do them justice. His work has been described as "a visual Strunk and White" (here is a German translation of this article).

Throughout this outline I have included references to the illustrations in his books that are labeled with the abbreviations VD-pp, VE-pp, and EI-pp, where "pp" is a page number and:

* VD is "the Visual Display of Quantitative Information"
* VE is "Visual Explanations"
* EI is "Envisioning Information"

Clift's Notes on Edward Tufte.

Graphics and Web Design Based on Edward Tufte's Principles

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The communications infrastructure behind Betnet™ is manned at our Network Operations Center (NOC) in Austin, Texas. Using the latest broadband communications channels and technologies, proven encryption protocols and true interactivity, Multimedia Games delivers linked interactive games to players in the most secure and controlled environments possible.

Security is critical in gaming. From intrusion detection monitors to exposure analysis, Multimedia Games' proprietary networks are continuously and automatically scanned to identify vulnerabilities. Because we realize uptime is the lifeblood of a gaming system and game integrity is key to players, Multimedia Games provides the most dependable, secure and reliable network solutions in the gaming industry.
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Multimedia Games, Inc. | Network