The programmers of Firefox aren't standing still, nosiree. Firefox is already faaaaar better than that hunk of crap known as IE, and the work that's being done on version 2 will continue to keep it ahead of the upcoming IE 7. Want to know what's comin' up in Firefox 2? Then check out this list of cool new features (includes screenshots!). Anti-phishing done right tops the list, which is an excellent addition! Long live the Fox!

(Check out all of our posts on Firefox.)

This is a pretty cool page: "Password Recovery Speeds: How long will your password stand up". Given a password consisting only of numbers, and between 2 and 9 characters, how long would it take a Pentium 100 to crack it using brute force? What if you used a faster PC? What about a supercomputer? OK, now what if your password added letters? And now symbols? And so on. It's a fascinating series of tables, and it may help you to convince folks that they really really really need to change their crappy passwords to something a bit tougher.

(Check out all of our posts on security & passwords.)

When it comes to sniffing packets, the tool I usually use is Ethereal, a fantastically powerful piece of software. Tony Howlett's book Open Source Security Tools: A Practical Guide to Security Applications covers Ethereal and many more. You can read a sample chapter, titled "Network Sniffers: Is Open Source Right for You?", online. In it, Howlett gives a great list explaining Ethereal's benefits over using straight tcpdump on the command line. Here's a brief outline of his list. After reading this, go check out the sample chapter & the book!

• Easy to use GUI
• More analytical & statistical options than command line
• Cleaner output format
• Supports over 300 network protocols
• Supports many physical network formats
• Interactively browse & sort captured data
• Save output in a variety of formats
• Display packets with color-coding
• Filter creation GUI makes it easy to create filters
• Follow a TCP stream & view it as a unified whole in ASCII
• Supports many capture programs, libraries, & hardware
• Save sessions in different formats
• Command-line terminal mode

(Check out all of our posts on Ethereal, tcpdump, and security.)

Now this is way cool, & it's a great example of innovation in the open source area. You've probably heard of PuTTY, the open source & free SSH terminal for Windows. Now there's PortaPuTTY, which is PuTTY hacked so that nothing goes in the registry, meaning you can keep a copy on a USB flash drive and use it with any machine. Now that, my friends, is pretty kick ass. That is definitely going on my USB flash drive!

(Check out all of our posts on SSH & PuTTY.)

I read about 275 RSS feeds every day. How do I do it? Bloglines, baby. Free, powerful, web-based. There is nothing better. For a newbie's guide to setting up Bloglines, see "23 real simple steps to making your Internet life much better", from a columnist at The Chicago Tribune. He walks through the whole process, step by step. Show it to the RSS beginner in your life. And tell 'em to subscribe to this blog's feed, wouldja?

(Check out all of our posts on Bloglines and RSS.)

Here's how it works: you download Torpark (Windows only right now ... grrrrrr) and install it on a USB flash drive. Then, when you're sitting at a public computer, or someone else's PC, and you wanna browse anonymously, plug the USB flash drive in and open its Torpark, which really open a copy of Firefox designed to work with Tor, the super-cool anonymous proxy. Don't know much about Tor? Read more about it, lazy bones! Wanna stay anonymous when the US government seems hell-bent on knowing every damn thing we do online? Then use Torpark & stick it to the Man!

(Check out all of our posts on Tor and security.)