Slashdot Mirror
Free Windows Software Without Spyware/Adware
Jem Berkes writes "This week I launched CleanSoftware.org, a resource site with a unique goal: listing free, daily-use software that is free from spyware, adware, and other malicious/intrusive components. With Windows users increasingly believing that free software invariably means adware or spyware, I set out to promote good, clean, free software. Perhaps geeks helping family and friends set up their new computers this holiday can make use of this resource; sticking to clean software is much easier than struggling with never-ending cleanups. To expand my listing, I am also looking for input from the Slashdot readership: what other free, clean desktop software do you regularly use that Windows users should know about?"
I am also looking for input from the Slashdot readership: what other free, clean desktop software do you regularly use that Windows users should know about?
Firefox (and Linux!).
for the mac page, see http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/
I use IrfanView. The lighest and quickest image viewer for Windows that I've ever used.
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/Real_Alternati ve.htm
Although less annoying, there's a Quicktime alternative too:
http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alte rnative.htm
You missed winzip and winrar.
I've recently been impressed with Solarwinds network utilities...
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
This one's straight from microsoft's site, but heck the software there are free and I use 'em daily:
o ls /default.mspx
:-)
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/to
I also use The Core Media player, a free media player that I use to replace windows media player with. It has all the known codecs already built-in, and has many other unique and helpful features.
http://www.tucows.com/preview/299014.html
Hope you'll find those two useful.
Anthony
http://www.palmzone.net
that should be BODE not BOD.
Now to be a little more of a help than an ass...
There's Bittorent, Azureus, Firefox, Mozilla, Thuderbird, Open Office, the GIMP, Ad-aware, Spybot-S&D, Winamp (at least in the 3.0 series...haven't upgraded for a while.)
I'm sure others will name more.
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Trillian basic is a great IM client.
- CD Burner XP Pro
- Ultra VNC
- POV Ray
- Sygate Personal Firewall
- IconShop
Good luck!By the way, how do you plan to take submissions in the future and filter out bunk submissions? It'd be nice to have a moderated system that could evolve some.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
I use VirtualDubMod (http://virtualdubmod.sourceforge.net) and AVISynth (http://www.avisynth.org) extensively for video processing. They're the two big reasons why I keep a Windows XP partition on my computer.
You can find a large collection of AVISynth filters at http://www.avisynth.org/warpenterprises/. I don't do much filtering in VirtualDubMod (I use it mostly for viewing AVISynth output, writing AVISynth scripts, performing compression, and muxing), but you can find a good starting list of VirtualDub filters at http://neuron2.net.
The doom9 forums for AVISynth development are also a good place to look for software and hints.
You gotta have Cygwin! Best thing since sliced bread.
Underholdning.info
Sokoban
WinHTTrack
Battle for Wesnoth
Lbreakout
Filezilla
TightVNC
SciTE
All free - all free from adware/spy ware
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
- Firefox
- Thunderbird
- Outpost Firewall
- Cygwin
- The GIMP
- Spybot
- adAware
- Trillian
- Google Desktop Search
- SETI@home
- iTunes
I'm sure there are many other specialty apps that could be useful, but searching SourceForge for something in the appropriate category seems like a better approach than trying to audit a bunch of closed source stuff for malware."I would give my right hand to be ambidextrous."
I use:
l oads.html (no longer under development, but I like it)
UltimateZip http://www.ultimatezip.com/ for file compression
Crimson Editor http://www.crimsoneditor.com/ for editing code
BadBlue http://www.badblue.com/ for local webserving
LeechFTP http://stud.fh-heilbronn.de/~jdebis/leechftp/down
For the geekier MS Windows user, how about emacs and yudit?
For power users, mostly (because they'll confuse your grandma)
I'm sure there are many others, but those are the ones that immediately came to mind.
Seriously speaking my desktop right now looks like a Full screen X0rg-cygwin + Fluxbox running - like this. With lots of Xterms and ssh logins :)
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
FileZilla is a nice FTP/SFTP client and apparently a server too, but I've never tried using it for that.
Media player classic is part of the "guliverkli" suite of multimedia opensource tools and applications.
It is much better than any other free player that I have tried, such as WMP, BSPlayer, and others.
I found out that most problems related to subtitles, audio, and codec-specific sync issues, which occur in many other players, never happened in Media Player Classic.
This could be a nice addition to CleanSoftware.org
I know many people say it's crap, but hey it's a install&forget firewall, it's free and it has no ads http://www.zonelabs.com/
See pictures of tits
video lan client is the best video player out there. it plays everything i've ever thrown at it.
;)
http://www.videolan.org/
a clean, free, open source gem
-mr silver
AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition http://free.grisoft.com/freeweb.php/doc/2/
WinMX is a P2P program that is NOT infested with spyware or adware. You must have gotten it from a bad location, because I use it and it's clean.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
I'd nominate Virtual Dub. Come to think of it, I think I'm going to donate a little towards the guy who wrote that. Damn useful if you have to make .AVIs.
"Derp de derp."
You missed http://gaim.sf.net/Gaim. Arguably the best IM client for both Windows, and Linux, and as a bonus it's also totally free. If anyone can direct me as to the correct way to make a link with the name Gaim, like the parent has (and as I obviously failed to do here), I would be most apreciative.
From their intro page: "Before we list anything here we check for viruses, trojans, spyware etc."
Horribly outdated. Firefox listed as v. 0.9.1.
probably not, a static site like that won't have much trouble.
All you have to teach them is the difference between Free Software and Freeware.
It is Freeware that is very often infected with spyware, trojans, ads, etc.
Free Software is almost the opposite. It's where not only can you be reasonably sure it's safe, it's also where you can check - something almost all commercial software doesn't allow you to.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Instant Messaging client. Great tool and open source too: http://www.miranda-im.org/release/
IAAL
Zoom Player http://www.inmatrix.com/
VideoLAN http://www.videolan.org/
VirtualDub http://www.virtualdub.org/
Kerio Personal Firewall (which, surprise, surprise, is a firewall).
Gotta have putty. Absolutely essential.
I found that http://freedownloadmanager.org/ fits the niche exactly, for what I need in a download manager. Multipart, resume, etc. And it integrates with firefox!
-PHiZ
Pretend I said something meaningful or insightful here.
They have a great collections of tools including TCPView, FileMon, RegMon etc.
www.sysinternals.com
well...... nonags costs money? That doesnt sound like free. It maybe that it only cost 25 bucks for all you can grab,but still not the same as free (as in beer if that helps)
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
Why use 7-Zip? There are so many other great alternatives. I prefer TugZip (http://www.tugzip.com/)
I will blog about your incompetence @ http://www.barelyadraft.com
> You've got to be kidding.
Ask the slashdot admins to reveal what % actually uses desktop linux, its in the logs. The windows userbase is huge, even here. Almost all of my unix use is server side. That being said:
Winamp - disable anon statistics at setup
Firefox/Mozilla
Media Player Classic - best videoplayer out there OSS
Music Brainz - indentifies mp3 files my their sound signature
Abiword - word processor OSS
eMule - like kazaa only better
TightVNC - A nice VNC derivative
Cygwin - unix on windows. sexy.
Winzip - it now does 256 ARS encryption
PGP - the free version, crippled but useful
Textpad - great text editor
Thunderbird - email client OSS
7-zip - free zip/rar/everything opener
Trillian - best IM client, does encryption
Gaim - okay IM client OSS
CoreFTP - better than filezilla
atomic time sychronizer - for PCs/users that cant do NTP
Tweak UI - Users will want this eventually
AGP - free virus scanner
Ad Aware - spybot not needed really. AA catches just about everything now
What NOT to recommend:
Google toolbar - the full version is spyware. Warn users if they are going to use this.
I just spent a weekend setting up my wife's new laptop. In doing so, I added a lot of free and Spyware-free software. Here are some things you missed:
1. Editors! There are a lot of freely available (open source, freeware, etc.) editors out there. EMacs, Jove, VIM, Elvis, VILE/XVile/WinVile, NVI, Scintilla, and others too countless to name. I haven't seen ANY of these encumbered by SpyWare.
2. MultiMedia: RealPlayer and QuickTime both avoid spyware, if I'm not mistaken.
3. Blender and DIA are missing. They appear on
TheOpenCD.org, which seems to be a similar project to yours.
4. Cygwin32 -- Essential for any Linux user that needs to occasionally run Windows. With laptops with humongous drives, you can have an entire development system with GCC, perl, python, etc.
5. ActiveState has freeware implementations of a few useful languages, such as ActivePerl.
6. Tcl/tk comes to mind as not on your list.
7. Sun's Java is almost a requirement nowadays and integrates into IE, Opera, and the Mozilla-based browsers.
8. PaintDotNet was mentioned on Slashdot recently.
Now... for the site...
If you wish to use this as a service for users, then you should have a "This Just In!" section that shows items and when they are added. This way, a person can visit every couple of weeks and keep abreast of the things that have changed since they last left. This is also a good use for cookies--remember the last visit and highlight things that have changed since then.
Good attempt, and good luck!
"May I have ten thousand marbles, please?"
Why does anyone use WinMX, Kazaa or any other spy and mal-ware software when both eMule and Shareaza are available? with source?
I guess I spend so much money on my hobby, CGI and the software for that, I just can't handle the thought of buying something when a free application does as good or better.
Some free software that is better than alternative commercial software (or has no alternative):
FREENET
Steel Panthers: World at War
Irfanview
PAF 5 (genealogy software, go to download products, ignore Marie Osmond's attempts to seduce you to the dark side)
GMAX 3D Modelling software
You can also get tons of free software with the purchase of magazines (I know, not really free); you can get the previous version or a free version of just about any graphical app when you buy digit magazine, including software that cost kilobucks as recently as a year ago.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Darn! Should have used the preview. :)
Official Homepage:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
Unofficial Win32 binaries + installers and/or GUI's:
http://armory.nicewarrior.org/projects/cygmp/
http://csant.info/mplayer.htm
http://deje.uw.hu/
http://mplayer.sunset-utopia.homeip.net/
http://mplayerc.uw.hu/
http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer-win32.php
in this order . .
http://nonags.com/
http://www.pricelessware.org/thelist/index.htm
http://www.doom9.org/ (click on the download button on the left)
http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/
http://www.komando.com/shareware_index.asp
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best.htm
Do I need to mention sourceforge and freshmeat?
Not sure if http://skype.com/ is listed in the above lists - it is surely worth mentioning but sometimes requires a USB headset purchase to tweak it, which is well worth the expense since this software often rivals Vonage service in quality when calling pots lines (non-free) and blows away anything when calling pc to pc (free).
http://grouper.com/
http://www.ultravnc.com/ is almost always my preference over tightvnc.
Realplayer is not that bad if it is tweaked - you have to look for the setting that disables automatic ownership of filetypes.
http://kerio.com/ is my firewall preference over ZoneAlarm and Sygate, although the windows xp built-in is is usable. Kerio keeps an eye on changing files via an md5 hash.
http://grisoft.com/, in most cases, would be my recommendation for AV software.
http://www.apple.com/itunes/ is great if you have the connection for it.
And if you want more free software then download emule.
um uh . . erase that last line
Winzip is not freeware. You are supposed to pay for it, not use a keygen from from emule.
http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/ is what you want.
A cd full of good and open source software, a must!
The cd includes
From the page:
* OpenOffice 1.1.3
* AbiWord 2.2.1
* PDFCreator 0.8
Design
* GIMP 2.0.5
* Blender 2.35a
* Dia 0.94
* TuxPaint 0.9.14
Internet/Networking
* FireFox 1.0
* Thunderbird 1.0
* Mozilla suite 1.7.3
* Gaim 1.1.0
* Filezilla 2.2.9
* TightVNC 1.3dev6
* WinHTTrack 3.32-2
Multimedia
* Audacity 1.2.3
* Celestia 1.3.2
* CDex 1.51
Utilities
* 7-zip 3.13
* Notepad2 1.0.12
* SciTE 1.62
Games
* Sokoban 1.187
* Battle for Wesnoth 0.8.8
* Lbreakout 2.4.1
A little stupidity is as unlikely as a little pregnancy
EAC is an audio grabber for CD-ROM drives
Anything from Systernals
Anything from AnalogX
Anything from GNU Win II
Anything from TheOpenCD
You need people like me so you can point your fuckin fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So what that make you? Good?
NoNags Plus costs money, regular NoNags doesn't. You get the directory of nag- and spyware-free, well-sorted freeware without paying, so you only need to pay if you want
# Live 24/7 New & Updated Software.
# Direct Downloads From Our Servers.
# No More Broken links to files.
# More than 4000 freeware files.
# 5.1 Gigabytes of freeware.
# 300+ Gigabytes of MP3 Audio Books, Old Time Radio, and theater plays.
# More than 4200 quality True Type fonts. Free!
# More than 13000 quality imagess. Free!
# Other special downloads.
# Best in Nonags, top rated programs.
# NO ADVERTISING, no banners, no popups, nothing.
# And more...
http://www.pmail.com Excellent Free email program.
Buy the President
Some of my favorites are: Dev-C++ BurnAtOnce IZarc Abiword Open Office GAIM
Stuffit Expander is free and supports more formats that Winzip.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
You might want to take Gnucleus off the list, or look into it a little more clearly. On more than a few occasions Zonealarm caught it trying to send e-mails out. To who, I don't know.
These are the programs I install as soon as I have to work on a new machine -
1. Firefox with adblock plugin (browser)
2. CDEx (ripping audio CDs)
3. AVG (antivirus)
4. AceMoney Lite (Personal finance management)
5. Irfanview (Image viewer)
Cheers
--
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.
I've had a much better experience (on all platforms, Windows, Mac, Linux) with VLC Player. I find it better in every way than Media Player Classic.
HijackThis - an invaluable addition to the expert's arsenal in antspyware
These ones were mentioned already, but bear repeating:
AVG - free antivirus. I just used this over xmas to clean out someone's computer...
Virtualdub - possibly the best video editing program ever written. Source code too.
Sysinternals.com - my favorite site for expert's utilities. These guys are sharp, and they release their sourcecode too.
Yeah, if you're a Mac user (even on Windows). The rest of us us IZarc.
I've noticed a lot of sites actually selling NTP clients for windows as shareware. Rediculuous scams.
All versions of windows 2000, XP and 2003 support Simple NTP natively via the Windows Time Service. You just can't configure it using a GUI. However, entering this simple command line:
The server time.nist.gov is a decent choice for users in the US. You can enter multiple NTP servers separated by commas, and the Windows Time service will try them in order.
statistics:s .shtml
R http://www.r-project.org/
WinBugs http://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/bugs/winbugs/content
symbolic mathematics:
Maxima http://maxima.sourceforge.net/
numerics:
Octave http://www.octave.org/
Scilab http://scilabsoft.inria.fr/
g95 (Fortran 95 compiler)http://www.g95.org/
If you need free software for windows, look no further than GNU ports. Free as in freedom AND beer, and high quality too.
For all those who want people to stop porting GNU software to Windows... what about us who are forced to use Windows at our place of work, etc.? I don't think we should be denied GNU tools on those grounds.
On the contrary, I think we should try and make GNU software work with Windows even better. Already we have seen some bright things come out of it... Is there any better dev enviroment for windows than DJGPP? And it's DJGPP that first got me into the whole free software philosophy.
Free programmer's editor. Highlights: open source; runs on any OS that supports Java 2; built in Java; modularized; has regular expressions search/replace, auto indent, soft word wrapping, syntax highlighting, folding of code based upon its indentation level (useful for collapsing deeply nested code, in order to more easily see the overall structure), keyboard macros, abbreviation expansion, shell interface, file browser, class browsers, etc. Runs on Windows and Linux.
Available at http://www.jedit.org/.
Haven't you read maybe someone will post a link to the slashdot artical on the fact that AdAware was one of the top 5 Spyware cleaners but it still only caught about half of the junk out there. Sypbot according to the study caught about 1/3. This numbers mean that both can mise large numbers of spyware/adware and that I have ran both on most machines as it helps alot.
Robert
This wiki page is a conglomeration of work and suggestions from many different forums I am a part of. Lots of good utilities available such as:
Nokia Monitor test: Test your CRT for focus, convergence, moire, geometry, voltage regulation, etc.
Locate - Windows version of a linux utility. Creates a database of every file on your drives. You can then search and get instant results.
Unstoppable Copier - The program allows you to attempt recovery of files from a physically or logically damaged disk. The program will attempt to recover as much data as possible without giving up once an error is encountered. The program allows recursive copying of whole disks.
OpenOffice.org - Think: Free MS Office without the bloat. Has Writer (word), Calc, Impress (powerpoint), Draw (vector art program) and the DB user tools to give you all the tools you need for day to day database work in a simple spreadsheet-like form.
Here is the full list:
File Utils
Installation / Automation
Multimedia Tools
Linux/Etap.1C
July 2002
Linux/Slapper
September 16, 2002
Backdoor.Linux.GMM
2003-02-01
Backdoor.Linux.Rst.a
October, 2002
DoS.Linux.Chass
Dec 03 2004
Exploit.Linux.Dar.b
Dec 03 2004
HackTool.Linux.BF.a
couldn't find any references
Backdoor.Linux.Gata.a
10/12/2004
I rest my case...