Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Tools of the Trade - En Passant Explained

En passant (from French: "in [the pawn's] passing") is a maneuver in the board game of chess. The en passant rule applies when a player moves a pawn two squares forward from its starting position, and an opposing pawn could have captured it if it had only moved one square forward. The rule states that the opposing pawn may then capture the pawn as if it had only moved one square forward. The resulting position is the same as if the pawn had only moved one square forward and then the opposing pawn had captured as normal. En passant must be done on the very next turn, or the right to do so is lost. The move is unusual in that it is the only occasion in chess in which a piece captures but does not move to the square of the captured piece.

On to the tools...

1) On March 29th, Paint.NET v3.05 was released. Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. Check the download page for the latest changes.

2) On March 27th, The Metasploit team released Metasploit Framework v3.0.

Metasploit 3 is a from-scratch rewrite of Metasploit 2 using the Ruby scripting language. The development process took nearly two years to complete and resulted in over 100 000 lines of Ruby code. See details on the new features on the Metasploit blog.

3) On March 23th, THC released Hydra v5.4.

THC-Hydra - the best parallized login hacker: for Samba, FTP, POP3, IMAP, Telnet, HTTP Auth, LDAP, NNTP, MySQL, VNC, ICQ, Socks5, PCNFS, Cisco and more. Includes SSL support and is part of Nessus. Changes in 5.4: Several speed improvements, bug fixes and a few enhancements!

4) On March 24th, Tim Brown released Fuzzled v1.0.

Fuzzled is a powerful fuzzing framework for Perl programs. Fuzzled includes helper functions, namespaces, and factories which allow a wide variety of fuzzing tools to be developed. Fuzzled comes with several example protocols and drivers for them. I wonder if Tim knows what "Fuzzled" means...

5) On March 21st, Insecure.org released Nmap v4.21 Alpaha 4. See the change log for all the details.

6) On March 20th, Tenable Tenable released Nessus v3.1.3 beta has been released for the Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems. See the Tenable blog for the major changes.

7) Java has released several JRE updates as well.

Java JRE 6 Update 1 (ReleaseNotes) & Java JRE 5.0 Update 11 (ReleaseNotes)

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