Tools of the Trade - More Expensive Than Kopi Luwak

Kopi Luwak is coffee made from coffee cherries which have been eaten by and passed through the digestive tract of the Asian Palm Civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus Archipelago, in the ). The animals gorge on the ripe berries, and excrete partially-digested beans in their feces, which are then harvested for sale. This process takes place on the islands of Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi in the IndonesianPhilippines (where the product is called Kape Alamid), in the country of Vietnam, and the coffee estates of south India.

Kopi Luwak is the most expensive coffee in the world, selling for up to $600 USD per pound, and is sold mainly in Japan and United States, but it is increasingly becoming available elsewhere, though supplies are limited.

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On to the tools....

1) On June 7th, Ad-Aware 2007 Free 7.0.1.2. Ad-Aware is designed to provide advanced protection from known Data-mining, aggressive advertising, Parasites, Scumware, selected traditional Trojans, Dialers, Malware, Browser hijackers, and tracking components.

2) On June 7th, ClamAV 0.9.3 was released. Clam AntiVirus is an open source (GPL) anti-virus toolkit for UNIX, designed especially for e-mail scanning on mail gateways. It provides a number of utilities including a flexible and scalable multi-threaded daemon, a command line scanner and advanced tool for automatic database updates.

3) On June 7th, Tenable released Nessus 3.1.4 Beta for *UIX systems. The whole Nessus 3.1.x series is considered as being in beta. When it reaches production quality, it will be labeled Nessus 3.2.x. Here are the main changes compared to Nessus 3.1.3 :

• 64 bits builds (for Debian 4 and Red Hat ES 5 only at this time)
• Fedora Core 7 build
• Better support for IPv6. In particular, the functions get_local_mac_addr() / get_gw_mac_addr() work when dealing with an IPv6 host
• Fixed a bug related to the maximum number of TCP sessions set in parallel and which would cause nessusd to use more CPU than what is necessary
• Added several fixes in the NASL interpreter. In some cases, a copy-on-write operation would not be detected properly thus leading to incorrect modifications of some variables
• Fixed nessuscmd which would not be able to use the local nessus daemon any more
• The 'nessus' command-line utility can now produce the same report type (.nessus) as the Mac OS X client
• Several other smaller bug fixes as well as further optimizations to reduce memory usage.
  

4) On June 6th, Adobe released Adobe Reader 8.1. Adobe Reader is free software that lets you open, view, search, and print Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Personally, I think Adobe Reader is totally bloated...that is why I use Foxit Reader 2.0.

5) On June 6th, Adam Laurie released RFIDIOt v0.1n. RFIDIOt is an open source python library for exploring RFID devices. Here are the main changes from v0.n:

• add CLONE mode to 'unique.py'
• make 'mrpkey.py' more intelligent about reading passport contents:
• read all data groups
• extract image from CBEFF block in EF.DG2
• extract public key certificate from EF.SOD (requires openssl installation)
• add asn.1 field length encoding rules
• add 'sod.py' tool for brute force finding of certificates in EF_SOD.BIN (requires openssl installation)

6) On June 5th, Microsoft released DirectX 9.0c. DirectX 9.0 includes security and performance updates, along with many new features across all technologies, which can be accessed by applications using the DirectX 9.0 APIs.

7) On June 5th, Andres Riancho released Untidy Beta 2. Untidy is open-source general purpose XML Fuzzer written in python. It takes a string representation of a XML as input and generates a set of modified, potentially invalid, XMLs based on the input.