In it’s own words Microsoft promotes IE8 for “professionals as well as those trying CSS and scripting for the first time.“, because of it’s built in tools for debugging purpose. ReadWriteWeb has done a great job promoting IE8, this is what they had to say regarding it’s standard compliance:

There were hints that IE8 would be a remarkable offering on the IE Blog as they released tidbits about the browser’s capabilities. For example, the announcement of IE8’s passing of the Acid2 test (a test for standards compliance) marked a milestone in IE8’s development. The standards mode was originally going to be turned off by default letting web developers code for it by including a “meta” tag to make use of IE8’s new standards compliant mode. Later, Microsoft came to their senses and made the default the standards-compliant mode.

That’s great news. It seems Microsoft has finally done something right, regarding IE, by following web standards; which has been a cause of headache for many web developers and freelancers like me trying to get websites compatible for two different browsers.

Let’s look at some IE8 standard compliance power:

Readwriteweb.com under IE8:

Readwriteweb.com under Firefox: (the way it was supposed to load)

I was trying to load linux.com and it tells you microsoft’s feeling towards open source software by the way it was loading the website:

All off this are reproducible by IE8. Try it at your own risk.

I am sure IE8 has some good new interesting features, but I was busy trying to find problems with it. And you have to admit this was way too easy. Next time I will I will try to point the new features, some of which are quite interesting.

FSCrack is a front end for John the Ripper (JtR) that provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for access to most of JtR’s functions.

JtR is described as follows (from http://www.openwall.com/john/): “John the Ripper is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavors of Unix (11 are officially supported, not counting different architectures), DOS, Win32, BeOS, and OpenVMS. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords. Besides several crypt (3) password hash types most commonly found on various Unix flavors, supported out of the box are Kerberos AFS and Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 LM hashes, plus several more with contributed patches.”

You can download fscrack here: http://www.foundstone.com/us/resources/proddesc/fscrack.htm

NTLast is specifically targeted for serious security and IIS administration. Scheduled review of your NT event logs is critical for your network. A server breach can be uncovered by regular system auditing. Identifying and tracking who has gained access to your system, then documenting the details is now made easier with NTLast. This tool is able to quickly report on the status of IIS users, as well as filter out web server logons from console logons.

Key Features

• Reads saved .evt files - makes it easy to search through your archives
• Allows you to search before, after, and between dates - again to zoom in on something
• Filters logons ‘From’ a certain host - helps you zoom in on suspected intrusions
• Can save files in a csv format w/ time field formatted for Excel
• Filters out and distinguishes web log usage - cuts down search time

Website: http://www.foundstone.com/us/resources/proddesc/ntlast.htm