You could get a complete education from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for free. MIT OpenCourseWare publishes materials from 2340 courses on its website and the courses are available to anyone. This isn't a new idea, but when the project started 15 years ago, the internet was a lot less universal than it is now. And MIT is just one of several no-cost learning opportunities.
The school describes it this way: "MIT OpenCourseWare is a free and open publication of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum and used by millions of learners and educators around the world." There are a couple of catches: There are no tests, students receive no credit, and there are no degrees. If your goal is learning for the sake of learning or to pick up new skills you can use, it's an outstanding opportunity.
MIT President, L. Rafael Reif, says "OCW drew on a tradition of open sharing at MIT that stretched back at least to the 1950s." More than 125 million learners have used the system. OCW offers both undergraduate- and graduate-level classes. Some of the class lectures are available as videos, but OCW Associate Dean of Digital Learning, Cecilia d'Oliveira, says "it takes a significant amount of time and funding to support a course with full video lectures."
The program depends on donations for funding, along with support from MIT, endowment income, and corporation and foundation support. Nearly 50% of students are from North America, 4% from Central and South America, 17% from Europe and northern Asia, 6% from Africa, 9% from south Asia, and 20% from southeast Asia.
There's a nearly even split between self-learners (43%) and students (42%). About 9% of the users are educators and 6% are listed as "other". The most recent statistics available for site usage are from March of this year. Nearly 1.6 million visitors viewed more than 9.3 million pages and downloaded 173 thousand files.
Drill down through the menus, starting with topics, course numbers, or departments.
In this example, I started with Engineering, selected Computer Science as the sub-topic, and then chose Applications and Data Structures as the specialty. The result was a long list of available undergraduate and graduate classes. I selected Introduction to Algorithms; the site displayed a summary and offered to let me start the course.
For more information, see the MIT OpenCourseWare website.
MIT isn't the only source of no-cost learning. I've written previously about language learning site Duo Lingo and Kahn Academy, which is intended primarily for high school students who are preparing for college. Kahn Academy receives support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. If you need a quick refresher course on algebra, geometry, or calculus, this is a great place to start. The site has math and science resources for students as young as kindergarten and first grade.
There are many other options if you're looking for knowledge. For example:
Other useful educational sites include podcasts from the University of London, TED Educational programs, and podcasts from the British Broadcasting Corporation.
If you want to learn something, there's no shortage of resources.
Understanding the business model for unwanted software could help security teams devise better ways to block the stuff. A team of researchers from Google and the New York University Tandon School of Engineering offers a view into shady practices that deliver computer crud that comes bundled with legitimate downloads. This actually is something that occurs more often than attempts to plant malware.
Research suggests that some of the affiliates that distribute such software may be complicit in the scheme, but still have layers of plausible deniability that they are installing unwanted software.
Few computer users have been spared the nuisance of unwanted software: Following what appears to be a legitimate software update or download, a barrage of advertisements overruns the screen, or a flashing pop-up warns of the presence of malware, demanding the purchase of what is often fraudulent antivirus software. On other occasions, the system's default browser is hijacked, redirecting to ad-laden pages.
In many cases, users can avoid these tricks by carefully reading every screen that's presented during the installation process and explicitly selecting the "advanced" options for installation instead of taking the "recommended" settings.
Google reports tracking more than 60 million attempted installs per week, three times the number of attempts to install malware. Despite that, the source of these installs and the business model that makes them profitable weren't understood. The researchers analyzed the link between commercial pay-per-install (PPI) practices and the distribution of unwanted software.
This is a topic I've discussed previously. SourceForge, which was once a good source of freeware, open-source applications, and shareware started bundling junkware along with their installers in 2013, sometimes without a developer's permission or knowledge.
SourceForge built a huge amount of goodwill by being a reliable source for software, but Dice Holdings bought both Slashdot and SourceForge from Geeknet in 2012. Less than a year later, the crapware was added. SourceForge now says "we present third party offers only with a few projects where it is explicitly approved by the project developer."
Even so, I currently use SourceForge only if there is no other source for the application I want to download.
Google research scientist Kurt Thomas and NYU assistant professor of computer science and engineering Damon McCoy led a team of researchers from Safe Browsing and Chrome Security to investigate commercial pay-per-install schemes as the main vehicle for moving unwanted software from developers to unwitting computer users.
The resulting research paper, Investigating Commercial Pay-Per-Install and the Distribution of Unwanted Software, was presented at the USENIX Security Symposium in Austin this week.
Commercial pay-per-install software is a monetization scheme that installs third-party applications -- often consisting of unwanted software such as adware, scareware, and browser hijacking programs -- along with legitimate applications. The developers of the software you want should receive a payment from the pay-per-install business. In the case of SourceForge, that may not have been the case.
When users install the package, they get the desired piece of software as well as a stream of unwanted programs. Most of the installer applications allow users to opt out of the extra "features", but finding out how to do so can be difficult. The instructions are often presented in tiny, light-colored type and the unwanted applications are always selected by default and "recommended".
The group's research cites reports that say commercial pay-per-install is a highly lucrative global business, with one outfit reporting $460 million in revenue in 2014 alone. Note that this revenue reflects a mix of both legitimate as well as unwanted software downloads.
"If you've ever downloaded a screen saver or other similar feature for your laptop, you've seen a 'terms and conditions' page pop up where you consent to the installation," McCoy explained. "Buried in the text that nobody reads is information about the bundle of unwanted software programs in the package you're about to download." The presence of a consent form allows businesses to operate legally, but McCoy classifies the extra applications as "treading a fine line between malware and unwanted software."
The report explains that pay-per-install businesses operate through a network of affiliates. These are brokers who make deals that bundle advertisements with popular software applications. When that has been done, links to the installer packages are placed on well-trafficked sites where they're likely to be clicked on.
How pay-per-install works. Source:
Investigating Commercial Pay-Per-Install and the Distribution of Unwanted Software
Some legitimate developers don't know that their products are being bundled with unwanted software. Those who do and who agree to the arrangement can earn as much as two dollars per install.
The researchers analyzed packages from four pay-per-install affiliates by routinely downloading the software packages and closely examining the components. Among their more important discoveries was the degree to which such downloaders are personalized to maximize the chances that their payload will be delivered.
When an installer runs, the user's computer is "fingerprinted" to determine which adware is available to run on that particular machine. Additionally, the downloader searches for antivirus protection, factoring in the presence or absence of such protections in its approach. "They do their best to bypass antivirus, so the program will intentionally inject those elements -- whether it's adware or scareware -- that are likeliest to evade whichever antivirus program is running," McCoy said.
Google routinely updates the Safe Browsing protection in its Chrome browser to warn users when they visit questionable pages, but the pay-per-install affiliates simply adjust their tactics to avoid detection.
The researchers say these actions imply that pay-per-install affiliates are directly catering to the unwanted software market, avoiding user protections while intentionally delivering crapware under a "thin veil of consent." NYU's Damon McCoy says that the group wants to expose these business practices so people are less likely to get duped into "flooding their computers with programs they never wanted."
The full report is available here.
Utility applications (freeware, donationware, and shareware) bring many useful features to Windows computers and these specialized, small applications are often featured on TechByter Worldwide. They're just as important to Mac users, so let's look at some of the key free applications for the Mac. You'll probably notice some cross-over with Windows applications.
VLC is the media player that does everything for everyone. Apple's Quicktime is already on your Mac, of course, but VLC does so much more and does it so well that if you watch any kind of video on your Mac, you really should have VLC.
It's not just a video player, though. There's a video conversion option, support for play lists, audio playback, and a host of other features. In other words, VLC on a Mac includes all of the neat features that it brings to Windows PCs. Even if you never use any of those features, it's still a great video player.
Download from here: http://videolan.org/
Just about everyone has some bits of text that they type frequently. Maybe it's your name and address, the current date and time, the name or description of a product or service, or possibly correcting a word that you misspell just about every time you type it.
On a Windows machine, Macro Express Pro handles these tasks (and a lot more) for me, but Macro Express Pro doesn't work on a Mac.
Atext (or, as it's styled by the author, aText) does and it costs just $5. You can, of course, download a free trial and use it before you pay. After using it for less than an hour, I paid.
It's not as robust as Macro Express Pro because Atext has been designed only as a text expander, but it's certainly well worth the small fee.
Download from here: http://www.trankynam.com/atext/
Apple has Time Machine, but it's not a robust backup application. Everyone needs a reliable backup system and I've found CrashPlan to be just that on a Windows system. It's also available to Mac users.
It's both versatile and easy to use. If you back up to an external hard drive, it's free. And if you want to back your Mac up to CrashPlan's cloud-based servers, the fee is just $60 per year. On-line backups are encrypted.
You can also use CrashPlan for free if both you and a friend install the software and then back up files to each other's computers via the internet.
Learn more here: http://crashplan.com
I'm a fan of plain text editors to compose articles that will later be used in Word documents, InDesign documents, or on websites. An application such as UltraEdit Studio on the PC eliminates the temptation to format text and forces the writer to concentrate on the message. The Mac equivalent of UltraEdit Studio is BBEdit at $50.
If you like the idea, but don't want to part with any money, there's TextWrangler, a very powerful free text editor. Both are from BareBones Software. Probably the best comparison for TextWrangler is the powerful but free Windows text editor Notepad++.
In addition to writing articles, a plain text editor is essential for anyone who wants to write code. (Some examples: Javascript, Java, C++, Python, Perl, and PHP.) TextWrangler includes syntax coding and many other features in BBEdit, but omits its big brother's high end features such as the inclusion of Consolas Regular (a specialized code editing font), the ability to read and write files stored within Zip compressed archives, a set of HTML tools for website developers, text completion, support for development tools, and lots more. In other words, if you're a developer, you should probably spend the money and buy BBEdit. Otherwise, just stick with TextWrangler.
Download here: http://www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/
Digital cameras name files with sequential numbers. After all, they can't be expected to know that you're photographing the grand staircase in the Metropolitan Museum of Art while you're on vacation in New York City. Sequential numbers are great from the camera's point of view. Less so from yours.
An application such as Adobe's Photoshop Lightroom can automatically rename images when you import them, but if you don't use a photo management application that renames files, a file renamer is a handy tool to have. This is a highly versatile tool that can handle simple replacement renaming, sequential renaming such as I show here, and complex renaming that uses regular expressions.
There are other situations in which you might find yourself with a group of files that have nonsense names. Nonsense at least to humans. NameChanger is a Mac utility that has one job and it does that one job well: It renames a list of files so that the names are meaningful to humans.
Download from here: http://www.mrrsoftware.com/MRRSoftware/NameChanger.html
