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SymForm: 200Gb of distributed-computing data storage.. for free?

imageInteresting idea. Rather than a central cloud-based storage concept like Dropbox, SugarSync or Minus, SymForm turns the idea into a distributed computing solution. You get up to 200Gb for free, but in order to do that you "pledge" 80% uptime and a big chunk of your OWN HD storage space to the client. Then you become part of the cloud, hosting random highly-encrypted fragments of other peoples’ data. Sounds scary? To me, it’s not half as scary as storing your ENTIRE load of data in one location. Someone bombs Dropbox Central, your data is fried. Or, someone at Dropbox could pull a stunt like this (http://gawker.com/5637234/). These guys apparently have massive redundancy and parity copies – would take 33 failures on the network before your stored data starts to become unavailable. I’ll have to think about whether this is worth giving a shot. My decision will be wholly based on how much bandwidth it chews up.

SymForm

Outpost Firewall for free! (updated)

image Agnitum’s Outpost Firewall, one of the best firewall programs for Windows, now exists in a free version (minus some features of the Pro version, of course, but it’s still a damn good deal – ten times better than ZoneAlarm and about two-point-seven times better than Comodo).

Features include:
Bidirectional firewall · Protection that can’t be shut down by hackers · Application behavior monitoring · Intuitive, resource-friendly operation · Activity monitoring capabilities · Windows Vista and 64-bit compatibility

Get it from http://free.agnitum.com/ or http://www.firewallforfree.com.

STOP PRESS! (yeah, four days after it’s already been to press. sigh.) Anyway, I have a rule for myself where I won’t erase previous posts, but I need to modify this one as follows. Stupidly I went ga-ga about the software before I discovered the limitations of the free version. You can’t click on any connections and do anything with them, like terminate them etc. The per-connection context menu is completely disabled in the free version, essentially making the firewall read-only! This is pathetic and makes it next to useless as far as I’m concerned, like a viruskiller that doesn’t clean virii. I hereby retract what I said about this tool and advise my readers to go back to Comodo until I find something better. I still stand by what I say re the full version of Outpost though. Just not this version.

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