This document explains our recommendations for various software that runs under Microsoft Windows that is likely to be useful to BroadSky customers. All the programs recommended here are completely free (as in "they cost nothing") high-quality, well-supported "open source" projects.

Web Browser

The most common web browser today is Microsoft's Internet Explorer, not because it's the best browser, but simply because Microsoft packages it with their Windows operating system. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer suffers from some significant problems: it doesn't correctly implement many of the standards for how web browsers are supposed to display content, and more seriously, is riddled with security holes. Indeed the security problems with Internet Explorer are so serious and pervasive that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Response Team has recommended that people should not use it! (See, for example, articles here, here, here, and here). Internet Explorer is just too easy for spyware to "hijack", and for viruses to use to infect your computer.

Fortunately, a much better, and free, alternative exists: Firefox, available as a free download from the Mozilla Foundation. Unlike Internet Explorer, Firefox displays web pages correctly as specified by industry standards, and doesn't have all of IE's security problems. Firefox also has several really useful features, like tabbed browsing, that just aren't available in IE. We highly recommend it!

There are only two downsides to using Firefox: first, one of the biggest security problems with Internet Explorer, something exploited by a number of virus and spyware programs, is something called "ActiveX". ActiveX allows websites to download and execute software on your computer; because this has been demonstrated to be a very dangerous thing to do, the makers of Firefox decided that they would never support ActiveX in their browser. Secondly, the bugs and quirks in IE force web designers to sometimes code their webpages in ways that violate web standards—meaning that standards-based browsers, including Firefox, may not work properly with them. As a consequence of both of these problems, one occasionally finds a website that won't work properly in Firefox—but this is actually not very frequent.

Email

If you're looking for more functionality that our webmail system provides, you'll want to use a Windows-based email client, and there are lots of choices available. If you're in to paying hundreds of dollars for software (or if you already own it as part of the Microsoft Office package), Microsoft's Outlook is a fine email program that works well. We, however, recommend Mozilla Thunderbird instead. Thunderbird is a high-quality, completely free email client that does pretty much everything, and it's anti-spam features are superior to Outlook. It doesn't yet have the calendar function that Outlook has, but that's coming—you can already download a beta version of the compansion free SunBird calendar.

Instant Messaging

AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, and others all have their own "Instant Messaging" programs that you can use to stay instantly in contact with friends, family, and co-workers. . . but what if you want to stay in touch with people on all these networks at the same time? Or what if you don't like all the crap and spyware these program load on your computer when you install them? We recommend you give Gaim a try: it's a powerful and free instant messaging program that lets you use all of the popular IM networks at the same time.

To prevent miscreants (including the messaging service providers) from eavsdropping on your IM conversations, we also recommend downloading and installing the Gaim Encryption plug-in; if both you and the person you are chatting with use this plug-in, your conversations can be encrypted so no one else can read them.

SSH

SSH (an abbreviation for "secure shell"), is used to connect to a remote computer with a "command line" interface; SSH is like the old "telnet" program that it replaces, except that, unlike telnet, SSH is very secure because everything, including user authentication and all data transmissions back and forth, are encrypted. There are lots of SSH client programs available that you can use on Windows; we recommend one called PuTTY.

FTP

FTP is a convenient way to upload and download files to and from a remote server. There are a huge number of Windows FTP client programs available, some free, and some that you have to pay for. From among the free FTP clients, we recommend FileZilla.

It should be noted that the FTP protocol is not secure in any way, shape or form—when using FTP, not only your data, but also your username and password are sent over the internet "in the clear", with no encryption at all. For this reason, newer alternatives to FTP are available that are secure, most notably SFTP ("secure FTP") and SCP ("secure copy"). For both SFTP and SCP, we recommend WinSCP and FileZilla. These newer protocols are actually superior to the old FTP in every way except one—speed—and it turns out that is why FTP is still used, despite it's security issues. The encrypting and decrypting necessary to make the protocol secure take time, and when you're transferring megabytes of files, that extra time adds up and can become more than just noticable.

HTML Editor

There are a huge number of programs you can use for editing HTML documents; which one you use is largely a matter of taste, and of what other functions you want to role in with HTML editing. We recommend Nvu and HTML-Kit. Nvu is a completely free, and HTML-Kit is free for personal use (and pretty inexpensive for commercial use, too).

Office Applications

"Office" applications are word processors, spreadsheets, presentation software, desktop databases, and so on--the typical programs that just about everyone needs. Normally, people pay many hundreds of dollars for office suites like Microsoft Office, or make do with the hobbled free versions that come bundled with new PCs. We recommend an alternative: OpenOffice is a completely free world-class suite of office applications that can do everything people normally do with expensive office application suites--including reading and writing files in the formats used by the Microsoft Office products, which makes them ideal for anyone who needs office software, but doesn't want to pay through the nose for it. OpenOffice includes a word processor ("Writer"), a spreadsheet program ("Calc"), a presentation program ("Impress"), and a drawing program ("Draw") and a desktop database.

File Compression

A frequent task people need to do is to uncompress an "archive" file they have downloaded off the internet, or to combine several of their files together in a compressed archive for emailing to someone else, or just for more compact storage. On Windows computers, the most common archive file format is the ".zip" format, created by programs like WinZip and PkZip. Recent versions of Microsoft Windows also include software allowing very basic manipulation of zip files. We recommend 7-Zip as a powerful, free alternative to these commercial programs. Not only can 7-Zip produce standard zip files that are smaller than it's non-free competitors can, but it can also produce archives in a variety of other, even more compressed formats that are sometimes useful, such as rar, arj, gzip, bzip2. . . and more!