No web site on the Internet is particularly unique. Below is a list of other "tester" web sites.
- Infected thumb drives: In
Test your defenses against
malicious USB flash drives I provide a sample autorun.inf file that can be used on a thumb drive to test how well
your computer is defended against malware that may live on a USB flash drive. January 2009.
- OpenDNS: Are you using OpenDNS? I think you should, these buttons indicate if you are. So too, does
opendns.com/welcome.
BrowserSpy also offers an OpenDNS tester.
The OpenDNS home page indicates it too, but the manner in which this works changes too often for me to
keep track of.
- FLASH: Java competes with Flash for making interactive web pages. Adobe has a
Flash tester web page (they don't call it that)
that reports the currently installed version of Flash. Windows users running IE and another browser should do
this for all browsers installed on their system as they can be using different versions of the Flash player.
There is also another Adobe Flash tester
page.
Incomplete Flash version history:
- As of June 13, 2010 the latest version is 10.1.53.64
- As of February 11, 2010 the latest version is 10.0.45.2
- As of December 7, 2009 the latest version is 10.0.42.34
- As of August 2, 2009 the latest versions are 10.0.32.18 and (I think) 9.0.246.0
- As of February 26, 2009 the latest versions are 9,0,159,0 and 10.0.22.87
See
Advice on updating the Adobe Flash Player from February 28, 2009.
- As of November 7, 2008 the latest version of v9 is 9,0,151,0
- As of October 2008 the first and latest version of v10 is 10.0.12.36
- As of April 9, 2008 the latest version is 9,0,124,0
- As of December 18, 2007 the latest version is 9,0,115,0
See
Update your copy of the Flash player now. And do it the right way from December 21, 2007
and Problems updating
the Flash player in Firefox from December 22, 2007.
- As of July 10, 2007 the latest version is 9,0,47,0.
- As of December 9, 2006 the latest version is 9,0,28,0.
- As of July 1, 2006 the latest version is 9,0,16,0.
- As of March 20, 2006 the latest version was 8,0,24,0.
- As of October 2005 the latest version was 8,0,22,0.
- As of June 2004 the latest version was 7,0,19,0.
- As of September 2003 the latest version was 7,0,14,0.
- As of March 2003 the latest version was 6,0,79,0.
- As of February 3, 2003, the latest version of Flash for Windows was 6,0,65,0.
Note: If your computer has the Flash Player version 8.0.22.0 or earlier,
you should upgrade to get important bug fixes.
- The Adobe Flash Player Settings Manager are web pages that let you configure Flash cookies (a.k.a. local shared objects) as well
control how often Adobe checks for updates to the Flash player. For more from Adobe on this see: Flash
Player Help and How
to manage and disable Local Shared Objects.
- The Global
privacy settings page controls whether Flash based web sites can use your camera or microphone
- Global
Storage Settings control how much disk space websites can use to store information, or you can prohibit
websites from storing any information at all
- Global
Security Settings lets you specify if SWF or FLV content that uses older security rules can access the Internet.
Beats me too what that means.
- Global
Notifications Settings is where you configure how you want to be notified about updates to the Flash Player
- At the Website Privacy
Settings page you get a list of websites you've visited. For each you can specify rules about using your camera
or microphone or storing data on your computer.
- This what Adobe says about the Website
Storage Settings panel: "Use this panel to specify storage settings for any or all of the websites that have requested
permission to use your camera or microphone or to store information on your computer."
- The Secunia Online Software Inspector
scans your computer looking for software with know security bugs. It requires Java version 6.
- IPChicken is my favorite website for reporting on your IP address. The
"Name Address" field often makes the ISP name obvious.
- The Mozilla Plugin Check
(secure link).
Originally, this only worked with Firefox, but as of May 2010, it was extended to work
with other browsers as well.
- Test your firewall with ShieldsUp! from Steve Gibson.
- Sun has two Java tester pages
- TESTING WEBSITES FOR MALWARE
- Unmask Parasites tests if a web page contains
hidden illicit content.
- Test if a web site is blacklisted by either Google, Firefox, Chrome or Norton Safe Web at
Dasient.com.
- OpenDNS has a
Site Checker.
- Web of Trust is in the website good guy/bad guy business.
They offer web browser plugins for IE and Firefox but on their site you can get their rating of any
website without installing software.
- Norton Safe Web from Symantec
- SiteAdvisor from McAfee
- Wepawet is a service for detecting and
analyzing web-based malware. As of April 2010 it handles Flash, JavaScript and
PDF files. From the Computer Security Group in the Department of Computer Science
at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
- Sucuri Security Scanner from Sucuri
- LinkScanner from AVG
- Google has a safe browsing feature that offers their opinion on the safety of a
web site. There doesn't seem to be direct link to it, but
click here to see
the rating of this site. It should be obvious from the URL how to get the rating for other sites.
- Eric Gerds Plugin Detection detects
Java, QuickTime, Flash, Shockwave,
Windows Media Player, DevalVR, Silverlight and the VLC Player.
- Eric Gerd (above) does not report the latest version of QuickTime, but you can see it at Apple's QuickTime download page.
- Firefox 3.5 Location-Aware Browsing: Click the Give it a try link and Firefox and Google
team up to locate you based on both your IP address and nearby Wi-Fi networks.
I'm glad to report that on a computer without Wi-Fi it was off by roughly two thousand miles.
- The PC Pitstop Quick Program Scan is an ActiveX based test that
tells you what's running on your computer, including background processes. For each process, it reports who made it and
what it is. Most importantly, perhaps, processes are color coded based on threat level: unknown, safe, optional,
spyware/adware, virus. Only works with Internet Explorer and will not run if IE is run in restricted mode with DropMyRights.
- The Conficker Eye Chart is a simple
web page that reports whether your computer is infected with the Conficker worm. Joe Stewart came up with the idea
and he has a copy of the same page at his personal website.
The H security also has an online Conficker tester.
- My favorite Internet speed test is from SpeakEasy.
It's Flash based and shows both download and upload speeds. DSLreports.com offers many speed tests including one in Flash, one in
Java, a Simple Mobile Speed Test for "dumb" phones and an iPhone Speed and Latency test. SpeedTest.net is a fancy Flash based test. Uploads speeds are
slower and I prefer SpeakEasy for presenting upload speeds in KB - SpeedTest.net always uses MB.
- Pingdom Tools offer different types of speed tests. The full page test reports
on the load time of individual pieces of a web page. They also offer ping speed tests.
- The JavaScript tester page on this site verifies if JavaScript is working
(at least working on this site, it may not
work on other sites if you use the Firefox NoScript extension), reports the version of JavaScript your web
browser supports and displays your browsers "user agent", a string of characters that websites can use to
identify which web browser you are using.
- Adobe has a page which tests for Shockwave
(alternate link).
This page used to test for both Flash and Shockwave, no more.
- Test your brain at the Prevention Magazine Brainpower
Assessment Quiz. They say to allow 15 minutes for the test.
- LCD MONITORS
- The Intel Driver Update Utilities will (in theory)
auto-detect if you have Intel hardware for video, audio, Wi-Fi or Ethernet. Each is a separate utility and
they only support Windows.
If one of the utilities finds Intel hardware, then it reports whether you have the latest driver or not.
Each utility works with either IE using ActiveX or Firefox using Java. Be warned though,
I tested them and found they failed to
correctly detect Intel hardware most of the time.
- ClickJacking demos put together by Steve Gibson in October 2008.
As of May 2009 the demos seem to have gone stale, not sure.
- Test if your ISP is manipulating BitTorrent
traffic from the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
- Windows Update: Conficker and other malware blocks access to Windows Update.
A quick and easy way to verify that Windows Update is working correctly is to manually run Microsoft's
Malicious Software Removal Tool. In Windowx XP, do Start -> Run -> "mrt.exe". In Vista, click the Start
button and type "mrt" into the search box to locate the mrt.exe file. For more see my February 5, 2009
blog posting
What
you don't know about the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool.
- Testing VRML plugins: cic.nist.gov/vrml/vbdetect.html
- Cyscape also has a very
complete web browser report in their BrowserHawk
demo page. It shows the Java version and vendor and, for Microsoft JVMs, it
shows the build number. In addition, it reports the installed version of Flash, Director, QuickTime,
Acrobat, Real Player, Windows Media Player and much more.
- Mickey Segal has a Configuration
Test for Java that is very similar to the Version page here
- Another Java tester is available at gemal.dk
as part of their BrowserSpy. Read more about BrowserSpy.
- A low end Java tester is available from
upshot.com
- Click and Learn has a browser tester in German that tests
Java, Flash, Acrobat, Windows Media player and more.
- What is My IP / IP / Proxy / System Information reports on
information about your browser, computer and network environment.
- ScanIt has a web browser
security tester (a bit off this subject, but good to know)
- www.mailtester.com validates an
email address and reports on the email server
- www.dnsstuff.com offers domain name
tests, IP tests and hostname tests
- PC Pitstop has an ActiveX
tester, very similar in concept to the Version page on this site. Martin
Heller has one too.
- Testvirus.org allows you to send a harmless test virus to any email address. If
your mail server or email hosting provider is running anti-virus software, these emails should get blocked.
- Analyze Your Internet Privacy at
privacy.net has a Java tester and much more.
- This isn't a tester, just a useful page. Microsoft's free
Office Online File Converters and
Viewers
- Who made that Ethernet network adapter? See the
Mac address lookup at the H security
- CentralOps.net has a number of online techie networking tools. I like their
NsLookup and
Domain Dossier.
- The ICSI Netalyzr tests your Internet connection for
signs of trouble. Very techie stuff. Requires Java. From their website: The International Computer Science
Institute (ICSI) is a leading center for research in computer science and one of the few independent,
non-profit research institutes in the United States.
- Test your popup blocker at
