Free Podcasting Software

A vast array of software is available to support your podcasting requirements; some programs offer one stop integrated solutions to all your podcasting needs, while others fill more specific niches. However, every piece of software that you need in order to record and produce a professional, quality podcast is readily available free of charge.

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Acquiring the Audio

No matter what software you choose to help create and produce your podcasts, you will first have to get your audio into the computer. How you choose to do this is entirely up to you, but is likely to depend on what level of audio quality you want and your budget. At the most basic level you could use your computer’s in-built microphone, but for a reasonable degree of quality you will want a semi-decent external microphone.

1. Audacity – Audio Recorder and Editor

2. WinLAME – Audio Encoder

winlameOnce your audio has been recorded and edited (preferably in WAV format) you will need to convert it into a suitable podcast format. The universally accepted audio file format for podcasts is MP3. WinLAME is an excellent piece of free podcasting software designed to convert WAV files into the podcast friendly MP3 format.

3. Mp3Tag – ID3 Tag Editor

sshot1qcNow that you have your podcast MP3 audio file and some suitable artwork for its cover, you will need to embed the artwork into the MP3 file and add some additional tags that can be displayed by the listener’s playback device.

A confused deputy attack

A confused deputy is a computer program that is innocently fooled by some other party into misusing its authority. It is a specific type of privilege escalation. In information security, the confused deputy problem is often cited as an example of why capability-based security is important, as capability systems protect against this whereas ACL-based systems do not.

Confidence trick based scams are based on gaining the trust of a victim in order for an attacker to use them as a confused deputy. For example in Salting, an attacker presents a victim with what appears to be a mineral-rich mine. In this case an attacker is using a victim’s greed to persuade them to perform an action that the victim would not normally do.

When checking out at a grocery store, the cashier will scan the barcode of each item to determine the total cost. A thief could replace barcodes on his items with those of cheaper items. In this attack the cashier is a confused deputy that is using seemingly valid barcodes to determine the total cost.

A cross-site request forgery (CSRF) is an example of a confused deputy attack that uses the web browser to perform sensitive actions against a web application. A common form of this attack occurs when a web application uses a cookie to authenticate all requests transmitted by a browser. Using JavaScript an attacker can force a browser into transmitting authenticated HTTP requests.

The Samy computer worm used Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) to turn the browser’s authenticated MySpace session into a confused deputy. Using XSS the worm forced the browser into posting an executable copy of the worm as a MySpace message which was then viewed and executed by friends of the infected user.

Clickjacking is an attack where the user acts as the confused deputy. In this attack a user thinks they are harmlessly browsing a website (an attacker-controlled website) but they are in fact tricked into performing sensitive actions on another website.[3]

An FTP bounce attack can allow an attacker to indirectly connect to TCP ports that the attacker’s machine has no access to, using a remote FTP server as the confused deputy.

Another example relates to personal firewall software. It can restrict internet access for specific applications. Some applications circumvent this by starting a browser with a specific URL. The browser has authority to open a network connection, even though the application does not. Firewall software can attempt to address this by prompting the user in cases where one program starts another which then accesses the network. However, the user frequently does not have sufficient information to determine whether such an access is legitimate—false positives are common, and there is a substantial risk that even sophisticated users will become habituated to clicking ‘OK’ to these prompts.[4]

Not every program that misuses authority is a confused deputy. Sometimes misuse of authority is simply a result of a program error. The confused deputy problem occurs when the designation of an object is passed from one program to another, and the associated permission changes unintentionally, without any explicit action by either party. It is insidious because neither party did anything explicit to change the authority.

OpenBUGS

BUGS is a software package for performing Bayesian inference Using Gibbs Sampling. The user specifies a statistical model, of (almost) arbitrary complexity, by simply stating the relationships between related variables. The software includes an ‘expert system’, which determines an appropriate MCMC (Markov chain Monte Carlo) scheme (based on the Gibbs sampler) for analysing the specified model. The user then controls the execution of the scheme and is free to choose from a wide range of output types.

Versions…

There are two main versions of BUGS, namely WinBUGS and OpenBUGS. This site is dedicated to OpenBUGS, an open-source version of the package, on which all future development work will be focused. OpenBUGS, therefore, represents the future of the BUGS project. WinBUGS, on the other hand, is an established and stable, stand-alone version of the software, which will remain available but not further developed. The latest versions of OpenBUGS (from v3.0.7 onwards) have been designed to be at least as efficient and reliable as WinBUGS over a wide range of test applications. Please see here for more information on WinBUGS. OpenBUGS runs on x86 machines with MS Windows, Unix/Linux or Macintosh (using Wine).

Note that software exists to run OpenBUGS (and analyse its output) from within both R and SAS, amongst others.

For additional details on the differences between OpenBUGS and WinBUGS see the OpenVsWin manual page.

ggplot2

ggplot2 is a data visualization package for the statistical programming language R. Created by Hadley Wickham in 2005, ggplot2 is an implementation of Leland Wilkinson‘s Grammar of Graphics—a general scheme for data visualization which breaks up graphs into semantic components such as scales and layers. ggplot2 can serve as a replacement for the base graphics in R and contains a number of defaults for web and print display of common scales. Since 2005, ggplot2 has grown in use to become one of the most popular R packages.[1][2] It is licensed under GNU GPL v2.[3]

On 2 March 2012, ggplot2 version 0.9.0 was released with numerous changes to internal organization, scale construction and layers.[4] An update dealing primarily with bug fixes was released on 9 May 2012, incrementing the version to 0.9.1.[5]

On 25 February 2014, Hadley Wickham formally announced that “ggplot2 is shifting to maintenance mode. This means that we are no longer adding new features, but we will continue to fix major bugs, and consider new features submitted as pull requests. In recognition this significant milestone, the next version of ggplot2 will be 1.0.0”.[6]