Track and Recover Stolen Laptops - Adeona

A very interesting software for all you laptop owners out there to try out is Adeona (Name of the Roman Goddess of safe return!), a free and open source tracking software. But before you get excited, know that this is not a foolproof method of protecting your laptop. In fact, if your laptop is really stolen with adeona already installed, I don't think it will be able to help you recover your laptop because of the current networking technology available in Sri lanka. But once that situation improves, this software can come in handy.

Adeona tracks the location of your laptop by recording its internet connection information, such as the IP address of your laptop, addresses of nearby routers, and also the names of nearby access points (for wireless connections only). This information, once collected, is encrypted, and then stored in the OpenDHT system.

Adeona installs two softwares to your computer. One is a client program which, at random times, sends the internet connection information to OpenDHT. The other is the retrieval software through which you can retrieve the stored information. In order to retrieve the information, the software uses a file called an Owner Recovery File (extension .ost) which is generated when adeona is installed. This file is of great importance as without it, retrieval of the information is impossible, even for the rightful owner. The recommended method of using adeona is to install the client on the laptop, backup the created .ost file to a USB pen or other medium which is secure, and delete the original file from the laptop. If the laptop is stolen, you can use the ost file and the retrieval software from any other PC in the world.

As you can see, a good networking system is required for this software to be effective. In western countries, where internet connections are readily available, and wireless hotspots are in abundance, this software is pretty useful. But here in Sri lanka, without such technology, adeona is limited in what it can do. But still, like I said, in the future, when these technologies are implemented (eventually), adeona is sure to become a very useful tool.

I installed adeona on my desktop computer, and after a couple of days, I tried retrieving my location information. Here is a sample.

info: ======== start location data =========
update time: 08/28/2008,19:09 (PST)
internal ip: 192.168.1.2
external ip: ---.---.---.---
access point: (n/a)
Nearby routers:
1 0.000ms 192.168.1.1 (could not resolve)
2 23.000ms 220.247.232.7 (could not resolve)
3 24.000ms 220.247.193.249 (could not resolve)
4 23.000ms 222.165.130.241 (could not resolve)
5 23.000ms 222.165.130.10 (could not resolve)
6 72.000ms 217.6.48.33 (could not resolve)
7 281.000ms 62.154.14.98 (could not resolve)
8 0.000ms 62.156.138.70 (could not resolve)
9 327.000ms 67.17.108.165 (te1-2-10G.ar2.MAD1.gblx.net)
10 348.000ms 67.17.108.165 (te1-2-10G.ar2.MAD1.gblx.net)
11 456.000ms 162.97.119.18 (could not resolve)
12 479.000ms 130.206.250.26 (NAC.XE1-0-0.EB-Barcelona0.red.rediris.es)
13 473.000ms 130.206.202.30 (cesca-router.rediris.es)
14 474.000ms 84.88.18.18 (upc-anella.cesca.es)

Quite interesting information (I've blanked out my external IP for obvious reasons). The first entry under nearby routers is an internal address. The second entry is the gateway address given by SLT. An although I'm not sure on this, I think entries 3, 4, and 5 all are gateway addresses of SLT. About 7 entries couldn't be resolved into domain names (because they don't have domain names). Entries 7 and 8 belong to a one Deutsche Telekom AG, the largest telecommunications company in Germany and the EU, while number 12 is somewhere in Spain.

Most of this information is repeated throught the retrieved location information, since I am using my desktop computer to run the program. The program can be truly tested only on a laptop, which changes location often, and has a good internet connection. If anyone does carry out this, please drop in a comment with your observations.

Grab the software from the Adeona website.

LTTE Vs. Sri Lanka - A form of Cyberwarfare

As the battle between the SLA and the LTTE rages on, I decided to analyze another form of warfare between the two sides that has been raging for, well maybe not as long as the real war, but it has become very important in recent years. i.e. LTTE Vs. SLA Cyberwarfare. Although this is not as fierce (or real) as, say, the Cyberwar that erupted between Russia and Estonia (and more recently Georgia) and there is no real hacking of sites, banks or anything like that going on, the Internet has become a major source of information for Sri lankans and Tamils living in Sri lanka and abroad, and also a medium for propoganda for both sides, so holding the edge in this war can be justified as being important for both sides.

Google Search Volumes

To start off my analysis, I visit Google Insights for Search, where I can get an idea on the amount of web searches done using google for specific keywords throughout the world.

First, I search for the word 'LTTE'. I want to see the graph for the word 'LTTE', throught the world, from 2004 to present. Then I get the following graph.


The LTTE has had exposure to the world for quite some time. Now the same criteria for the phrase 'Sri lanka army' yields this.


Looking at the two graph, one can see the term LTTE gets searched more on google. This is confirmed by the bar next to the search term on the top right corner of the graph, which gives the average of all the points on the graph. 'LTTE' has an average of 50 while 'Sri lanka army' lags behind at 35.

Now comes the interesting graphs. The graph for the search term 'tamilnet' within sri lanka from 2004 onwards is this.


Tamilnet has been around for some time (longer than defence.lk) and this graph shows how many searches for it have originated from Sri lanka. The early years from 2004 to mid 2005 are the low points, at which time, the ceasefire was being repeatedly broken by the LTTE. Then, there is a sudden surge in searches during 2006, when Mahinda Rajapaksa has assumed power and the war was been openly fought out. Then it goes downwards (except for November 2007, when 16 are killed in a bomb attack in Colombo, and January 2008, when the government pulls out of the ceasefire agreement) and virtually dimishes at July 2008. This downward trend can be attributed to the government imposed ban on tamilnet within Sri lanka.

The graph for Sri lanka Ministry of Defence website defence.lk, for searches originating from Sri lanka from 2004 onwards is as follows.

The graph starts at around June 2006, which I think is around the time defence.lk was started (I'm not sure on this), and has continued its upward trend ever since. These last two graphs show how late the GoSL has been on entering the cyberwar. The LTTE has been spreading their word since 1997 while the government only started their website around 2006. This headstart has cost the GoSL something, since tamilnet has firmly established themselves as a major source of information on the internet for news regarding the ethnic conflict. The two graphs below, which show search volumes from 2004 onwards for tamilnet and defence.lk worldwide, confirm this.


Web Traffic Analysis

For web traffic analysis, I use two services, called Compete and Alexa.

Starting with Compete, the first thing to note is that this service calculates these graphs based on traffic from the USA only! But that fact aside, here is the graph for tamilnet and defence.lk websites.



The above graph shows the number of unique visitors for each site. As expected, tamilnet has a bigger audience than defence.lk, owing to their longer presence than defence.lk on the internet. But as the table below shows, the number of visitors for defence.lk has grown from June, while for tamilnet it has decreased (Although this trend might not hold in future).

Date: 07/2008	Visits	Month Δ	Year Δ
defence.lk	12,509	46.6%	265.0%
tamilnet.com	58,777	-10.2%	-11.0%

The popular Alexa site has the following graph for the comparison between tamilnet and defence.lk. Alexa collects its data from users who install their special toolbar for the web browsers, which sends the users surfing data to alexa servers, so this calculation is also biased.


This graph also shows tamilnet being over defence.lk, but that gap has diminished throughout the year and defence.lk for this month ranks higher than tamilnet.

Observations

The general trend among all statistics presented is that defence.lk is gaining on tamilnet rapidly. As I said earlier, the gap between the two sites' general popularity can be attributed to tamilnets headstart. But the GoSL has hit back by banning the website in Sri lanka, which caused its popularity to decrease and defence.lk to become a regular web destination for Srilankans.

But defence.lk has a lot to improve on. For example, tamilnet has made its website available in German and French languages for international readers (defence.lk is available in Sinhala), and their site is much more better in terms of organization of information and appearance. But the appearance and organization of defence.lk doesn't warrant a second visit. Tamilnet also has an edge over defence.lk on mobile phones, with a WAP version of its site available (I dont know wether this is still available or working).

You can argue on the statistics presented here, and I admit they are not rock solid. If you want to know more about the methods of calculation for the above represented data, the links are provided below.

• Alexa traffic rankings
• Compete FAQ
• Google Insights for Search Help

Post your comments (If you want to).

P.S. Perhaps our government can hijack tamilnets' IP address. Like many sites out there, they have only one IP address (83.138.147.99), and this kind of thing has been done before. If they do do this, then at least it will justify my including the word cyberwarfare for the heading of this post!

Ubiquity - Letting you connect to the web in a brand new way

I just installed and tested the latest extension from the good folks at Mozilla Labs, called Ubiquity. So far, it has been a great experience. I am not good with words, so here is a description from the Mozilla Labs blog.

"Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
• Extend the browser functionality easily."

Ubiquity introduces a command line interface through which the user can issue interactive commands. And I repeat, Interactive. This is not the dull ms-dos command prompt (Dull?) most of you are used to (Ubiquity does introduce a new item to the context menu). Ubiquity is sensitive to every action you take on the page. For example, if you highlight a word in a website and then bring up Ubiquity, you'll see several suggestions for that highlighted word. There are many other interactive commands and stuff, and the best thing is, you can define your own commands to do what you want. In this sense, Mozilla is making the user a kind of a programmer (without all the gory details). I have tried out the tutorial at their site and I suggest you do the same. Remember though, that this is still in beta, so don't try it if you aren't comfortable with tinkering around firefox.

You can grab this extension from https://people.mozilla.com/~avarma/ubiquity-0.1.xpi

Visit any website you want (yes, even banned ones!)

I first thought of giving this post the following title: "Freegate - Anonymous surfing", but then I thought the current title applies much better (to the current situation). So there is going to be a ban on porn websites. I have nothing against that (What! then what about this?). But I have a feeling that this isn't going to stop here. Soon they will try to stop Bittorrent and P2P too. This post is not a rebellion, but, well I dont know why I'm actually posting this, but here goes.

Freegate, a Free and Open Source software, is described as "an anti-censorship software for secure and fast Internet access" by its creators. It works as a local proxy, channeling all your HTTP requests through a network of proxies known as Dynaweb. The proxies of this network change their own IP addresses and domain names constantly, so ISPs cannot block the proxy servers themselves indefinitely. Dynaweb monitors the blocking status of all its servers and changes the IP addresses once a blockage is detected, but I think this monitoring is done mostly for routers sending data to China (Dynaweb creator is a Chinese man who dont like the Chinese government!), so blockages by our own dear ISPs might go unnoticed. But still, Dynaweb has far too many servers changing IP addresses far too many times for them to handle (I hope).

Many of you might be familiar with JAP, which is another local proxy software, but I found out that JAP has gone commercial. Of course, there are other great proxy software, like Privoxy, but Freegate is a simple software that can be used by the average computer user. It is only a single .exe file which can be run without any installation, and automatically setups IE to use the proxy when surfing the web. Firefox users will have to manually set the proxy information in the options window (See below picture).

Grab Freegate from http://us.dongtaiwang.com/loc/download_en.php

P.S - If you have a firewall, you need to give freegate access to the internet. Refer to your firewall documentation for this.

P.P.S - Keep tuned for more 'surfing banned sites' tools.

TinySong/Grooveshark - Listen to your favourite Music Online

So you might think, what is so new about listening to your favourite music online. You've probably being doing this for years. Well, TinySong not only allows you to search for and listen to your favourite tracks, it allows you to discover new music similar to the ones you search for.

There is no registraton, and anyone can listen to any amount of music. The main page has a minimalist design, with only the search box. Once you enter your song name, a list of matching entries will be shown. Select one, and a new url will be shown. Visit this url and you can listen to your track. The quality of the music is pretty good too, and it loads extremely fast in my SLT ADSL connection. Once you are listening to your music, there is an option called Autoplay, which automatically creates a personalized playlist based on your music taste.

In reality, the site TinySong is a frontend for Grooveshark.com, which is an online repository of music. You can sign up for free at their site and upload your music collection. After that, you can listen to it from anywhere with a computer and an internet connection. But Grooveshark is not as simple as that. They have built a social network around the music, where you can listen to what your friends are listening to, create and share playlists, and do many other things with your music. Once you upload your music at Grooveshark, it will be available for listening for you and everyone else at both sites without the need to login to the site. And I definitely recommend these two sites as worth visiting.

You can check these out at http://www.grooveshark.com/ and http://tinysong.com/

Songbird - Music Jukebox for Linux

iTunes is the frontrunner when it comes to Music Jukeboxes for the Windows platform, but there is no version of iTunes available for Linux. This is not much of a problem because good ol' Free and Open Source solutions are out there for you, and this blog is about one such player, Songbird, available for multiple platforms and OSs.

Based on the stable Mozilla Platform, Songbird has all the features you would expect from a typical Jukebox including support for multiple file formats, Skinnable interface, and an extension system that is the same as in Firefox. The User interface is modeled after the familiar iTunes interface, with links to the library, Bookmarks and downloads housed on the left sidebar. Listening to online radio is a simple matter of clicking the SHOUTcast link on the left sidebar.

Since its based on Firefox, Songbird inherits the Firefox extension system and can act like a web browser, and also has the ability to play media off web pages. There is a feature called Birdhouse included that lets you discover and download new music according to your taste.

Songbird is a new project under active development, so it still has a few drawbacks to it. When it comes to external devices, Apple iPod is supported but not the iPhone (Should not be a problem for most of us). CD ripping is still not available as is video playback. Another important feature missing is the ability to watch given folders for changes in music.

I tested the 64bit version of songbird in Ubuntu linux and was just OK with the performance. It was a bit too slow for my liking (64bit should mean faster performance dont you think?) and takes up a fair amount of memory if kept running for a long time (See the Below picture).


All in all, I would say Songbird is a reasonable choice as your standard Jukebox, but I recommend waiting until all the new features are implemented and the stability and performance issues are resolved.
You can download songbird from http://getsongbird.com/

Porn Ban - A Fools Errand

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Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality might be a concept a bit alien to us Sri lankans, but has become a hot topic abroad. Basically, net neutrality is... well it's a bit hard for me to explain, so i'll just quote from http://www.savetheinternet.com

"Net Neutrality is the reason why the Internet has driven economic innovation, democratic participation, and free speech online. It protects the consumer's right to use any equipment, content, application or service on a non-discriminatory basis without interference from the network provider. With Net Neutrality, the network's only job is to move data -- not choose which data to privilege with higher quality service"

Couldn't have said it better myself. This issue came to the fore when the USA company Comcast was revealed to be throttling Bittorrent traffic on its servers. If this were to happen in Sri lanka, the result would be chaos. No more downloading of movies or TV series! A complete and utter disaster! SLT, which most of us use for this purpose, dont seem to be doing this. But Dialog has something called a fair usage policy, about which I read in a PDF file at their site, but here is the interesting thing. Its gone now. The link to this PDF file at their site seems to have been removed. I searched in vain for this document at their site, tried googling it, but to no avail. If you can find this document, drop in the link in the comments.

Anyways, from what I remember, Dialog will be monitoring your internet usage, and if your internet traffic exceeds a certain limit (They had a nice name to this limit in that document) for a given month, during the next month Dialog will cut down on your internet traffic to make up for the extra amount of data you 'spent' in the previous month. I distinctly remember Bittorrent and P2P being mentioned in the 'lost' document, and, I think I remember the gist of that part. What they mentioned was that if the customer is not using any Bittorrent or P2P applications, the user need not worry about their internet slowing down. Here is another statement which is mathematically equal to the previous statement: If you dont have sex, you wont get STDs. And that statement is bound to stop all us males in our tracks (or our underpants, depending on your personal situation). And come to think of it, the traffic limit was somewhere around 1Gb (I'm not sure about this).

As far as I am concerned, net without Bittorrent or P2P is like Sri lanka without its politicians. Wait, I think I got that wrong. Sri lanka without its politicians would be heaven, Bliss, Nirvana, whatever you might wanna call it. To rectify my above mistake, net without Bittorrent or P2P is like..... me without my essentail body parts? not as cheesy as I would like, but it'll do for now.

BSA in Sri Lanka

This is the kind of news that makes my blood boil over. And then I stop to think a bit, and I think again...
According to bsa.org, the BSA is

"the foremost organization dedicated to promoting a safe and legal digital world. BSA is the voice of the world's commercial software industry and its hardware partners before governments and in the international marketplace".

And they have a few members in this alliance you may have heard of like "Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, Avid, Bentley Systems, Borland, CA, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco Systems, CNC Software/Mastercam, Dell, Entrust, HP, IBM, Intel, McAfee, Microsoft, blah, blah, blab, blab,..." You can check out the rest of the members at their site (if you want to).

Here is an excerpt from the daily mirror article.

"Studies have shown that a reduction of software piracy will not only promote the growth of the local software industry, it will create new jobs, attract foreign direct investments and generate additional tax revenues from legitimate businesses to the government".

Yes of course! Why didn't I think of this before? It must be because I'm an idiot. I always suspected this. The local software industry will grow if there's no piracy. Yes!. Virtusa will create the next-gen operating system for us locals called 'Sinhala-Dows' and will dominate the market thereafter. IFS will have to eat the scraps off Virtusa's table. Or maybe IFS can create an Office package for us Sri lankans (Lets call it Kaar-yaa-la-ya, or maybe, car-ya-liar).
But this is not the best part. No sir, not by a mile. The best part is, this will generate additional tax revenues to the government. Yay to the chinthanaya! More taxes! Now our politicians can buy more and more bulletproof BMWs. But then again, they might go all 'Deshiya' and stuff, and get some of our local mechanics to build a bulletproof bullock-cart (I wouldn't count on it being bulletproof though if I know anything about our local products. But then again, I dont know much about local products, simply because there aren't many, so I might be wrong). This is exactly what our little country needs. More taxes so the great minds by the Diyawannawa can live it up. I heard their brains have a starting threshhold of infinity.

OK, now I've vented all my anger... wait. I'm not angry. Everything I said above is sincere...
Well no, I wasn't sincere. But then again, from the hard working software engineers point of view, what we are doing is wrong by them. They work their butts off creating good software (I heard once that windows' main function is 5-6 million lines of code, but I might have heard myself speaking so dont trust that statement too much) and we use it without paying a cent (Why is he suddenly talking like this you wonder. hmm... I tell you it has nothing to do with the fact that I might also one day, hopefully, if I pass all the exams, become one of those hard working SE).

The thing is, even if you managed to completely wipe out piracy in this country, the software houses wont start writing any general purpose software, like Operating systems or Office packages. You might argue that piracy is the only thing keeping them from doing so, and I agree to a certain extent, but the fact is, piracy isn't the only thing thats keeping them. For starters, there are free alternatives available, so there's no point in making new ones, and also, there is a lack of what I like to call, a 'software buying trend'. We dont walk into a shop and buy a boxed set of original software, unlike in the States or Europe, and it'll take some years for this trend to catch up and become a norm in our IT culture.

There are a lot of things to say about this, and many people I talked to had many different things to say. Leave a comment (If you want to), but in the meantime, all you Pirates out there beware! the BSA is out there, waiting, watching, smelling out the scent of free software right to your doorstep. Yes, you. You're a pirate. Did you really think Windows was free? Have you been living under the cost of living all these years you... What? ME! What about me? Ha Ha sucker! I use Ubuntu. They cant catch me... They wont..... Ha ha....

Photosynth - Almost 3D worlds from pictures

This is, without doubt, one of the coolest software created by Microsoft since, maybe, Windows (You might not agree with me on that last part). The new web based service allows the user to create a near perfect 3D world using normal static pictures. This is actually something I've seen before in certain sites (St. Josephs College Colombo 10 site, now defunct, had a 3D panoramic view of their ground). But the Microsoft version is far better, as you might suspect from the below picture of a 3D world of Taj Mahal, created completely using pictures.


You can use pictures taken from any source (even camera phones), but better quality pictures result in better 'synths' (as these 3D worlds are called by Microsoft) for obvious reasons. You can see something called 'point clouds', which are aggregations of points which marks spots the software thinks are available in multiple photos (See pictures at the bottom). The result is a 3D world made up of 'clouds of points', which demonstrates the complexity of the algorithms used.
Creating your own synths is pretty easy too.You'll need a Windows Live account, and will have to download a small software (about 10Mb). Then, you have to create a separate Photosynth account, which gives you about 20Gb of space to host the photos of the synth, and off you go. One thing to remember is that any synths you create are available for everyone to view, so you might want to wait until the service matures enough to allow better personalization.












You can check it out at http://photosynth.net

Multimedia Linux Systems - I

I'm a fan of Open Source software, and this post is about the biggest of them all. Linux. And not just any linux, its about Multimedia Linux. What the heck is that?
Well, i just included that multimedia part to get your attention, but this post is about linux operating systems created with multimedia in mind. This includes audio/video creating/editing software and serious graphics creation/editing software. In the days olden, this might have passed off as a dream, but nowadays, some of the best multimedia programs available are open source.
And these linux distributions i'm about to pen down grabs all these 'best-of-the-best' linux software into a single distribution, which is a great thing because, most of these software are hard to configure for the average computer user (who happens to be a windows user most of the time), and well, some people(like me) likes to collect linux distros (like collecting stamps. No just kidding!).
So, if you do want to try out these multimedia OSs, here are the links.

Musix GNU + Linux

A Linux distribution based on Knoppix. This OS has all the bells and whistles you would expect from a multimedia system including software for video editing, audio editing, audio creation using midi and many other software. But dont be fooled by the multimedia tag, because this OS has all the other features you would expect from a fully fledged OS (mainly because its based on the stable Debian kernel).
I actually tried out the live CD version of this software, and I have to say it seems pretty capable of doing major multimedia tinkering, but I couldn't test these out since I don't have any midi enabled devices (and also I don't have a scrap of knowledge on music). OS itself was fast and thats a good thing considering I was testing out a live CD (without installing) inside VirtualBox.

ArtistX

Another Linux Distro based on Debian. Has a lot of software included into the DVD like Blender, Cinelerra, GIMP, Rosegarden, etc...
I haven't actually tried this OS (Live DVD too big to download for me!) but the description and the software lineup is pretty impressive. But the biggest drawback is the lack of a proper installation method. When I say proper, I mean a method that is easy for the average user. The current method of installation requires the user to first install the core Debian system and then use the aptitude command to install a big list of software through the internet. Experienced users can follow the installation guide provided at their site to get a working ArtistX OS installed onto the hard drive.




dyne:bolic

A different, yet equally good (or better?) multimedia OS. This is different because, well, it has mostly to do with the fact that dyne:bolic GUI is not the familiar kde or Gnome, but a more light weight XFCE. The OS website says the creator wanted to make sure that the system works on as many low end machines as possible, hence the use of XFCE. I tested this OS in VirtualBox and the results were very good. It has an impressive collection of software for audio/video creation and editing, and for all other needs as well. Another unique feature of this OS is that it explicitly gives the user the option of saving their work on the local hard drives when working in the Live CD (the other OSs mentioned here don't have this feature, although an experienced linux user can mount the local hard drives and achieve the same thing).

Download Faster in Firefox - DownThemAll.net

This is one of the best add-ons i've ever seen for the Open Source browser Firefox. Downthemall (or dTa) is a very good download manager that works inside Firefox. It allows the user to download the current web page and all the links going from it with a single click.


It has most of the functions you would expect from a website grabber (But no support for grabbing a site in all its entirety), including a nice filtering feature which allows the user to download only specific types of media embedded in a page. But the best feature of all is the speed of the downloads. Under the SLT 512Kbps download speed limit, dTa achieves an average speed of about 50Kbps, but this is not always the case. Although I have no idea about the internal workings of this extension, it seems to achieve these speeds by breaking up the download into small pieces. But this is possible only in servers which support this kind of HTTP requests. For example, Rapidshare doesn't allow multipart downloading, therefore dTa slows down when downloading from these servers. Another thing to note is that although dTa supports FTP, downloading through this protocol is very slow, and I recommend using this extension only for HTTP downloading. You can install this extension from their website, www.downthemall.net

Portable Applications for the USB - PortableApps.com

This is a must have for all you 'heavy-duty' computer users out there. A software which contains all your favourite programs in their portable versions. Quite handy if you are moving around different desktops all the time, so you can carry your settings (like instant messaging) without any trouble. The pack contains all kinds of useful software like Firefox for web browsing (like you didn't know that!), Pidgin for all your instant messaging needs, and more importantly, a portable version of OpenOffice, the Open Source alternative to Microsoft Office. The pack comes in 3 versions, which vary on the number of applications they contain. Still, the biggest download, containing all the software is exactly 113.72 Mb, which expands to 350 Mb once installed onto the flash drive. 350Mb is reasonable, considering all the software bundled into it. You can grab this software from www.portableapps.com