CA Protection Suite Beta Program

CA invites you to participate in the Protection Suite r3.1 Beta Program.

From the product data sheet:

"Designed to meet the unique needs of small and medium sized businesses, CA rotection Suites provide cost-effective, easy-to-manage solutions that help ensure your IT assets are secure and available, enabling you to focus on running and growing your business. CA Protection Suites provide comprehensive data protection for your ritical IT assets, combining security, backup and desktop migration capabilities into egrated solutions that help minimize risks, prevent downtime, and reduce IT management costs."

To participate you will have to register and provide basic personal information.

Online forms are used to submit issues and send your feedback.

Firefox 3 and Community Beta Program

Firefox 3 a.k.a Gran Paradiso has moved to alpha 2 and is available for download for testing purposes only, great news for us.


The main changes in Gran Paradiso is the use of Gecko 1.9 engine and Cairo graphics system, and it is finally passes ACID 2 test. It means that Firefox 3 will be a truly new version, comparing to version 2 that was an upgrade to Firefox 1.5. This also means that there will be a lot of bugs and testing Firefox 3 will greatly help it development.

For more Firefox 3 details check this review.

Those who will install and test Firefox 3 should use the report tool for reporting broken websites. In addition general feedback can be sent to mozilla.feedback newsgroup directly or using the form on this webpage.
Mozilla developers encourage testers to turn on Talkback. Talkback reports give them really valuable data on which crashes are the most serious, and how often people are encountering them.
And of course dedicated testers should join the QA team: Mozilla QA has a page dedicated to ways to get involved with helping. You don't have to be technical and being involved is good for people wanting to get more familiar with Mozilla and Firefox to contribute to the project.

And to the second part of the story:

Just opened Firefox Community Beta Program. This program goal is to ensure continued improvement in the quality of Firefox 2.

"During the run up to Firefox 2, we released beta builds and release candidates for wide testing and feedback as part of a community beta program. Anyone who downloaded and installed these pre-release versions of Firefox became part of this beta program and was automatically updated to the Firefox 2 final release.
To ensure continued improvement in the quality of Firefox 2, we are now applying the same program to our security and stability release process for Firefox 2. Starting within the next 24 hours, everyone who participated in the beta process will be offered a pre-release version of the next security and stability update." [via developer.mozilla.org/devnews]

If you are not already part of the commuity beta program, you can check Mozilla Developer News for more information on how to join the program.
If you are and if you aren't, report any problems or issues at Mozilla community feedback web site.

Jetico Personal Firewall 2 beta

Jetico is well known personal firewall manufacture and scores very high in firewall tests. Their firewall is not for the average Joe, but if you always use expert and advanced modes this is your firewall. Being a free product is a big plus too.

Jetico Personal Firewall (JPF) was first released over three years ago and the second version entered public beta just before 6 month. From the number of the releases of the beta and after reading the release notes, it looks now safe to install and test the beta.

Those who decide to test the firewall can use dedicated forums for version 2 to report bugs, get support and use the knowledge base.

Version 2 discontinued the support for Windows 9x/Me, so if you are using Windows XP and above give JPF2 a try test.

Beta Testing Kaspersky Lab Products

Kaspersky Lab is a well known developer, producer and distributor of information security solutions. Kaspersky Lab provides products that protect information from viruses, hackers and spam for home users and enterprises and offer consulting services and technical support.

From their site:
"Founded in 1997, Kaspersky Lab is an international information security software vendor. Kaspersky Lab is headquartered in Moscow, Russia and has regional offices in the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Japan, China, Korea, Romania and the United States. Further expanding the company's reach is its large partner network comprising over 500 companies globally.

Our products are certified by West Coast Labs and regularly receive awards from leading IT publications and testing labs. In 2003 we received the Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status for Security Solutions. Kaspersky Lab is also a proud partner of SUSE and Red Hat. Experts from Kaspersky Lab are active in IT associations such as CARO (Computer Antivirus Research Organization) and ICSA (International Computer Security Association)."

Kaspersky Lab has a dedicate page for beta testing http://www.kaspersky.com/beta and also forums for each product that currently in beta testing.

When you register only your Full Name, Company and Email are required. Also you should select whether you want to participate in quality assurance surveys or not.
After filling the form you are sent to their FTP server to grab the beta product installation and the activation key.

Kaspersky Lab doesn't promise any benefits for participants in the beta testing, nor the ability to use the beta product for the infinite time. All the programs in beta stage stage are available for testing. The most popular products are the Kaspersky Anti-Virus and Kaspersky Internet Security.