As expected,
e-fense is moving to a commercial business model with their Helix3 Pro (to be released in April) and no free support or user's forum will be available to
Helix users from 2 February 2009. To get access to Helix support and forum e-fense is introducing the membership for $19.95 a month or $239 a year. It is not very clear at this stage; whether Helix3 Pro will be available for free download to non-members.
30 January 2009I have a clarification in relation to Helix3 Pro availability. The product will not be free ...........
So Long free Helix!Youtube videos:e-fense Inc. announces new management teamHelix3 vs Helix3 Pro
2 May 2009
E-fense desided to keep a free version of Helix3 alive.
It can be downloaded at here.
5 comments:
As much as I try to be open minded, the greed factor is obviously apparent. Online press releases show that e-fense has had substantial changes in either ownership or control, which has immediately affected their view of providing a great resource for free into for a fee.
It's too bad in this economy to make an extorted threat to the forensic community that if you don't pay, you can no longer play with our free tool.
There is nothing on the current version of Helix that is not available through GNU or freely available for use anyway. A pay version of Helix is surely not to have much more.
Whilst I share your feelings on free Helix becoming non-free, I am also grateful to the developers of Helix for all of that time I was using it for free.
I’d like to THANK the guys for their contribution to the forensic community.
Additionally, I think it is not the best time to roll out the paid version of Helix, but the time will show.
There are several free and promising Linux Live CD distros out there you can try.
FCCU Gnu/Linux Boot CD http://www.lnx4n6.be/Downloads/download.php?dir=isos&type=iso&target=fccu-linux-cd-12.1
CAINE (Computer Aided Investigative Environment)
http://www.caine-live.net/en/index.html
DEFT
http://www.deftlinux.net/
There are a couple of more Forensic CD's developed by Italian guys as mentioned by “snip” on his blog http://brainstretching.blogspot.com/ (It is in Italian but auto translation is available).
None of them are as good as Helix yet, but this fact just shows how much time and effort was put into Helix.
I forgot to mention
Penguin Sleuth Kit
http://penguinsleuth.org
and possibly a few other free forensic distributions.
For the Windows platform, there is Windows FE (Forensic Environment). It is free. It runs Windows drivers (e.g., for those pesty RAID arrays) and Windows software, such as X-Ways and Encase.
Helix3 CE (community edition) Will be available mid April. Some of the updates to the cd will be removing some of the unnecessary applications, upgrading the TSK, adding support for e01 and other images pre compiled & more.
Please show your support by going to http://forums.charlestendell.com
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