While ripping retail DVDs to share with friends is a no-no, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to copy them. For example, you might want to take all 13 episodes of Greg the Bunny with you on your next vacation, but don't want to worry about losing any of the DVDs. Or maybe you just bought season one of Hannah Montana to go with your daughter's new Linux desktop and don't want her to scratch them up as she plays them over and over. Well, you get the idea.

Mac users have several open source tools at their disposal to help back up personally-owned DVDs with very little effort. I've talked about DVD ripper Handbrake before, so lets have a look at a few others. And remember, always rip responsibly.

You and I may have taken the 4th of July off, but the folks over at TrueCrypt didn't. Instead, they pushed out version 6.0 of their on-the-fly encryption utility, with more options than ever for protecting - and hiding - the critical data on your hard drives. Available for Linux, OS X, and Windows, the software is licensed under its own TrueCrypt license, which is not OSI-approved.