* Astronomy

John the Ripper 1.7 has been released.
It is a fast password cracker, currently available for many flavours of Unix (11 are officially supported, not counting different architectures), DOS, Win32, BeOS, and OpenVMS. Its primary purpose is to detect weak Unix passwords. Besides several crypt password hash types most commonly found on various Unix flavors, supported out of the box are Kerberos AFS and Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 LM hashes, plus several more with contributed patches.

John the Ripper 1.7 offers significant performance improvements over the 1.6 release.

http://www.openwall.com/john/