Slashdot Mirror

All of it will: http://kegs.sourceforge.net/

It's Microsoft's job to supply a stable API for developers to code on. If they change enough of their OS between versions to break applications, they should make sure there is a downgrade path to older versions of their OS and to support those older versions.

You're an asshat, and an idiot.

Winshill.

So-called "Game AI" is not even AI. It is just s few fancy tricks to make the game program look, but not actually be, a little bit smarter.

Mind.html recently became a True AI that reveals the deep thought process in a tutorial display mode. You can interact with the AI Mind and watch it thinking, as spikes of excitation spread by associative tag from concept to concept in the knowledge base of the genuine artificial intelligence.

Mind.Forth AI for robots is written in Win32Forth for installation in autonomous mobile robots and has spawned at least one independent offshoot on the Web as the true AI evolves and speciates into multiple branches of live-or-die AI in the Darwinian jungle of survival of the fittest.

Franks AI Mind is the "son-of-Mind.Forth" AI with advanced features such as the ability to send e-mail and to read Web pages.

You should give Dmaths and OOoLateX a try.

Why not just use a lightweight browser? there's a few about, like dillo for linux or k-meleon for windows (plenty of others too, these are just the ones i know off hand). If you want lightweight, you should give up on firefox right now and move on. I happen to like all the crazy crap it can do though.

It is called "Psychic Mode" and it does not seem to be documented. Anyway, it comes with the default distribution of Gaim, you just need to turn it on.

My favourite bug-thats-a-feature is the bank account in iLarn. If you win, the money in your bank account becomes the default value when you start a new game.

This means:

1. I can avoid the tedium of getting enough money to buy a Lance of Death at the start of the game.
2. I can amuse myself in-game by seeing how much money I can accumulate as I play.

You could argue that this makes the game too easy, and you may be right, but I find it makes it more fun.

From this essay I wrote:
    http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTech nologyHasFailedSchools.html

With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still
considered a problem area, see:
    "To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over"
    http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.htm l
Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools?
Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other
places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not
much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.

Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting
"learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite
end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand.
Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand",
for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or
the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools
to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to
offer, schools themselves must change. ...

And it also turns out, based on psychological studies, that for creative
work (as opposed to ditch digging), reward is often not a motivator, and
creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if a task is done for gain:
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
This finding calls into question the entire notion of a scarcity-based
ideology oriented around exchanging ration-units for creative goods, as
opposed to a "gift economy", such as drives GNU/Linux.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
So, if most of what people do is not related to growing food or making
things, then a system based around material rewards doesn't make much
sense. And it turns out, a lot of difficult work is quite interesting, if
you are not forced to do it -- where the work (and success at a
challenging task) is its own reward.

But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a
way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by
automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the
drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything
you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in
  one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn
something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50
contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap
themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so
of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in
India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a
"hole in the wall":
    http://www.greenstar.org/butterflies/Hole-in-the-W all.htm

Have you tried LiVES ?

I use SubSonic: a free, web-based media streamer, providing access to your entire music collection wherever you are. This way I don't need to fill up my laptop drive and I can access my collection from anywhere (provided I can SSH to my home firewall to port tunnel access to my SubSonic). It allows me to browse my collection, generate and stream my playlist, or download the songs I want. It also has features for album art and lirycs. There is also Ampache, but I have not used that.

QT 3 isn't available under GPL for Windows

Ahem.

Not really. Fvwm is still actively maintained, and TkDesk is only 3 years removed from its last update. They both still work, what's so wrong about using them? They probably do everything the OP wants them to do, so why does he need something newer?

Why hasn't it been done, then?

Have you tried using the DejaVu fonts (a derivative of Bitstream Vera)? In my opinion, they look far better than the Microsoft core fonts, especially when you use subpixel antialiasing on an LCD screen. They also support a lot more glyphs than Helvet^WArial, Times [New Roman], Courier New, Verdana, and Tahoma.

I haven't really used the new fonts from Vista, however, so those might actually look nicer for all I know.

Also, if you have a copy of OS X, it's always a nice idea to copy all the fonts from /Library/Fonts/ and use Fondu to extract the fonts in the dfont resource fork files. That way you get some nice fonts for printing (from Adobe) and some nice designer fonts as well.

Have you tried using the DejaVu fonts (a derivative of Bitstream Vera)? In my opinion, they look far better than the Microsoft core fonts, especially when you use subpixel antialiasing on an LCD screen. They also support a lot more glyphs than Helvet^WArial, Times [New Roman], Courier New, Verdana, and Tahoma.

I haven't really used the new fonts from Vista, however, so those might actually look nicer for all I know.

Also, if you have a copy of OS X, it's always a nice idea to copy all the fonts from /Library/Fonts/ and use Fondu to extract the fonts in the dfont resource fork files. That way you get some nice fonts for printing (from Adobe) and some nice designer fonts as well.

finally I can use a windows box with a different gui, thus negating that iky feeling when I use a win box...

Yes, finally!

Seriously, explorer is bloatware and there are no shortage of replacements. The only good thing about KDE4 on Windows will be KOffice ;-)

Free POP3/SMTP access to Yahoo! mail. http://sourceforge.net/projects/yahoopops/ provides a POP3/SMTP server interface at one end to talk to email clients and an HTTP client (browser) interface at the other which allows it to talk to Yahoo! ... plus lots of firefox plugins can act as http/pop/smtp tunnels to yahoo, gmail, hotmail and others.

So, FUSE (Filesystem in Userspace), which can be run on a number of platforms, allows you to mount your Gmail account like a drive. If you copy data to this disk, it uploads it to your Gmail account as a message/attachment. So now you have a ~3GB hosted virtual drive, albeit with pretty slow access speeds... Pretty wild stuff.

Unlimited messagees on Yahoo makes me hope someone is working on a libYmail component, allowing FUSE to do the same with Yahoo Mail. Got a 15 gigs of TV shows/movies/porn which you've been thinking about deleting anyway? Let Yahoo have them!

From this other article:

Users are subject to Yahoo's abuse policies, which requires users to follow "normal email practices" and not engage in activities like using Yahoo mail for basic online storage (a number of services have popped up to help people use Gmail for this purpose). Abusive accounts will not be summarily deleted - users will be notified by Yahoo and/or accounts suspended, but users will still have access to the data.

If you get caught, Yahoo seems to allow you to pull the data back down. If they won't (I'm going to guess they're going to change that policy pretty quick), then oh well, you were going to delete that stuff anyway! :)

One such "pirate handshake" has already been implemented, actually, though not directly into P2P-clients to my knowledge.

It's called Monolith, and it's basically about merging two copyrighted files, so for the RIAA to claim infringement it must also claim ownership of the other copyrighted file, one that it does not neccesarily own.

http://monolith.sourceforge.net/

A quick perusal of the Slashcode CVS tree shows it still is a numeric value. Ah, the old bitchslap script, now that brings back memories!

Here are a few other examples of free programs which I forgot to include. Like the others they are available in both Windows and Linux versions.

• GnuPG - The GNU Privacy Guard which can encrypt and sign you data and your communications
• DOSBox the Dos emulator for running many old DOS games and programs
• Firebird the relational database program
• PostgreSQL object-relational database management system
• Stellarium is a free open source planetarium

I have not actually seen what is on their CD, but there are some examples of free programs, most of which, have already been mentioned, that are available for both Windows and Linux.

• Firefox Web browser
• Thunderbird full-featured email program
• GIMP Image Manipulation Program
• ImageMagick software suite for creating, editing, and composing bitmap images
• Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor
• ClamWin free antivirus scanner for Windows
• 7-Zip file archiver
• Celestia space simulater that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions
• OpenOffice office suite
• Scribus professional page layout program
• AbiWord word processing program
• Gnumeric spreadsheet
• LyX Document Processor
• Gaim multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client
• Audacity Sound Editor
• Blender the advanced 3D modeling program capable of producing high quality animations
• VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server
• Nvu complete Web Authoring System

I have not actually seen what is on their CD, but there are some examples of free programs, most of which, have already been mentioned, that are available for both Windows and Linux.

• Firefox Web browser
• Thunderbird full-featured email program
• GIMP Image Manipulation Program
• ImageMagick software suite for creating, editing, and composing bitmap images
• Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor
• ClamWin free antivirus scanner for Windows
• 7-Zip file archiver
• Celestia space simulater that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions
• OpenOffice office suite
• Scribus professional page layout program
• AbiWord word processing program
• Gnumeric spreadsheet
• LyX Document Processor
• Gaim multi-protocol instant messaging (IM) client
• Audacity Sound Editor
• Blender the advanced 3D modeling program capable of producing high quality animations
• VLC - the cross-platform media player and streaming server
• Nvu complete Web Authoring System

Why use GTK? GTK still limits you to GTKs look and feel--even on other platforms. I am not sure if it is available, but why not leverage another open source cross-platform framework that's been around since 1992. I am talking about wxWidgets. It is already cross-platform, and it has been bound to other languages like ruby & python. wx.NET started this, but has stalled. You could even use SWIG 1.3.18, or newer, to make the library available to C#.

I had an experience with this kind of thing just today. My music education class is taking a short detour into technology use in the classroom for the next couple of weeks. I was happily surprised to note that one of the prominent examples of music software to use was Audacity. The link was in big bold letters on the handout: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

• Openoffice.org (use word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and similar applications)
• Picasa (view/edit photos)

Internet Tools

• FireFox (browse Web sites)
• Gaim (chat with users of AIM, YIM, MSN, IRC, etc.)
• Thunderbird (e-mail)
• Pegasus Mail (e-mail)
• Macromedia Flash Player (watch Flash animations within Web browser)
• Java Plugin (run Java applications inside Web browser)

Basic Tools

• 7Zip (compress/decompress files)
• EditPad Lite (edit text files)
• vim/gvim (edit text files--advanced)
• Adobe Acrobat Reader (view PDF files)
• PDF Creator (create PDF files)

Security Tools

• ZoneAlarm (firewall - detect unwanted Internet access)
• Avira Antivirus (detect/remove viruses)
• ADAware Personal SE (detect/remove spyware)
• SpyBot Search & Destroy (detect/remove spyware)
• HiJackThis (detect/remove spyware)
• Discombobulator (make Windows more secure)
• Shoot the Messenger (make Windows more secure)
• Unplug-n-pray (make Windows more secure)
• PGP (encrypt/decrypt files or e-mail for privacy) - see admin for more details

Advanced Tools

• Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP (mount ISO images as filesystems) from MSDN
• IMAPSize (manage/search/backup an IMAP mailbox)

• Openoffice.org (use word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, database, and similar applications)
• Picasa (view/edit photos)

Internet Tools

• FireFox (browse Web sites)
• Gaim (chat with users of AIM, YIM, MSN, IRC, etc.)
• Thunderbird (e-mail)
• Pegasus Mail (e-mail)
• Macromedia Flash Player (watch Flash animations within Web browser)
• Java Plugin (run Java applications inside Web browser)

Basic Tools

• 7Zip (compress/decompress files)
• EditPad Lite (edit text files)
• vim/gvim (edit text files--advanced)
• Adobe Acrobat Reader (view PDF files)
• PDF Creator (create PDF files)

Security Tools

• ZoneAlarm (firewall - detect unwanted Internet access)
• Avira Antivirus (detect/remove viruses)
• ADAware Personal SE (detect/remove spyware)
• SpyBot Search & Destroy (detect/remove spyware)
• HiJackThis (detect/remove spyware)
• Discombobulator (make Windows more secure)
• Shoot the Messenger (make Windows more secure)
• Unplug-n-pray (make Windows more secure)
• PGP (encrypt/decrypt files or e-mail for privacy) - see admin for more details

Advanced Tools

• Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel for Windows XP (mount ISO images as filesystems) from MSDN
• IMAPSize (manage/search/backup an IMAP mailbox)

Yeah, I endorse all of those, especially PDFCreator. Also, Inkscape, Audacity, and VLC.

It's specialized, but if you need a UNIX-like enviroment under Windows, Cygwin is wonderful.

Yeah, I endorse all of those, especially PDFCreator. Also, Inkscape, Audacity, and VLC.

It's specialized, but if you need a UNIX-like enviroment under Windows, Cygwin is wonderful.

Gerardo Santana worked on a project implementing binary patches for OpenBSD at least since 2001. His code is quite reliable, IIRC he basically lacked the needed machines to create the patches for all the OBSD officially supported architectures.

I spend all day in my editor and dammit, it's going to look and feel exactly the way that I want it to. Namely, invisible, fast, and part of the rich command environment around it. And any editor that needs a 200-page manual is weighed down with crap I'll never use.

Why would you?

-- http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1

DOSBox. I use it for my masters of orion and several other classic DOS games such as the first Doom incarnations. Works real well.

's even a GNU/Linux version available.

I frigging love TextMate. I love the directory browsing "project" system, I love the fact that it's dead simple to create custom macros/commands (using bash/python/ruby/perl!), and I love its snippets features.

However. It's not cheap, not cross-platform, and the "Emacs-like keybindings" are just bastardized enough to drive me up the wall. So I'm sticking with Emacs for now.

For anyone interested, here are some quick ways to modify the One True Editor to behave a bit more like TextMate:

Directory browsing of projects: Try Emacs Code Browser.
Snippets: Check out msf-abbrev. You'll be able to specify cursor location, fields, etc. similar to TextMate. I've also heard good things about Skeleton Mode).
Macros: Try the Power Macros package.
Quick(er) buffer-switching: The ido.el package works wonders for me. Note: If you're used to running dired from find-file, you'll want to set ido-show-dot-for-dired to t in your .emacs.

What about notepad++? It's free, it's extensible, it's GUI based, it works on Windows, *nix, and maybe Macintosh (I don't know, I'm a PC fanboy), and it works great with code, xml, and regular text files.

When it comes to Linux software, no doubt that this is the case. Even on Windows, usually, the open source selection is significant enough that you're completely correct. On OS X, the quality of commercial software is so incredibly high, that ponying up the cash very often results in some pretty significant productivity gains.

I've got to join in with everyone else who's given a glowing review of TextMate. It's the best text editor I've ever used, bar none, and it's the main reason I don't use Ubuntu as my primary OS. Yet. I have no doubt that, given enough time, Scribes will get to the point where I might consider replacing TextMate with it, but right now, TextMate is still the king of simple, powerful text editors that refuse to get in your way.

There is an open source text editor for OS X called Smulton. I've been using it for awhile. It's a bit lean on features, but it is free.

http://smultron.sourceforge.net/

On Windows, I use PSPad (Free) or UltraEdit (Commercial). The only thing I know of on GNU/Linux is BlueFish and SciTe.

Agreed.

And with Clippy on vim who could ask for anything more? Can textMate do this?

People who want decent formatting on an 80 column term... pretty much everyone apart from GUI weenies :-o

There's still no excuse for a parser choking on a space when flex and lemon are free.

and each one requires an entry in checkcommands and services.

You should be using "servicegroup," then.

Also, you might like http://fruity.sourceforge.net/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zenoss says:
Project of the month for : February 2007

http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2007-03.php says:
Project of the Month: March 2007 - Zenoss Core

Looks like a newcomer alright...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/zenoss says:
Project of the month for : February 2007

http://sourceforge.net/potm/potm-2007-03.php says:
Project of the Month: March 2007 - Zenoss Core

Looks like a newcomer alright...

Personally, I don't want to see the Win2K sources. Every time MS code has been stolen (they don't handle their own security much better than they do their user's) or published under a limiting license, I see a few 'at last' posts in at least a couple of fora. If you're looking at their code, unless under anything like an explicit agreement with them involving something like 'helping Samba team' or 'complying with EU demands so they halt our massive fines' (fat chance of either) you might want to worry about being a vector for submarine patents, in the same way that some are worried about accepting Novell code into various projects.

I'll look at Microsoft code when it's under a GPL, BSD, or similar, somewhat friendly license. Not something under a license from a clearly hostile corporation. IAMNAL, don't want to be a lawyer, and don't want to have any doubts in my mind. The few people I know who've seen Microsoft code don't give me better than average reviews. I just don't see any up side, unless, say you're on the Samba team, operating under a specific agreement.

Even then I might be wary, in the specific case of Samba. I have pretty strong notions of why you might want to *keep* the separate functions of authentication and authorization separate. I'm not a believer in doing both under, say, a Free LDAP server. Nor an AD server, even if wrapped in proprietary Kerboros extensions.

I wish the Samba team the best of luck, as I'll probably have to do more interoperability work in the future. But it's just a 'dealing with what's popular' thing, for me. Definitely not a 'good idea' thing. Given a choice, I'd keep the functions separate, and implement LDAP next to RADIUS, or TACACS+ (At a minimum. I don't really want to use TACACS+, unless it's improved beyond the flaws Solar Designer found several years ago. I quit tracking or recommending it, at that point, and things may have changed.).

Most networking ideas MS has come up with aren't really things that I buy into. They've been more about lockin than open standards, security, and network efficiency since they discovered networking. Granted, the same could be said about early IBM, MS NETBIOS, Novell IPX, etc., networking. But that stuff is mostly gone, and good riddance.

I'd hope that the future of workstation-friendly networking, where you might want to go beyond the basics of DNS, LDAP, RADIUS, various network filesystems, etc., would lie more along the lines of Zeroconf.

http://www.zeroconf.org/
http://zeroconf.sourceforge.net/

That will get MS, BSDs, Linux, and Apple machines talking. It's even making inroads into HP-UX and OpenSolaris. Be advised that I haven't done a security review--I'm just tossing it out because:

a) A complete security review should finally be *possible*. Shouldn't be as much of a Samba/AD scenario, as, well, Samba/AD.
b) Problems found are probably more politically fixable.
c) More universally applicable, including easier mixing of KDE and Gnome desktops, which is a big deal for me.

Especially given c), I'll be plugging some serious hours into it starting in April, and continuing for 2-3 months after that. I know at least a couple of other security guys will be doing the same, as we're starting to talk about collaboration. Including extending some tools. I know I'd like a firm handle on Zeroconf as the KDE folk release 4.0, and a couple of Gnome-heads I know are pushing the group, as well. It should be interesting. I only wish we had an AIX guy, as well.

Some of this is going to end up being client-only info, but a couple of us are also pushing for up-front agreements to release docs and code as a joint effort. I'm definitely going to release everything I can.

Why is it news? It's not like an x86 emulator is anything new. While this is hardly the worst article ever posted to Slashdot, this emulator will be a pointless toy if it's closed-source.

what you want, me old mucka, is DosBox. And then you can have all of 6 Commander Keen episodess. Here's the first one, enjoy.

How does it compare to Qemu or Bochs, both open-source x86 emulators?

I'm with #7. I love GNOME. The Mac UI confuses me.

OK, before I go further--do you consider yourself an average user, or a nerd/geek/power user? If the latter, you're not contradicting my argument, and may in fact be demonstrating point (6) to some degree. If the former--you consider yourself an "average" user--then you are probably the first reasonable person I've ever heard favor GNOME for average users. In that case, I'm wrong.

Assuming I'm not wrong on (7):
That's fine if you prefer GNOME--more power to you--but for what it's worth I'll try to explain why the Mac OS is the way it is.

If I'm working inside a window near the bottom of my screen, it is a waste to move the mouse all the way to the top. Why can't I have my menus be near where I'm working?

Early on, Apple put a lot of research into their human interface guidelines. They found that, in general, the amount of time it takes a user to click a button, menu, or other control was inversely proportional to the size of the control. The exception was items at the edge of the screen, which were effectively "infinitely large" in one direction (since it was impossible to overshoot). Thus, in many cases, putting menus at a screen edge can make them faster to access. I find that, if my trackpad sensitivity is set properly, I can hit menus at the top of the screen very quickly, even if my cursor is initially at the bottom. If you're always working in small windows on a very large screen, menu-in-screen may work better for you.

And why does that window that pops up have 3 panes when you're just trying to open an app?

I'm not totally sure what you mean. Are you referring to column view in Finder windows? That's just one of three different views in Finder, the OS X file browser.

Shouldn't the app be in the menu instead of in some folder hidden somewhere?I don't get it. GNOME puts the programs in categories by you use it for and its in the menu, not opening up extra windows to get to a launcher. It's much easier to me.

Finder is only one of several means of launching applications. Commonly-used apps are usually added to the Dock, located by default at the bottom of the screen (thus benefitting from the same point I raised earlier about controls at the edge of the screen). You can replicate the category structure using a few folders of aliases in your Dock. For "power users", I highly recommend QuickSilver.

My very-non-geeky sister is confused by Macs too, but she asked for Linux after using my laptop.

The best way to help a non-timid neophyte get started on a Mac is to spend a few minutes talking to them about what they think they'll want to use the computer for, then stick the relevant programs in the Dock. Point out a few key apps, then tell them to go ahead and play. Reassure them they won't break it.

And Macs need to get right-click.

Am I being trolled? Macs have had right-click for many, many years. Plug a standard three-button mouse into a Mac and you'll see typical right-click functionality just work. Apple sells a mouse with right-click. Their laptops, although nominally one-button, let you do a "right-click" by placing two fingers on the trackpad while clicking, and on any Mac you can also just control-click to simulate a right click.

It sounds to me like you haven't given Macs a chance, or at least not recently. Buy, borrow, or otherwise use a Mac for a few days and you'll quickly get used to most of the differences you're complaining about. The few genuine preference issues you have can probably be resolved by tweaking the OS X interface with third-party utilities, although I'd strongly recommend giving the "Mac way" a fair try first. For your pains, you'll get all sorts of great stuff, ranging from launchd to Cocoa to the iLife apps to Photoshop. You may even find a Mac-only killer app for your interests, such as BibDesk for academics.

Before we switched to a commercial solution (which was a mistake in retrospect), I had implemented an open source / php app I found over on SourceForge -- Employee Scheduler.

It was written for managing student employees in a library -- and its not half bad.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/empscheduler/

I ended up hacking the hell out of it, adding ajax calls so that it was a little more user friendly, and had ended up with a clock in / clock out solution (using student id cards and a card reader). Tried to contact a few folks listed on the site, but it looks like a dead project (and my source is gone...don't ask...wasn't that hard to do though). If there was a community around it, I would have kept using the software and contributed...but there wasn't.

Its good software, but it needs some work. If you are a php coder, you might want to think about trying it out and seeing if you can hack the functionality you need.

I have been participating as a mentor for the SoC program since it started, and I highly recommend it. It is a great way to get paid, gain valuable experience and a great resume booster, and write code which will be used by thousands or millions of people! Your can read about the successful creations of Nmap SoC students in 2005 and 2006.

This year I am involved with three projects which have been accepted for SoC this year:

• Nmap Security Scanner (SoC Ideas Page)
• UMIT (SoC Ideas Page). This is an Nmap graphical front end which started out as a student's Nmap-SoC project, and now he has been accepted by Google to run it as an independent SoC project!
• Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (SoC Ideas Page). I serve on the board of directors for this 501(c)3 nonprofit which aims to educate and influence policy makers and the public on technical issues.

And even if none of those projects float your boat, there are 128 others to choose from. Remember that you can apply for multiple projects, and doing so can (with sufficient care and detail for each application) be a good way to increase your odds.

-Fyodor
Insecure.Org

I have been participating as a mentor for the SoC program since it started, and I highly recommend it. It is a great way to get paid, gain valuable experience and a great resume booster, and write code which will be used by thousands or millions of people! Your can read about the successful creations of Nmap SoC students in 2005 and 2006.

This year I am involved with three projects which have been accepted for SoC this year:

• Nmap Security Scanner (SoC Ideas Page)
• UMIT (SoC Ideas Page). This is an Nmap graphical front end which started out as a student's Nmap-SoC project, and now he has been accepted by Google to run it as an independent SoC project!
• Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (SoC Ideas Page). I serve on the board of directors for this 501(c)3 nonprofit which aims to educate and influence policy makers and the public on technical issues.

And even if none of those projects float your boat, there are 128 others to choose from. Remember that you can apply for multiple projects, and doing so can (with sufficient care and detail for each application) be a good way to increase your odds.

-Fyodor
Insecure.Org

To anyone involved with security and operating systems, this is like a big "duh!". Fortunately, some people who are experts in this area are taking this problem seriously.

First, you start with the library which talks to the Telecommunications chip. And you make absolutely certain that security is the top priority (ala OpenBSD):
            http://libgsmc.sourceforge.net/

Second, you add a completely Open Source effort, for both the hardware and the software.
            http://hbmobile.org/

Experience and history has shown that there's no other solution for secure solutions.

Now there are other Open Source efforts out there, most notably OpenMoko and TrollTech's Green Phone. But neither of these efforts have impressed me as taking security seriously. They certainly haven't said as much. They are both doing an otherwise excellent job, but I do wish they'd change their attitude here.