Slashdot Mirror

rkrishardy writes "A group of researchers from MIT, Stanford, and Syracuse has developed a new program, named 'Ardilla,' which can analyze PHP code for cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection attack vulnerabilities. (Here is the paper, in PDF, and a table of results from scanning six PHP applications.) Ardilla uses a modified Zend interpreter to analyze the code, trace the data, and determine whether the threat is real or not, significantly decreasing false positives." Unfortunately, license issues prevent the tool in its current form from being released as open source.

hoytak writes "An expert in electoral fraud, professor Walter Melbane, has released a detailed analysis (PDF) of available data in Iran's controversial election (summary here). While he did not find significant indications of fraud, he does note that all the deviations from the predicted model are in Ahmadinejad's favor: 'In general, combining the 2005 and 2009 data conveys the impression that a substantial core of the 2009 results reflected natural political process... [These] stand in contrast to the unusual pattern in which all of the notable discrepancies between the support Ahmadinejad actually received and the support the model predicts are always negative. This pattern needs to be explained before one can have confidence that natural election processes were not supplemented with artificial manipulations.'" In related news, EsonLinji notes reports in the Seattle PI and other sources that the US State Department has asked Twitter to delay system maintenance to prevent cutting off Iranians who have been relying on the service during the post-election crisis. And if you would like to help ease the communication crunch, reader RCulpepper tips a blog post detailing how to set up a proxy server for users with Iranian IP addresses.

freakshowsam writes "Technology Review has an article on a software engine, developed by researchers at the University of Washington, that pulls together facts by combing through more than 500 million Web pages. TextRunner extracts information from billions of lines of text by analyzing basic relationships between words. 'The significance of TextRunner is that it is scalable because it is unsupervised,' says Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, which donated the database of Web pages that TextRunner analyzes. The prototype still has a fairly simple interface and is not meant for public search so much as to demonstrate the automated extraction of information from 500 million Web pages, says Oren Etzioni, a University of Washington computer scientist leading the project." Try the query "Who has Microsoft acquired?"

CSEMike writes "Currently popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy. For applications like BitTorrent or Gnutella, sharing a file means exposing your behavior to anyone interested in monitoring it. OneSwarm is a new file sharing application developed by researchers at the University of Washington that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. Instead of communicating directly, sharing in OneSwarm is friend-to-friend; senders and receivers exchange data using multiple intermediaries in an overlay mesh. OneSwarm is built on (and backwards compatible with) BitTorrent, but includes numerous extensions to improve privacy while providing good performance: point-to-point encryption using SSL, source-address rewriting, and multi-path and multi-source downloading. Clients and source are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows."

CSEMike writes "Currently popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy. For applications like BitTorrent or Gnutella, sharing a file means exposing your behavior to anyone interested in monitoring it. OneSwarm is a new file sharing application developed by researchers at the University of Washington that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. Instead of communicating directly, sharing in OneSwarm is friend-to-friend; senders and receivers exchange data using multiple intermediaries in an overlay mesh. OneSwarm is built on (and backwards compatible with) BitTorrent, but includes numerous extensions to improve privacy while providing good performance: point-to-point encryption using SSL, source-address rewriting, and multi-path and multi-source downloading. Clients and source are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows."

CSEMike writes "Currently popular peer-to-peer networks suffer from a lack of privacy. For applications like BitTorrent or Gnutella, sharing a file means exposing your behavior to anyone interested in monitoring it. OneSwarm is a new file sharing application developed by researchers at the University of Washington that improves privacy in peer-to-peer networks. Instead of communicating directly, sharing in OneSwarm is friend-to-friend; senders and receivers exchange data using multiple intermediaries in an overlay mesh. OneSwarm is built on (and backwards compatible with) BitTorrent, but includes numerous extensions to improve privacy while providing good performance: point-to-point encryption using SSL, source-address rewriting, and multi-path and multi-source downloading. Clients and source are available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows."

Pickens writes "MIT computer scientist Scott Aaronson has an interesting post on how to improve Wikipedia's coverage of theoretical computer science. Aaronson writes what while Wikpedia will never be an ideal venue for academics because 'we're used to (1) putting our names on our stuff, (2) editorializing pretty freely, (3) using "original research" as a compliment and not an accusation, and (4) not having our prose rewritten or deleted by people calling themselves Duduyat, Raul654, and Prokonsul Piotrus,' he identifies twenty basic research areas and terms in theoretical computer science that are not defined on Wikipedia, and invites readers to write some articles about them. Article suggestions include property testing, algorithmic game theory, derandomization, sketching algorithms, propositional proof complexity, arithmetic circuit complexity, discrete harmonic analysis, streaming algorithms, and hardness of approximation. One commenter suggests that professors should encourage students to improve the Wikipedia articles about topics they are studying. 'This will help them understand the topic and at the same time improve Wikipedia.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier and company have created a new hash function called Skein. From his blog entry: 'NIST is holding a competition to replace the SHA family of hash functions, which have been increasingly under attack. (I wrote about an early NIST hash workshop here.) Skein is our submission (myself and seven others: Niels Ferguson, Stefan Lucks, Doug Whiting, Mihir Bellare, Tadayoshi Kohno, Jon Callas, and Jesse Walker). Here's the paper."

jamie found links to a discriminating selection of Siggraph papers at waxy.org. Among the more captivating: automatically improving the attractiveness of faces in portraits; automatic substitution of similar faces into photographs (with potential applications such as a privacy-enhanced Google Street View); and using still photographs to enhance video of a static scene.

seussman71 writes with a link to some very interesting research out of the University of Washington that employs "a method of using high quality photographs to enhance a video taken of the same subject. The project page gives a good overview of what they are doing and the video on the page gives some really nice examples of how their technology works. Hopefully someone can take the technology and run with it, but one thing's for sure: this could make amateur video-making look even better than it does now." And if adding mustaches would improve your opinion of the people in amateur videos, check out the unwrap-mosaics technique from Microsoft Research.

An anonymous reader writes "A group of researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Washington could face both civil and criminal penalties for a research project (PDF) in which they snooped on users of the Tor anonymous proxy network. Should federal prosecutors take interest in the project, the researchers could also face up to 5 years in jail for violating the Wiretap Act. The researchers neither sought legal review of the project nor ran it past their Institutional Review Board. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has written a legal guide for Tor admins, strongly advises against any sort of network monitoring."

An anonymous reader writes "Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service. This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there's no need to rely on a single third party. What's more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving. This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner's choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop."

An anonymous reader writes "Have you ever wondered what it takes to get 'caught' for copyright infringement on the Internet? Surprisingly, actual infringement is not required. The New York Times reports that researchers from the computer science department at the University of Washington have just released a study that examines how enforcement agencies monitor P2P networks and what it takes to receive a complaint today. Without downloading or sharing a single file, their study attracted more than 400 copyright infringement complaints. Even more disturbing is their discovery that illegal P2P participation can be easily spoofed; the researchers managed to frame innocent desktop machines and even several university printers, all of which received bogus complaints."

An anonymous reader writes "Hubble is a system that operates continuously to find persistent Internet black holes as they occur. Hubble has operated continuously since September 17, 2007. During that time, it identified 881,090 black holes and reachability problems. In the most recent quarter-hourly round, completed at 04:40 PDT, 04/09/2008, Hubble issued 46,846 traceroutes to 1,815 prefixes it identified as likely to be experiencing problems (of 78,772 total prefixes monitored by the system). Of these, it found 195 prefixes to be unreachable from all its vantage points and 139 to be reachable from some vantage points and not others." No relationship to that other Hubble which also tries to find black holes ;)

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Bruce Schneier has an essay on the mind of security professionals like himself, and why it's something that can't easily be taught. Many people simply don't see security threats or the potential ways in which things can be abused because they don't intend to abuse them. But security pros, even those who don't abuse what they find, have a different way of looking at things. They always try to figure out all the angles or how someone could beat the system. In one of his examples, Bruce talks about how, after buying one of Uncle Milton's Ant Farms, he was enamored with the idea that they would mail a tube of live ants to anyone you asked them to. Schneier's article was inspired by a University of Washington course in which the professor is attempting to teach the 'security mindset.' Students taking the course have been encouraged to post security reviews on a class blog."

TreeDork alerts us that Alpine 1.00 has now been released by the University of Washington. The full source and documentation are available."On the surface, Alpine will appear strikingly similar to the Pine Message System, and it is upwards-compatible for existing Pine users. Alpine is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The source code has been reorganized from the ground up to separate the user interface code from the underlying email engine itself. All of the source needed to build Unix, Windows, and Web-based mail user agents is included.

TreeDork alerts us that Alpine 1.00 has now been released by the University of Washington. The full source and documentation are available."On the surface, Alpine will appear strikingly similar to the Pine Message System, and it is upwards-compatible for existing Pine users. Alpine is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The source code has been reorganized from the ground up to separate the user interface code from the underlying email engine itself. All of the source needed to build Unix, Windows, and Web-based mail user agents is included.

Roland Piquepaille writes "The billion of images available from a site like Flickr has stimulated the imagination of many researchers. After designing tools using Flickr to edit your photos, another team at the University of Washington (UW) is using our vacation photos to create 3D models of world landmarks. But recreating original scenes is challenging because all the photos we put on Flickr and similar sites don't exhibit the same quality. With such a large number of pictures available, the researchers have been able to reconstruct with great accuracy virtual 3D model of landmarks, including Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and the Statue of Liberty in New York City."

TheWoozle writes "In a follow-up to a recent story about ISPs inserting ads into web pages, the University of Washington security and privacy research group has teamed with the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) to develop an online tool to help you identify if your ISP is inserting ads or otherwise modifying the web pages you request."

TheWoozle writes "In a follow-up to a recent story about ISPs inserting ads into web pages, the University of Washington security and privacy research group has teamed with the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) to develop an online tool to help you identify if your ISP is inserting ads or otherwise modifying the web pages you request."

QuatumCrypto writes "A project is underway at the University of Washington to enable real-time sign language communication via cell phone. Because of the low-bandwidth wireless cell phone network, a new compression scheme is necessary to capture only the bare essential components of signing to minimize data transfer. Although text messaging is a viable alternative for everyone, signing — like speech — is a much faster and more convenient form of communication."

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from the computer science department at the University of Washington have released BitTyrant, a new BitTorrent client that is designed to improve download performance via strategic selection of peers and upload rates. Their results call into question the effectiveness of BitTorrent's tit-for-tat reciprocation strategy which was designed to discourage selfish users. Clients are available for Windows, OS X, and Linux."

Johan Louwers writes "Robots will crawl tubes in a short while to investigate power cables running in the tubes to make sure they are still undamaged or in need for a repair. The Robotic Cable Inspection System is developed by Alexander Mamishev, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Washington. Making use of infrared thermal analysis and acoustic partial discharge analysis, the robot will be checking mile after mile of cable while crawling his way in the tubes."

moon_monkey writes "There's an interesting post on NewScientistTech's blog about virtual reality inducing false memories during a recent experiment (pdf). Ann Schlosser at the University of Washington tested students' ability to learn how to use a real digital camera by operating a virtual one. Although those students who used the virtual camera found it easier to remember how the camera worked, they also experienced more 'false memories'. As the post points out, could this be a serious problem for VR going forward?"

md8mart writes to let us know about the imminent shutdown of the site that distributes Pine patches. From the RSS feed of Patches for Pine we read the following bad news for all Pine users: "The Department of Mathematics of the University of Washington will close the account that hosts my Patches for Pine site. I would like to thank the Department of Mathematics for having hosted this site for so many years. I do not have current plans to move this site, but this site will disappear on December 15, 2006. Thank you to everyone who supported me by positive feedback and encouragement to do this work through the years. I will update this information as it becomes available."

md8mart writes to let us know about the imminent shutdown of the site that distributes Pine patches. From the RSS feed of Patches for Pine we read the following bad news for all Pine users: "The Department of Mathematics of the University of Washington will close the account that hosts my Patches for Pine site. I would like to thank the Department of Mathematics for having hosted this site for so many years. I do not have current plans to move this site, but this site will disappear on December 15, 2006. Thank you to everyone who supported me by positive feedback and encouragement to do this work through the years. I will update this information as it becomes available."

Zelbinian writes "Wired News reports there are a number of artists, ranging from The Beatles to Radiohead, that are still holding out on iTunes. Some feel that per-track downloads hurt the artistic integrity of albums as a whole; for others it's simply a matter of negotiation troubles. From the article: 'Since record companies have realized the popularity of iTunes and other sites, many reworked contracts to give artists less money per download. Andrews said while record companies once offered artists about 30 cents for each song sold, now musicians are earning less than a dime.'"

Alien54 writes "Who wants to pay for Stanford's Crypto Course, when University of Washington has made the whole Cryptography Course available online for free. Yes, all the presentations, videos (mp3, WMV), homework, quizzes etc. are available online. The material seems pretty decent, and is intended for an advanced audience." Found on linkfilter.

Alien54 writes "Who wants to pay for Stanford's Crypto Course, when University of Washington has made the whole Cryptography Course available online for free. Yes, all the presentations, videos (mp3, WMV), homework, quizzes etc. are available online. The material seems pretty decent, and is intended for an advanced audience." Found on linkfilter.

abscondment writes "Nearly a year ago, two couples were charged with scamming WalMart for nearly $1.5 Million by creating custom barcodes with reduced prices. You'd think that in the intervening months, other companies would guard against such shenanigans - but today we see that Target just caught a scammer buying iPods for $4.99! The 19 year old used BarCode Magic to create fake barcodes, buying expensive electronics suspiciously low prices. Personally, I would have gone for a less blatant discount, or refrained from visiting the same store so soon afterwards."

abscondment writes "An error in the way Internet Explorer parses CSS files has been discovered by Matan Gillon of Israel. The flaw can be exploited by any website, and used to access personal information via Google's Desktop Search program. Of course, Google contends that this is a flaw with IE, and not their search software."

abscondment writes "Stating that "open source is the future" of the software industry, Sun's President and COO Jonathan Schwartz announced that Sun will be opening its enterprise software in a manner similar to Solaris 10. Sun is opening up the Java Enterprise System, Sun N1 Management software, and Sun developer tools, etc. - practically everything except Java - hoping to lure more developers and chief executive officers worldwide to use and deploy its enterprise software."

jonbrewer writes "Pioneered by CENS, Sensor Networks are rapidly becoming a mainstream environmental monitoring tool. The NY Times has an article today with a quick tech overview and info on RiverNet, EarthScope, NEON, and Neptune. The Times reports 'scientists want to deploy millions of these kinds of devices over large tracts for long periods, opening new windows on nature.'"

ChuckOp writes " front-page article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer states: "The University of Washington associate professor has embarked on a one-man mission to persuade the Redmond company to improve the grammar-checking function in its popular word-processing program. Sandeep Krishnamurthy is also trying to raise public awareness of the issue." He includes some twisted prose that the grammar checker fails to find fault with, such as: "Marketing are bad for brand big and small. You Know What I am Saying?" and "Gates do good marketing job in Microsoft". This last comment is disputed by retired Microsoft researcher Karen Jensen, who developed part of the underlying technology; "Only by knowing that 'Gates' probably refers to Bill Gates -- and not to the plural of the movable portion of a fence -- would the program know to suggest using 'does' instead." The professor also has several twisted examples available."

XopherMV writes "A study by Lai and Singh, published in a 1995 issue of Bioelectromagnetics, found an increase in damaged DNA in the brain cells of rats after a single two-hour exposure to microwave radiation at levels considered "safe" by government standards. The idea behind that study was relatively simple: expose rats to microwave radiation similar to that emitted by cell phones, then examine their brain cells to see if any DNA damage resulted. The news was apparently unwelcome in some quarters. According to internal documents that later came to light, Motorola started working behind the scenes to minimize any damage Lai's research might cause even before the study was released. In a memo and a draft position paper dated Dec. 13, 1994, officials talked about how they had "war-gamed the Lai-Singh issue" and were in the process of lining up experts who would be willing to point out weaknesses in Lai's study and reassure the public. To this day, the cell phone industry continues to dispute Lai and Singh's findings although half of about 200 studies say there is a biological effect from cell phone radiation. Read more in UW Columns."

An anonymous reader writes "Some companies seem to take the easy way out by depending solely on Microsoft for their email needs. To all IT managers who want to breathe easier, however, there are about eight alternatives in the market today, including Barca, Calypso, Eudora, Lotus Notes, Pegasus, Pine, The Bat and Mozilla Thunderbird--all featured in this review."

drewzhrodague writes "In what is sure to tie up a few print queues, us guys at WiFiMaps.com have released large-format printable maps of Seattle. These were generated during a collaboration with the University of Washington's communications department. This is one of the most comprehensive Wi-Fi mapping project to date, as 100 undergrads swarmed downtown Seattle to collect wardriving data. We've rendered their results at 300dpi, for letter, tabloid, and architectural E sized paper. There is both the standard layout, and the aerial versions available using bittorrent."

Writes writes writes writes "A group of graduate students from the University of Washington have posted a a new independent report about the extent of centralization in regards to BitTorrent communities. The report indicates that irrespective of the recent damage dealt to global torrent sites, the communities are still very active, even despite their large degree of centralization (and perhaps exposure/liability). Furthermore, the report attempts to determine if the torrent communities follow the 80/20 rule, by measuring the Long Tail of torrent distribution."

feagle814 writes "I've always wanted to create one of those digital picture frames out of an old laptop, and on the heels of a recent slashdot story, I've written up my Digital Picture Frame project. What's unique about this particular incarnation of the digital picture frame is that mine includes a homebrew remote control recognizer made out of a programmable IC, the Microchip PIC16F628. The article discusses everything from design considerations to custom slideshow software, all the way to final presentation, with lots of photos along the way."

museumpeace writes "Stuck for ideas about cheapest/fastest/most realistic rendering technology for that new video game you want to develop? Here is a great list of links and resources. The very latest is a tool mentioned on Technology Review which, if you feed it just a few dozen frames of a video of , for instance, Kurt Shilling pitching, can extrapolate a library of animated gestures or actions from just that sample. This new technique is already licensed to Electronic Arts. It was developed by Aaron Hertzman and Zoran Popovic and grew out of earlier work by Hertzman at NYU and a busy curriculum of computer graphics accomplishments by Popovic."

scupper writes "Infants learn language with remarkable speed, but how they do it remains a mystery. New data shows that infants use computational strategies to detect patterns in language, according to UW's Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl in the Nature article "Early Language Acquisition: Cracking the Speech Code" [PMID: 15496861] Interesting excerpt from the article: 'There is evidence that infants analyse the statistical distributions of sounds that they hear in ambient language, and use this information to form phonemic categories. They also learn phonotactic rules -- language-specific rules that govern the sequences of phonemes that can be used to compose words.'"

CygnusXII writes "Now this is a novel approach to Dual Mode Transportation. This is an interesting and refreshing approach, that could revolutionize the transportation industry. BladeRunner Dual Mode Transport, or see the main web page. The innovative vehicle will run on road as well as rail. It is as applicable to freight as to passenger transport. Branch-line infrastructure costs could be at least halved because signalling and points could be largely, if not totally, made redundant."

CygnusXII writes "Now this is a novel approach to Dual Mode Transportation. This is an interesting and refreshing approach, that could revolutionize the transportation industry. BladeRunner Dual Mode Transport, or see the main web page. The innovative vehicle will run on road as well as rail. It is as applicable to freight as to passenger transport. Branch-line infrastructure costs could be at least halved because signalling and points could be largely, if not totally, made redundant."

Iphtashu Fitz writes "Think all earthquakes last only seconds or minutes? Think again! Scientists at the University of Washington are measuring a "slow" earthquake some 12 to 25 miles underground that could last as long as a month. Along with the UW scientists, seismologists at the Geological Survey of Canada and Central Washington University have documented at least nine previous so-called slow earthquakes going back to 1992. They seem to occur every 14 months or so, the last one occuring in February and March of last year. These earthquakes, also known as slow-slip earthqakes, can release as much energy as a magnitude 6.8 earthquake but because it's released over such a long period of time nobody on the surface even notices it. One key question the scientists are trying to answer is whether these slow earthquakes add to or relieve stress in the tectonic plates, which could ultimately help to predict major earthqakes."

JoshuaDFranklin writes "When confronted with the reality of Open Source, academics often ask what processes allow it to happen. In his new book The Success of Open Source, Berkeley professor Steven Weber answers that question. He presents a clear, logical picture of how Open Source development works in a variety of projects, and comes to the intriguing conclusion that the process may be generalizable to other areas of production. The results, he argues, would 'make the consequences of the first-generation Internet seem quaint.'" Read on for the rest of Franklin's review. The Success of Open Source author Steven Weber pages 320 pages, 5 line illustrations publisher Harvard University Press rating 9 reviewer Joshua Daniel Franklin ISBN 0674012925 summary Weber argues that the success of Open Source is due to a production process than may be generalizable to other arenas.

Weber is an academic and makes no apologies for it. He is not presenting an exciting new business plan, advocating a particular method of software development, or calling hackers to revolution. He is simply describing his findings after extensive research of the Open Source development process and drawing conclusions from them. As such, this book may not appeal to everyone in the Open Source community. However, Weber's ideas are timely and informative for anyone who wants to explain or advocate Open Source. He likens his work to The Machine that Changed the World, the story of Toyota's production method (224):

That book made two simple and profound points: The Toyota "system" was not a car, and it was not uniquely Japanese. The parallels are obvious. Open source is not a piece of software, and it is not unique to a group of hackers.

The first part of The Success of Open Source is a historical case study that examines the origins and social development of the Open Source community. It begins with Unix and hacker culture. For those who have read Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Peter Salus' A Quarter Century of UNIX, there is little new material here, but Weber offers a new and interesting perspective on the events. For example, he offers the insight that "hacker culture" existed before widespread network connectivity, drawing into question whether cheap bandwidth is really essential.

From there, he covers the development of the BSDs, Apache, and Linux, focusing again on social structures. He describes diverse events such as the messy expulsion of Theo de Raadt from the NetBSD core, the creation of Apache by an informal group of interested developers, and the establishment of Alan Cox as de facto Linux networking lieutenant. Weber draws from an impressive array of firsthand accounts, including mailing lists, websites, conference speeches, and personal interviews.

I get some interesting trivia out of this, such as Larry McVoy's original Unix is dying troll (98). Unfortunately, since Weber's narrative is mainly topical, it is occasionally redundant in telling one story from multiple social angles. Other claims are close to flamebait, such as suggesting that Richard Stallman is an example of a "failed leader." (168)

For the second half of the book, Weber moves on to Explaining Open Source in the terms of his discipline, political economy. He sees two broad categories of principles to the Open Source process: Microfoundations, including individual motivations and the economic logic of the collective good; and Macro-Organization, solving the problems of coordination and complexity. (133) While I doubt each reader will catch every academic nuance in these chapters, Weber is thankfully sparing in his use of specialized vocabulary and writes his overall argument in clear, easy-to-follow logic.

This section also contains the most insightful observations in The Success of Open Source. While there are too many to list here, one is the concept of Open Source Software as antirival. As more copies are made and put into use, value increases as a result of a larger market and the small percentage of users that contribute bug reports and possibly patches. This turns the traditional "free rider" problem into an advantage.

Though Weber does not mention this in the text, one can see part of this principle in proprietary vendors' providing free downloads or turning their backs on rampant piracy. It also does not take a great leap of logic to see application of the antirival model to other fields such as music or academic research.

As is customary in social science literature, Weber uses his conclusion to both recap his argument and to raise questions for future direction of research. What is the best organization method for property distribution, as opposed to the current methods based on exclusion? How can the Open Source production process be used effectively to improve prospects for the developing world? What is the best way for closed, hierarchical systems to interact with open, network-based ones? While some of the issues involved are offtopic for this book, hopefully future work will examine these questions in depth.

Though Open Source has been mentioned in many recent works, The Success of Open Source is the first academic book that focuses on the Open Source community as its object of study. It gives a readable, thought-provoking, and occasionally funny account of what Open Source is and means, making it an extremely valuable resource for those who want to engage and discuss these issues on an intellectual level. As Weber states, his positive, constructive outlook "may not be fully satisfying, but it's not a bad place to start." (272)

Joshua Daniel Franklin is a graduate student at the University of Washington's Information School. This review may be redistributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. You can read the table of contents, preface, and an excerpt of the first chapter of The Success of Open Source at the Harvard University Press website. The reviewer's website has an list of errata. You can purchase the The Success of Open Source from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Paul Tinsley writes "After seeing the press releases from both Nvidia and ATI announcing their next generation video card offerings, it got me to thinking about what else could be done with that raw processing power. These new cards weigh in with transistor counts of 220 and 160 million (respectively) with the P4 EE core at a count of 29 million. What could my video card be doing for me while I am not playing the latest 3d games? A quick search brought me to some preliminary work done at the University of Washington with a GeForce4 TI 4600 pitted against a 1.5GHz P4. My Favorite excerpt from the paper: 'For a 1500x1500 matrix, the GPU outperforms the CPU by a factor of 3.2.' A PDF of the paper is available here."

Bob Moretti writes "The annual FIRST robotics championship is underway at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta. 295 of the best high school teams from North America and beyond have brought close to 20,000 students. 130 pound, 5 foot tall robots compete for pride and national recognition. NASA is providing a webcast. An explanation of the somewhat complicated rules can be found here. Any event that puts science and engineering in the spotlight for thousands of high school kids, many of them from low income or inner city areas, is a must-see. <shameless promotion> My team is currently in 20th place in the Galileo division. </shameless promotion>"

Peterus7 asks: "I'm a student at the University of Washington, and I was planning on majoring in Computer Science or Informatics until I took Computer science, and I'm realizing that it's simply beyond me. I grew up with computers, and naturally I want to study a field that involves a lot of interaction between people and technology (mainly computers), but the Intro to Java class I'm taking now is driving me over the edge. Any suggestions for a technologically intensive field that doesn't require ungodly amounts of coding, or perhaps any general methods for surviving computer science courses for new students?"

Peterus7 asks: "I'm a student at the University of Washington, and I was planning on majoring in Computer Science or Informatics until I took Computer science, and I'm realizing that it's simply beyond me. I grew up with computers, and naturally I want to study a field that involves a lot of interaction between people and technology (mainly computers), but the Intro to Java class I'm taking now is driving me over the edge. Any suggestions for a technologically intensive field that doesn't require ungodly amounts of coding, or perhaps any general methods for surviving computer science courses for new students?"

Peterus7 asks: "I'm a student at the University of Washington, and I was planning on majoring in Computer Science or Informatics until I took Computer science, and I'm realizing that it's simply beyond me. I grew up with computers, and naturally I want to study a field that involves a lot of interaction between people and technology (mainly computers), but the Intro to Java class I'm taking now is driving me over the edge. Any suggestions for a technologically intensive field that doesn't require ungodly amounts of coding, or perhaps any general methods for surviving computer science courses for new students?"