:: Intrepid Spaniel ::

This is a fun event. I attended last year and learned a lot and had a good time. Highly recommended. Here’s the announcement.
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South East Idaho’s 2nd Annual hands on computer security event will be here April 12 at the Newberry building. Registration begins at 14:00 and the games start at 16:00 and run to roughly 1 or 2am. The cost of entry is $10 or $5 with two cans of food.

This year the challenges include:

* Programming challenges
* Reverse Engineering Challenges
* Capture the Flag (or a variant of ctf at least)
* Web Challenges
* Video Game Challenges
* And more…

All skill levels are welcome. The emphasis of this event is on teaching and learning (although winning is fun too). If you are a beginner, there are a lot of easy challenges and there is a lot of help. If you are an expert, some of these challenges should still be very very difficult… As long as you are computer literate and have some interest in computer security, this event should be a lot of fun - and you will probably learn some things to.

There are some cool prizes this year like R/C Pirate vs. Ninja, Alber Einstein Action Figures, Computers, Penguin Mints, USB Memory Watch, The Zombie Survival Guide, and more.

For more information go to http://wargamez.org or reply to me.

Want to help make this event a success? Post fliers (some can be found http://wargamez.org/pages/posts/fliers–200816.php), tell your computer-minded friends and co-workers about it, and most of all show up!

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Rich Lundeen
http://webstersProdigy.net

I’m excited for the release of Ubuntu 7.10, the Gutsy Gibbon the above is a countdown to the release date. Here is a review showing what is new.. http://tech.tolero.org/blog/en/linux/review-ubuntu-710-gutsy-features-changes

With Ubuntu 7.10 and Apple OSX 10.5 (Leopard) coming out this month, it will be an exciting time.

I’m excited for Software Freedom day, the T-shirts are here, the Ubuntu CD’s just got here, but it looks like they had a rough trip.

Please put ISLUG’s SFD event on your calendar, it will be September 13th, (2 days early!) from 7-9 pm. It will be in the Wood River Room at the Pond Students Union Building at ISU. We will have several talks on FOSS programs including FOSS 101: A critical look at Free Software in Education (me), Gaming (zuggy), Programming in a Linux environment (mopey), Free Software on Windows (vog), and getting stuff done (peltkore). I hope to have FretsOnFire running with a Guitar Hero 2 controller that we can play on a projector.

If you have a dynamic web server and want to run a server or remote desktop at home and be able to access it with an ip address, you can use zoneedit.com for free dynamic DNS service. (Read more…)

This is pretty heady language, but pretty inspiring if you take the time to read it. Think if consumers actually did this.. we’d change the world.

From http://freeculture.org/manifesto/

Get involved over on their site.

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Manifesto

The mission of the Free Culture movement is to build a bottom-up, participatory structure to society and culture, rather than a top-down, closed, proprietary structure. Through the democratizing power of digital technology and the Internet, we can place the tools of creation and distribution, communication and collaboration, teaching and learning into the hands of the common person — and with a truly active, connected, informed citizenry, injustice and oppression will slowly but surely vanish from the earth.

We believe that culture should be a two-way affair, about participation, not merely consumption. We will not be content to sit passively at the end of a one-way media tube. With the Internet and other advances, the technology exists for a new paradigm of creation, one where anyone can be an artist, and anyone can succeed, based not on their industry connections, but on their merit.

We refuse to accept a future of digital feudalism where we do not actually own the products we buy, but we are merely granted limited uses of them as long as we pay the rent. We must halt and reverse the recent radical expansion of intellectual property rights, which threaten to reach the point where they trump any and all other rights of the individual and society.

The freedom to build upon the past is necessary for creativity and innovation to thrive. We will use and promote our cultural heritage in the public domain. We will make, share, adapt, and promote open content. We will listen to free music, look at free art, watch free film, and read free books. All the while, we will contribute, discuss, annotate, critique, improve, improvise, remix, mutate, and add yet more ingredients into the free culture soup.

We will help everyone understand the value of our cultural wealth, promoting free software and the open-source model. We will resist repressive legislation which threatens our civil liberties and stifles innovation. We will oppose hardware-level monitoring devices that will prevent users from having control of their own machines and their own data.

We won’t allow the content industry to cling to obsolete modes of distribution through bad legislation. We will be active participants in a free culture of connectivity and production, made possible as it never was before by the Internet and digital technology, and we will fight to prevent this new potential from being locked down by corporate and legislative control. If we allow the bottom-up, participatory structure of the Internet to be twisted into a glorified cable TV service — if we allow the established paradigm of creation and distribution to reassert itself — then the window of opportunity opened by the Internet will have been closed, and we will have lost something beautiful, revolutionary, and irretrievable.

The future is in our hands; we must build a technological and cultural movement to defend the digital commons.

This article suggest that educators and especially teacher educators should use F/OSS whenever possible and that the freedom offered by F/OSS can outweigh shortcomings in the software itself.

Training teachers and students to use a piece of software makes that software more valuable. Vendors know this. Business sense, not altruism, is what drives deep discounts on software for education. I once spoke to a vendor of an online grade book who, upon learning that I train teachers, was very interested in my using it in my classes.

The article suggests many alternatives to proprietary software and how they may be used.
http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/57760.html

George Ou points out this excellent crash course guide by Chris Walden of IBM for any Windows administrator that’s either migrating to Linux or would like to learn more about working with Linux. If you’re a Windows administrator it doesn’t matter if you’re actually migrating or not because at some point you’re going to have work with Linux on some device or other so this is a great way to get your feet wet. It tries to take what you already know and apply it to Linux.

You can use DVDFlick, a free (as in speech and beer) and open source app for windows to burn those video files on your computer to a DVD you can play in your living room. In a few simple steps, here’s how to burn almost any video file on your computer to a playable DVD.

You can find a howto guide here.

Linux users who aren’t afraid of the command line? tovid to the rescue.

This is from the perspective of a person setting up a machine from scratch and shows the possibilities of OSS. Good descriptions, covers the obvious and the not-so-obvious, provides URLs, and indicates clearly what closed source software each package can replace. A great list for someone setting up a new machine or updating one.

This list can save you some serious cash, but I would use some other BitTorrent client and Sunbird is nice but doesn’t really replace the calendaring functions in Outlook. Google calendar is nice for that if they’d just build in more device sync options.

Any one else have some favorites??

The Simple Dollar » 30 Essential Pieces Of Free (and Open) Software for Windows

A list of the Best open source projects, vote for or add your fave.

It tries to answer the question,
What is the absolute best that the open source model has to offer? The term is usually applied to software specifically, but I’d like to use it here to refer to any community developed project whose collaborative efforts are freely available to all to use and/or modify in any not-for-profit manner; This could include content, health, politics, religion, media, etc..

Current Results:

Best Open Source Project?