Day: May 29, 2003

Victor Marks at IBM Developerworks takes a look at AirTraf, a GPL’d wireless sniffer and security audit tool.  Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Enter AirTraf. AirTraf began as an open source (GPL) project for gathering and decoding packets sent via 802.11b. With information received from detected access points, it then calculates the bandwidth and signal strength of each individual wireless node. These are the standard sorts of things you would expect a wireless utility of this nature to be able to detect and log. It’s like heart surgery: still highly difficult to implement, but commonplace.

This package performs a number of tasks, such as determining the Service Set Identifier of the access points, and the channel it is operating under. It can tell how many wireless nodes are connected to a given access point, as well as that point’s total load, and also the amount of bandwidth being utilized by all the connected wireless nodes. AirTraf is capable, too, of polling a number of sniffers through a central polling server in order to collect the most current information, which can then be saved for analysis for just a few days, or up to an indefinite period of time — years, even.

Good stuff.  I need to find some more inexpensive 802.11b gear.

Diego has a more detailed writeup of The Animatrix.  There are probably some spoliers in there, so you have been warned.  The connections between “The Kid” and Reloaded, as subtle as they are, are pure evil genius.

Slashdot notes that Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is out and is free.  Someone at idsoftware has a .torrent for it.  I’m currently downloading at 35k and uploading at 22k.  It’ll be up while I’m at work, leech away.

Update: I played it a bit last night, but I will probably stick to other games to get my fix.  I can’t put my finger on it, but something just doesn’t feel “just right” about it.

This just in:

The PHP developers are proud to announce the immediate availability of PHP 4.3.2. This release contains a huge number of bug fixes and is a strongly recommended update for all users of PHP. Full list of fixes can be found in the NEWS file.

Via Slashdot: Waste, released by the guys that do Winamp, is “a secure, distributed mesh-like networking protocal and platform.”  What can it do?  “This v1.0 beta release uses RSA (key based) and Blowfish encryption for security, and features Instant Messanging and group chat, along with file browsing, searching, and transfer.”

It’s GPL, it’s out there.  I wasn’t able to get a network connection, but the installation process and key generation process was painless.  We love you, Nullsoft!

Joi Ito:

I wrote a script that gets your technorati cosmos and creates a sidebar file of inbound blogs like the one on my blog and sends you email and jabber chats when there are new inbound links. It’s written in python. It’s ugly and totally amateur, but Dave Sifry said that making it available now was more “in the spirit of things” than trying to clean it up before I made it available. It’s a bit embarrasing, but like with my Emergent Democracy Paper, I hope the releasing it early and getting feedback will be a good learning experience. Anyway, feedback is greatly appreciated and I hope to continue working on it. It is available on the TechnoBot Wiki Page. Please feel free to add feature requests or make comments about the way I am doing this.

GPL license of course.

Very cool, thanks for getting it out there.

Jeremy Zawodny:

This is interesting. According to Bruce Perens, SCO’s 10-K filing indicates that Novell is right.

Kerneltrap:

With the latest release of the 2.5 development kernel, Linux creator Linus Torvalds noted that he’s planning to work with Andrew Morton [interview] soon to start the pre-2.6 series, moving toward “more of a code slush“, at least a little closer toward a stabalizing code freeze.

From the Creative Commons blog:

We’ve updated our list of O’Reilly book titles, adding 33 more titles that are set to be released under the Founders’ Copyright.