OpenSourcery

Journey of Action profiles Global Citizen Corps as seen through the eyes of Amanda, a 16 year old high school student who discovered she was "part of something so much bigger" through the Global Citizen Corps Leadership program. OpenSourcery helped Mercy Corps develop "tools to actually take action" by building a multi-lingual bridge to connect students and educators across the globe.

Global Citizen Corps is an example of a great non-profit using technology in an innovative way, to achieve an even greater impact. At OpenSourcery we know great non-profits come in all shapes and sizes. A great nonprofit website doesn't need to move mountains or span cultural divides to have a big impact on your mission and services.

Interested in building a website to help drive the important mission of your charity, foundation, or public service organization?Drop us a line, we're here to help.

After crossing 4 states by car we arrived Thursday in Las Vegas for Defcon 17. We obtained our temporary badges, purchased some shwag, and headed off to finally get some good sleep.

Friday:

Moxie Marlinspike gave an excellent talk on defeating SSL. Using specially crafted certificate requests and flawed SSL implementations (currently most of them), one can MITM attack with no degradation in authenticity of an SSL site. Interesting and scary at the same time. Firefox 3.5 is patched with more to follow. OCSP is also a joke and easily defeated.

Next up Jason Ostrom and Arjun Sambamoorthy gave a presentation on hacking video. They have created a tool that ARP poisons RTP video streams and is able to reconstruct the streams into media files. You can also take an existing avi file and loop over an existing stream. It was interesting to see new sniffer software attacking a new type of data stream. In the attack against the Cisco phone, they had an cool hack for causing the phone to reboot and push a new config over TFTP in order to disable anti-spoofing settings.

After my video fix I hung around for Robert Clark's update on the state of Computer and Internet Law. This high ranking DHS employee had a surprisingly good sense of humor and also provided some tips for handling police, and border searches. Remember folks, if cops show up to your house to "talk", they're trying to get you to consent to a search because they don't have enough cause to get a warrant. :)

Tor was the next talk I attended. The topic was why Tor has been slow and what design changes are being considered. Tor relays wrap all individual data channels into one tcp stream. If one channel trips a tcp window adjustment, all the data channels suffer. Bit torrent was also picked on as a culprit of slowing tor. It also reminded me that I need to get some of my own tor relays up again. This talk was given by Roger Dingledine.

The last session I checked into was Dan Kaminsky's unnamed talk which ended up being on PKI and SSL. A lot of it was a rehash of the Moxie SSL presentation and how they can be exploited. It provided more back story, and a bit more detail, but the Moxie presentation was better (and first, which gets your more l33t points).

The Linux Foundation, which provides value to thousands of users every day, has decided to highlight the community's creative spirit by hosting a video contest. Of course, they needed the right tools to get the job done, so they asked OpenSourcery to design and develop a website for their user-generated videos and their internally produced videos.

We encourage you to visit their current video gallery, which is home to dozens of keynote addresses, panel discussions, and informative interviews. It's a wealth of information that already generates a lot of interest. We're very excited to redesign the site so it's easier for visitors to intelligently search for the content they need, explore related videos, and even give back to the community. It's the kind of work our user interface and informtion architecture lead, Randall Hansen, loves to take on.

OpenSourcery's Drupal developers will update the Video Upload module we created for Drupal 5, and make it available in Drupal 6. It's one of Jonathan Hedstrom's contributions, which you can learn more about here or read about in his blog. Since our team is full of Linux devotees, this project is like a dream come true. Keep your eyes out of the new site, which should be up and running before the holidays.