Spring 2011

This Thursday, June 2nd at 7PM in Dreese Labs 264, Jonathan Tubb and Brian Swaney will be presenting on compromising and exploiting web systems and will focus on some of the techniques as well as actual examples. The talk itself will be shorter than a normal meeting so that planning meetings for next year and organizing summer events can take place.

This Thursday, May 26 at 7PM, we will be meeting in *Hitchcock 224* where First Year Engineering staff will present on Arduino.

Have you ever wondered what functional programming is all about or how to use funky languages people are always talking about? This Thursday, May 19 at 7PM in Dreese 264, Alex Burkhart will describe the basic concept of functional programming and introduce us to Haskell. Next, Silas Baronda will present Erlang.

On Saturday, May 14, from 10:00AM to 11:30PM in the Ohio Union Creative Arts room. The emphasis will be on Free, Open

Club elections will be held May 12, 2011. If you are interested in running, please email elections [at] opensource [dot] osu [dot] edu in order to be listed here and in the meeting announcement. Any OSU student who has been to at least one meeting is eligible to run for president, vice president, or treasurer.

The following people have announced their candidacy.

President: Daniel Thau
Vice President: Paul Schwendenman, Brian Swaney (tentative)
Treasurer: Joel Friedly

This Thursday, May 5th at 7PM in Dreese Labs 264, Daniel Thau and Alek Rollyson will be presenting on Linux Mandatory Access Control (MAC). MAC is a different approach to computer security from the Discretionary Access Control (DAC) that is the default for Windows, Macs, most Linux distros, and most other Unixy operating systems. The basic concepts behind MAC will be explained, contrasted against DAC, and various options for MAC on Linux will be covered (with specific focus given to SELinux and TOMOYO Linux).

On Thursday, April 28, at 7PM in Dreese 264, we will have lightning talks about programs with a command-line interface (CLI). These utilities can be useful in their own right, but often can be connected together with pipes to do new and interesting things. It would be helpful if people interested in presenting signed up with their choices, either by emailing me at meinwald [dot] 1 [at] osu [dot] edu or commenting below. This way we can avoid duplication.

Have you ever run "rm -rf" on the wrong directory, ran "rsync" the wrong way, observed unintended consequences with "find," or locked yourself out of your own computer? If you can answer yes to any of these and would like to know what else to avoid, or if you can't and would like to keep it that way, please join us as various club members present how to break things! Everyone who has a story or a deadly command, please come and share it with us, no prior approval needed. Everyone else, prepare to be entertained.

As usual, we will be meeting on Thursday at 7PM in Dreese 264.

UPE and ACM-W have once again invited us to a quiz bowl competition. On Wednesday, April 20, at 6:30 PM in Lazenby 021, teams of students and faculty will be competing to answer computer science-related questions, perhaps with a few other topics occasionally mixed in. This time, people will be choosing their own teams. You can sign up your team in the CSE advising office on the third floor of Dreese.

This Thursday, April 14th at 7PM in Dreese 264, Daniel Thau will be giving a presentation on open source artificial intelligence for the board game Go.

Go is an ancient board game (estimated to be 2000-4000 years old) which, despite a simple rule set, is extremely difficult to write a human-level AI for. Unlike comparable board games such as Chess, the best Go AI's in the world were not match against strong club players only a few years ago, and despite significant development recently they are still no match for weaker professional Go players today.

This Thursday, April 7 at 7PM in Dreese 264, Alek Rollyson will be covering open source security tools from protocol analyzers to vulnerability scanners. This talk is meant as a general overview of tools available as well as their practical applications in security audits and penetration testing. Tools and topics covered will include:

This Thursday, March 31 at 7PM in Dreese 264 we will see presentations on window managers and desktop environments. Dan Thau will show the window managers dwm and Openbox as well as LXDE which uses the latter. Mike Yanovich will demonstrate the Awesome window manager and Gnome desktop environment (version 2.x). Alek Rollyson will present Window Manager From Scratch. Alex Lingo will talk about KDE. Mike Bettencourt will introduce Gnome 3. Matt Meinwald will explain the XFCE desktop environment and Compiz.