[via hack a day ]:

Apparently Phil Zimmerman's latest project is based on shtoom:

The app is based on the shtoom project (open source VOIP written in Python) and the crypto is strapped ontop. A nice feature of the protocol is hashing part of the previous conversation’s key into the current conversation. If you and the other person read the hash aloud and they match it means that this conversation and every previous one has been fully secure.

He’s shopping the project around to venture capital right now to make a commercial product written in C. The source will still be free though.

Good thing Anthony is in town this week...

One of the things that we heard about at the FLOSSPS meeting today was the degree of support for open source in Oregon. Here are a few things that I saw today that bear that out:

1. While riding the MAX back from lunch, we saw a guy wearing a black Debian T-shirt -- I even have a photo to prove it.
2. While walking back from dinner we were all talking about how people are starting to recognize the Firefox T-Shirts (Scott Kveton from the Open Source Lab was wearing one). As we crossed the street, we passed by a family on their way to dinner. The little boy in the family saw Scott's T-shirt and started exclaiming "That's Firefox! Daddy! He's wearing a Firefox T-Shirt"

Those of you who follow this blog regularly know that usually when Julie is off speaking (at BlogHer this weekend) I am usually running a parallel conference known as DaddyCon. This time that isn't happening, as I was invited to the Free/Libre Open Source Software Project Summit, which is small meeting for people involved with open source non-profits (and not-for profits) to meet each other in person, share information and pick each other's brains. This is something that Mitchell Baker and I (and I am sure many others) discussed last year around OSCON time, but folks were just too busy and it didn't happen.

So kudos to Allison Randal of the Perl Foundation for getting the ball rolling. There are people from the Perl and Python foundations, OSI, the Dojo Foundation, the Gentoo Foundation, the Plone Foundation, the Postgres Foundation, and the Eclipse Foundation. I'm representing OSAF, and standing in for the ASF, since none of the other Apache folks were able to make it. Paula Le Dieu from Creative Commons International is also here and it's been great to have her -- while CC isn't strictly in the software space, there is a lot of shared DNA, and the differences are making for great discussion. If you don't see a foundation listed, there were more who were invited, but people were unable to make the meeting. Based on what happened today, I think its a safe bet that there will be more of these meetings.

The planned topics for the day were various topics related to community and donor. In reality, we ended covering those topics (and many others) just by introducing our foundations and what they are all about. That took up the time allotted for the day, and was really a great thing for building relationships. There are a number of relatively new foundations, and a few people have come because they're not sure if starting a foundation is the right thing for their project to do.

Tomorrow's topics are all related to legal issues, and we have some open source savvy attorneys joining us.

As our family was getting ready to experience the jetset this weekend, we were having a competition over who was going to have the most fun: me at the FLOSSPS, Julie at BlogHer, or the kids at home with relatives. I've checked in with everybody else, and based on the latest reports, each party thinks that it is having the most fun -- a great situation to be in!

[via Napsterization ]:

I know of no other conference that holds speaker sessions (there may be some but I've never heard of it, so please leave comments if there are some). Almost all the speakers came, and the presentations by Elisa Camahort and Lisa Stone were great. I'll update this post with notes from Donna's post, but frankly, every conference I attend could use something like this, were the organizers give the results of the survey from attendees as they registered (context about who's coming and what they care about.. talk about knowing your audience), common sense tips about speaking and the guidelines for running sessions.

I've spoken at my fair share of conferences (I'm in Portland for OSCON), but I've never seen anything like this. And its way overdue, because lots of conference talks could use improvement. If we have to have the traditional speakerful conference format, at least we can work on improving the quality of the speaking.

Tonight I wanted to create RSS feeds of search for blogher and oscon on the big 3 (in my mind) buzz blog search engines: Feedster, Technorati, and PubSub. Here's my review of the user experience.

1. Feedster - type the search terms into the box. Hit enter. Drag the XML icon into the right place in NetNewsWire. Grade: A
2. Technorati - type the search terms into the box. Click add to watch list. Click view as RSS, which causes NetNewsWire's subscribe box to appear. Grade: B. I had to sign up to get a watchlist (fortunately I did it years ago).
3. Pubsub - type the search terms to create an entry in my "subscription stack. Drag the url for the feed into NetNewswire - Grade: A-/B+ Why? Because there's nothing in the search. I have to wait for new posts. I know that PubSub's claim to fame is "searching the future" but I want to have some context too. Plus it seems like there's probably at least one other person out there (Hi Scoble) who setup a blogher PubSub feed already.

eventblogging.com doesn't have entries for these conferences, so it's back to buzz monitoring by hand. It would be great if there was an automated way of doing this...

Update: in the comments Richard Eriksson points out that eventblogging does have an entry for OSCON