Blog

Oh, the love is in the air. For Valentine's Day, LUG got together and shared pieces of software or technology that they loved.

rTorrent - Jacques Uber

Tell subsonic to look at directory where music is downloaded. rTorrent watches a directory for new torrents. When it sees one it downloads it. Subsonic then sees the new media file, indexes it, and serves it. You can simply scp a torrent file over and it will automatically torrent and serve it. Ready to listen!

Flask - Corbin Simpson

Flask is a Python web framework that lets you create website insanely fast yet scales well.

    import flask
    app = flask.Flask(__name__)

    counter = 0

    @app.route("/")
    def index():
        global counter
        counter + = 1
        return """<p>I &hearts; flask!</p>"
            <p>I have been viewed %d times</p>""" % (counter)

    ...more
                    

What is SOPA?

The Wild West of the clouds, the group of rampant pirates known as the Internet, has thrown their gloves to the ground against bills proposed in the House and the Senate in an effort to preserve its very own existence. The land where people are free to share pictures of their cats and seed virtual farms is being overrun by dinosaurs. The dinosaur leading the charge is a stegosaur representing Texas that some know as Lamar Smith.

In late October, Smith proposed a bill named the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that would:

• allow government and the entertainment industry to seek court orders against websites merely accused of "enabling" or "facilitating" copyright infringement"
• bar advertising networks and payment facilitators (Paypal) from doing business with alledgely infringing sites
• criminalize unauthorized streaming of ...more

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soundcloud-dl

It was a cold November evening in the bullpen at Oregon State University. uberj and ngoke were sipping tea and getting work done, when the idea of an impromptu hackthon came into our minds. At the strike of 5, we powered ourselves up into coding mode and set off to hack away at a Python Soundcloud API that would allow us to download music from the streams.

We first attempted to use Mechanize to scrape the pages. uberj had previously used Burp to monitor what requests the browser was sending to Soundcloud and found that it was passing a "stream token", which was needed to request the stream, and the song's "uid". And we figured we needed to have a valid cookie as well. Security by obsurity much?

We ran into a slight hitch. We were able to compose a valid ...more

Ian Milligan, a math graduate student, gave the LUG an introduction to Haskell. Haskell is a functional programming language that is quite different from the usual imperative programming languages. We did calculated Fib numbers and generators (infinite lists on the fly) Haskell-style. It was an intense experience that left several of us dazed, but it was interesting to see something different. At the end, here was our demo code.

module Demo where 
import Prelude hiding (fst)

{-
    function notation doesn't use parenthesis, argument is space
-}

{- define type to be product of a and b -}
data Tuple a b = Cons a b deriving Show

{- pair of a and b to an a -}
fst :: Tuple a b -> a
fst (Cons x y) = x

snd :: Tuple a b -> b
snd (Cons _ y) = y

{- Function composition is the act of pipelining the result of one function, to the input of another, creating an entirely new function. This can be done with any ...more
                    

Beaver Bar Camp 8 was a large success. For those who don't know, Barcamp is ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. This year, Mozilla signed on to generously sponsor BBC8 and gave a focused, hands-on workshop on Web Security. Along with Mozilla was ThumbArcade who also sponsored BBC8 and hosted a couple speed-hack sessions and commentary on how Apple killed the publisher.

Not only did companies give talks but students and former students as well. For example, Ben Kero, who recently gave a talk last meeting about ...more

GPG Powerpoint Presentation

Ben Kero, former OSU student and current Mozilla employee, came down to Corvallis to give a talk on GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) encryption and key-signing. A crowd of one PSU student visited as well to help create this web of trust. After Ben's presentation, which entailed a Bradley Manning example and spamming Ben's IRC nick, everyone went around to each other to sign each other's PGP keys. For example, here is my PGP key. Along with that, there was pizza.

Creating and Signing GPG Keys

The first step to key-signing is to actually generate GPG public and private keys (check the SSH guide for general information on public and private key pairs)

...more

In what many refer to as "the golden days", the OSU LUG was highly active in promoting Mozilla, namely celebrating the 50th, 100th, and 200th downloads of Firefox in creative ways: a lot of sidewalk chalk, high-altitude weather balloons, and for the finale...a crop circle. Led by the current founders of Cloudkick, they were able to pull off some cool displays. OSU LUG takes inspiration from its predecessors to do the same. Below is their story.

Take Back the Sidewalk

"It was Wednesday night when several of us were throwing around ideas as to what we could possibly do for the 50 million download contest. After thinking of a bunch of ideas, we thought of using chalk to draw a huge Firefox logo on the quad outside the Memorial Union Building at Oregon State University. The idea was pretty cool, but, being students, we couldn't really find the time during the week. Finally, Friday arrived, and we were itching ...more

Hello [your name here]! If you haven't already been told by someone, at OSU, you have helpful resources offered by OSU at your disposal. This guide will show some cool things you can do with these resources.

First, it is assumed that you know how to ssh into other boxes, use a command line text editor, use bash, or any other Unix-like command line utilities. If you don't yet know these things, go ahead and read these guides and remember, "Google is your friend and ally".

• How to Use SSH and specifically putty for you Windows users.
• Basic BASH.
• vim is a powerful text editor. It is worth learning if you are going to be editing a ...more

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SSH is a secure client-server network protocol that allows you to connect with another box (computer). With this, you can transfer files between your local computer and the remote host. Even better, you can even edit files or execute commands on the remote host. This guide will explain how to effectively use SSH to communicate with another box and how to set up an SSH server so you can SSH into your box.

Basic SSH

If you are in Windows, download PuTTy. To use it, simply type in the host you want to connect to (e.g shell.onid.oregonstate.edu) and open. Sadly, this will be the greatest extent of which you can harness the power of SSH in a Windows environment. You can use PSCP to transfer files, but your powers here are severly limited.

If you are on an ...more

IRC is a real-time relay based chat protocol with no archiving. This means that when you send a message from your client to the server, the server just forwards the message to all of the other clients in the channel. At no point is that message stored, hence the name "relay chat". A downside to this is that you do not receive any messages if you aren't connected to the server.

What makes IRC so special is that is has been around for pretty much forever. Created in 1988 it was originally used by universities to help share ideas. To this day LUG and many other communities around the world still use it to share ideas. It is simple, light weight and runs on any platform. In this guide we will cover three ways in which you can use to get into IRC and into our channel.

First, let's go over some basic terms:

• Server - the machine that your client connects to, it receives your commands and ...more