Adobe officially unveiled the P2P video streaming capabilities of Flash 10 to developers this week. The technology itself is still in its infancy, but the mere fact that Adobe decided to embrace P2P for Flash 10 made a lot of headlines earlier this year. Many people, including Om over at GigaOM, wondered whether Adobe was taking aim at the CDN market with this technology and whether we will soon all watch our YouTube videos in a P2P fashion.br / br / The short answer is: We won’t — at least not with Adobe’s help. The current P2P implementation, which goes by the name Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP), isn’t really suited for mass-scale video delivery. Instead, it focuses solely on scenarios in which one client exchanges live video or audio data with another client. Think video conferences, Flash-based VOIP or even multi-player games. Just not YouTube. Not anytime soon.a href="http://newteevee.com/2008/12/04/adobe-makes-p2p-flash-video-available-to-developers/" target="_blank" Continue reading on Newteevee.com./abr / br/div class="tagblock"small class="ttags"Tags: a href="http://technorati.com/tag/adobe" rel="tag"adobe/a, a href="http://technorati.com/tag/flash" rel="tag"flash/a, a href="http://technorati.com/tag/flex" rel="tag"flex/a, a href="http://technorati.com/tag/air" rel="tag"air/a, a href="http://technorati.com/tag/rtmfp" rel="tag"rtmfp/a, a href="http://technorati.com/tag/newteevee" rel="tag"newteevee/a/smalldiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?a=rsmuO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?i=rsmuO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?a=i22aO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?i=i22aO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?a=zk4do"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?i=zk4do" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?a=sCLVo"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?i=sCLVo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?a=AeDpO"img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~f/p2pblog?i=AeDpO" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/p2pblog/~4/475132265" height="1" width="1"/

Adobe officially unveiled the P2P video streaming capabilities of Flash 10 to developers this week. The technology itself is still in its infancy, but the mere fact that Adobe decided to embrace P2P for Flash 10 made a lot of headlines earlier this year. Many people, including Om over at GigaOM, wondered whether Adobe was taking aim at the CDN market with this technology and whether we will soon all watch our YouTube videos in a P2P fashion.

The short answer is: We won’t — at least not with Adobe’s help. The current P2P implementation, which goes by the name Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP), isn’t really suited for mass-scale video delivery. Instead, it focuses solely on scenarios in which one client exchanges live video or audio data with another client. Think video conferences, Flash-based VOIP or even multi-player games. Just not YouTube. Not anytime soon.

RTMFP is essentially based on the idea that real-time video or voice interaction between two users of Flash or Air applications shouldn’t have to deal with the latency and bandwidth burden of a server-based relay. It’s just faster and cheaper to let the kids talk amongst themselves. Adobe does use a central server to authenticate users and facilitate the exchange of the data, but the actual video streams flow directly between the users of the application in question.

Graphic from Adobe’s RTMFP FAQ.

So who is running that server? RTMFP will eventually be supported by future versions of Adobe’s Flash Media Server, but the company wants to first integrate it into its new Cocomo cloud services, which went into beta last month. For now, only a subset of all Cocomo servers run by Adobe support RTMFP, but Adobe developer Nigel Pegg assured me that his team hasn’t seen any capacity problems just yet.

Pegg first wrote about the new protocol earlier this week on Adobe’s Collaborative Methods blog, detailing how Flex developers can add RTMFP support to their applications with a few lines of extra code. He told me that one of the big advantages of this solution is that it switches effortlessly between centralized and P2P data delivery. “We tend to see performance degradations after a certain number of receiving participants is reached,” he said.

One example for such a problem would be if you use a Flash P2P video chat and your broadband connection simply can’t support to serve all participants. “What’s cool about how Cocomo approaches this is that, once that limit is reached, Cocomo’s foundation classes swap down automatically, in mid-stream (to server-based video delivery)”, Pegg explained.

Speaking of video delivery: Adobe goes to great lengths to dispel the myth that it plans to P2P-ify all web-based Flash video with this new protocol. “Flash player 10 will not enable swarming, multi-cast or broadcast quality live video,” the protocol’s FAQ (PDF) reads, and it goes on: “RTMFP will have no impact on the business of a CDN.” The company even tries to avoid the acronym P2P completely, instead talking about client-to-client streaming.

Of course, the fact that Adobe doesn’t support any YouTube — or even Ustream-like environments — with RTMFP doesn’t mean that the company won’t go down that road eventually. Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch told Om earlier this year that the company is “taking small steps” and “using P2P in a very basic form” to make sure it doesn’t break web video. Which could mean that this is a first step down a potentially very disrupting path.

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Whither BitTorrent? The company is picking itself up and putting itself back together after recent exec departures and layoffs. And it has finally shed its consumer business, the download store that had helped kicked off Hollywood’s last few years of digital dealmaking, but never did much after that.

We just got off the phone with BitTorrent VP of Marketing Simon Morris, who filled us in on the company’s changing strategy, as well as the recent hubbub about it moving away from the P2P protocol to one that would interfere with VoIP and other activity. Morris said that following the company’s multiple rounds of layoffs, BitTorrent is now “in safe shape” to move forward. A lightly edited transcript follows.

NewTeeVee: So, I saw that the Torrent Entertainment Network is no longer up. When did that shut down?

Simon Morris: I think it was Nov. 17, a little over two weeks ago.

NewTeeVee: Was that due to lack of use?

Morris: It was due to two things. We found it very hard to make it a profitable business endeavor. If you look at the things we’re trying to do as we shrink down the company due to the economic environment, we’re experts in content delivery over the internet. With the Torrent Entertainment Network we were stepping into a new domain of merchandising of consumer entertainment products. In many ways, the retrenchment of the company has been really focusing on what we’re good at.

NewTeeVee: Can you give specific numbers on how many users or downloads you had?

Morris: No. It wasn’t sufficiently successful for us. We investigated all sorts of different approaches: try before you buy, download to own, download to rent, ad-supported streaming. Ultimately, I wouldn’t say us retrenching away from it is any indication it can’t be done, it’s just pure resources.

NewTeeVee: It seems from your shutdown FAQ that you’re doing a good job of taking care of obligations to former customers.

Morris: We have DRM servers; we’ll just leave them up. It seems from a PR point of view far more sensible to leave those things in place.

NewTeeVee: So, what’s happening with your remaining businesses? How is the P2P CDN business going?

Morris: We’re focusing both on our consumer BitTorrent client but also on our DNA content delivery service. The client is more popular than ever. Though I don’t know if you saw the article in The Register this week? We’re now talking to the guy about writing a followup. You will find his opinion may have changed.

NewTeeVee: That was about moving to the UTP protocol?

Morris: It was about moving from P2P to UTP. The tone of the article and the hysteria surrounding it was about creating a greedy protocol to bring the Internet to its knees, and in fact it’s the opposite, we’re working on a more polite, gentler protocol. We’ve briefed the ISPs, including Comcast, and we’re ultimately not trying to do something that would damage ourselves.

NewTeeVee: And as for the DNA product?

Morris: The DNA client also has the benefit of this polite protocol, which has actually already been implemented in the DNA client. The new protocol is UTP, based on UDP, but with a very important layer built on top that gives it particular congestion control.

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lkcl writes "The GitTorrent Protocol (GTP) is a protocol for collaborative git repository distribution across the Internet. Git promises to be a distributed software management tool, where a repository can be distributed. Yet, the mechanisms used to date to actually 'distribute,' such as ssh, are very much still centralized. GitTorrent makes Git truly distributed. The initial plans are for reducing mirror loading, however the full plans include totally distributed development: no central mirrors whatsoever. PGP signing (an existing feature of git) and other web-of-trust-based mechanisms will take over from protocols on ports (e.g. ssh) as the access control 'clearing house.' The implications of a truly distributed revision control system are truly staggering: unrestricted software freedom. The playing field is leveled in so many ways, as 'The Web Site' no longer becomes the central choke-point of control. Coming just in time for that all-encompassing Free Software revolution hinted at by The Rebellion Against Vista, this article will explain more fully some of the implications that make this quiet and technically brilliant project, GitTorrent, so important to Software Freedom, from both technical and political perspectives."pa href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/04/1625226amp;from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=08/12/04/1625226"/a/ppa href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/04/1625226amp;from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/jGuT4-TwLgrhYOcavgDYdnN6zCg/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/jGuT4-TwLgrhYOcavgDYdnN6zCg/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/C1oVbowrLX0" height="1" width="1"/

AOL has rolled out an online tool for sending messages to multiple AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) names at once. Even if you're rocking your AIM account through Digsby, Pidgin, or another multi-protocol...

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/aimblast.png" width="222" height="165" align="right" hspace="4" vspace="2" align="right"/AOL has rolled out an online tool for sending messages to multiple AOL Instant Messaging (AIM) names at once. Even if you're rocking your AIM account through a href="http://digsby.com"Digsby/a, a href="http://pidgin.im"Pidgin/a, or another multi-protocol client, you'll get a new Buddy List name that serves as a marker for sending out group messages. Users have to be invited and accept to get your messages, and the group creator decides whether the message recipients can see who else is in the group, and whether replies go direct to them or the whole group. It's one of those features you can't believe wasn't there already, but it's thankfully open to anyone using the AIM protocol. div class="related"a href="http://blast.aim.com"AIM Blast/a [via a href="http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/12/03/aim-blast-finally-you-can-im-multiple-buddies-at-once/"Download Squad/a]/div /p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/click.phdo?s=f0d6bae2b655f47b7247537c7bb4cce0p=1"img alt="" style="border: 0;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?s=f0d6bae2b655f47b7247537c7bb4cce0p=1"//a img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=f0d6bae2b655f47b7247537c7bb4cce0" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=SXHFBvkK"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=SrAqEwQD"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=6Lo6GyGO"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=6Lo6GyGO" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=kC5Yax19"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=kC5Yax19" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~4/6lOJ7MaSamo" height="1" width="1"/

The next version of #956;Torrent might put Internet service providers in a pickle. According to an article on The Register, the developers behind the popular BitTorrent client have decided to use UDP instead of TCP as the default protocol for file transfers, allegedly in an effort to evade Bell...

divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/93673?ns=guardianpageName=Politics%3A+Speaker%27s+investigation+into+Damian+Green+raid+will+not+begin+for+monthsch=Politicsc3=guardian.co.ukc4=Michael+Martin%2CDamian+Green%2CPolitics%2CUK+news%2CHouse+of+Commons%2CHarriet+Harman%2CPolice+%28politics%29c5=Policy+Society%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CUnclassifed+Contributorsc6=Deborah+Summersc7=2008_12_04c8=1128526c9=articlec10=GUc11=Politicsc12=Michael+Martinc13=c14=h2=GU%2FPolitics%2FMichael+Martin" width="1" height="1" //divpSpeaker Michael Martin's committee into why police were allowed to raid an MP's offices without a warrant will not begin its investigation for months, it emerged today./ppThe Speaker of the House of Commons looked increasingly isolated today as the Tories claimed that the inquiry, as detailed by Harriet Harman, the leader of the house today, bore "no resemblance to the immediate and speedy inquiry" MPs were promised yesterday./ppIt was claimed during business questions that the committee would adjourn soon after its first meeting to await the outcome of the police inquiry – in effect kicking the matter into the long grass for months./ppPressure on Martin is mounting following the arrest and police raid on Damian Green, the shadow immigration minister, last Thursday./ppTwo senior Labour ministers have so far refused to give the speaker their ringing endorsement./ppHarman repeatedly declined last night to openly express confidence in the Speaker or the serjeant at arms, Jill Pay, who consented to the raid./pp"I am not saying I have full confidence in anything or anybody; I'm just telling you what the procedures are," she told BBC2's Newsnight./ppMargaret Beckett, the housing minister, today also refused to endorse the Speaker, insisting it was not for the government to either back or criticise him./pp"It is not for the government to pronounce on the Speaker; the Speaker is elected by the house."/ppShe told BBC Radio 4's Today programme it was "unfortunate" that many people were looking for someone to blame other than the person accused of doing something wrong./pp"It didn't sound to me yesterday like this was all the Speaker's fault, or all the serjeant at arms's fault. It sounded like a singularly unfortunate set of events./pp"I don't blame Harriet for not wanting to be put in the position whereby she is somehow taking responsibility which is not hers."/ppPressed to say whether she thought Martin was doing a good job, Beckett added: "I thought he handled things yesterday with dignity in very, very difficult circumstances."/ppBut Labour MP Stephen Pound acknowledged that Harman had been "equivocal" in her position on Martin and Pay./ppSpeaking before Beckett's interview, he said: "I would say only the leader of the House of Commons on the government benches has been so equivocal."/ppAsked why she had been, he said: "I haven't a clue. It's not something that's collegiate or comradely but I'm sure she has her reasons."/ppHe accused the Speaker's critics of being "wise after the event" but also appeared to admit that the issue could have been handled better./pp"With hindsight, there should have been a group of people - everyone, the clerk of the house [Michael Jack], the Speaker, the serjeant - should have been gathered together and worked out a protocol. But being wise after the event doesn't help."/ppAmid fury among MPs about the whole episode, one Tory MP, Richard Bacon, last night openly called on Martin to quit, accusing him of having "failed in his fundamental duty"./ppEven before last week's events, the Speaker's position had been questioned for many months, especially after rows over his expenses and attempts to keep all MPs' claims under wraps./ppIn an extraordinary statement to the Commons yesterday, Martin said the search of Damian Green's office had been authorised by the serjeant at arms without his express permission./ppHe told MPs that Pay signed a consent form for the search last Thursday without consulting him or the clerk of the Commons./ppAnd he said that officers "did not explain as they are required to do that the serjeant was not obliged to consent or that a warrant could have been insisted upon"./ppMartin is now appointing a committee of seven experienced MPs to look into the seizure of Green's papers, computer and mobile phone following the shadow immigration minister's arrest in connection with Home Office leaks./ppAttention will shift to the role of senior ministers when Jacqui Smith delivers her own statement about the issues raised by the affair to MPs today./ppThe home secretary has already insisted that she did not order the police probe into alleged leaks of documents to Green and had no prior notice of his arrest./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/michaelmartin"Michael Martin/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/damian-green"Damian Green/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/houseofcommons"House of Commons/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/harrietharman"Harriet Harman/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/police"Police/a/li/ul/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/HrTIBOjLc5UOyJN_WhdG2pfcsbc/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/HrTIBOjLc5UOyJN_WhdG2pfcsbc/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/p

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/9953_thumb.jpg" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" SquirrelMail is a standards-based Webmail package. It includes built-in pure PHP support for the IMAP and SMTP protocols, and all pages are rendered in pure HTML 4.0 for maximum compatibility across browsers. It has very few requirements, and is very easy to configure and install. It has all the functionality you would want from an email client, including strong MIME support, address books, and folder manipulation. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / White space wrapping of auto-generated SquirrelMail option widgets may now be controlled. Matching of alternate identities when replying was fixed. HTTPS detection under Windows IIS was fixed, as it was incorrectly setting cookies to be transmitted only over a secure connections when none existed. An XSS exploit in hyperlinks when rendering messages was fixed. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/FM_9rUsCDydQzVRbmU8-9jOcpH8/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/FM_9rUsCDydQzVRbmU8-9jOcpH8/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix/~4/gb8h4ebIaos" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/9953_thumb.jpg" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" SquirrelMail is a standards-based Webmail package. It includes built-in pure PHP support for the IMAP and SMTP protocols, and all pages are rendered in pure HTML 4.0 for maximum compatibility across browsers. It has very few requirements, and is very easy to configure and install. It has all the functionality you would want from an email client, including strong MIME support, address books, and folder manipulation. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / White space wrapping of auto-generated SquirrelMail option widgets may now be controlled. Matching of alternate identities when replying was fixed. HTTPS detection under Windows IIS was fixed, as it was incorrectly setting cookies to be transmitted only over a secure connections when none existed. An XSS exploit in hyperlinks when rendering messages was fixed. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/BdOs3oM63f_c00mJvM81kQTAwk0/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/BdOs3oM63f_c00mJvM81kQTAwk0/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-global/~4/gb8h4ebIaos" height="1" width="1"/

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/...urrentPage=all

As his arm healed, the details of that Starbucks hack kept nagging at him. He remembered that he had gotten into Starbucks' locked network using the domain name system, or DNS. When someone types google .com into a browser, DNS has a list of exactly where Google's servers are and directs the traffic to them. It's like directory assistance for the Internet. At Starbucks, the port for the low-bandwidth DNS connection—port 53—was left open to route customers to the Pay for Starbucks Wi-Fi Web page.

So, rather than pay, Kaminsky used port 53 to access the open DNS connection and get online. It was free but super-slow, and his friends mocked him mercilessly. To Kaminsky that was an irresistible challenge. After weeks of studying the minutiae of DNS and refining his hack, he was finally able to stream a 12-second animated video of Darth Vader dancing a jig with Michael Flatley. (The clip paired the Lord of the Sith with the Lord of the Dance.)

That was more than a year ago, but it still made him smile. DNS was the unglamorous underbelly of the Internet, but it had amazing powers. Kaminsky felt drawn to the obscure, often-ignored protocol all over again.

Awesome. :up:

Noor: "Today, I came across what I call a deep-sea pearl. I came to know Hessian, the binary web service protocol."

strikeleader writes "TechCrunch has an article from an interview with General Kevin Chilton, US STRATCOM commander and the head of all military cyber warfare. Who protects us? 'Basically no one. At most, a number of loose confederations of computer scientists and engineers who seek to devise better protocols and practices mdash; unincorporated groups like the Internet Engineering Task Force and the North American Network Operators Group. But the fact remains that no one really owns security online, which leads to gated communities with firewalls mdash; a highly unreliable and wasteful way to try to assure security.'"pa href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/03/2350256amp;from=rss"img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rssamp;op=imageamp;style=h0amp;sid=08/12/03/2350256"/a/ppa href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/03/2350256amp;from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./p pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/M7mvmyDQexgqebQ9LhkiBZVQ1pg/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/M7mvmyDQexgqebQ9LhkiBZVQ1pg/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~4/z9vjhNzYGXs" height="1" width="1"/

The Linux and Unix Menagerie: "One question that I get asked a lot (and used to ask a lot ;) has to do with the TCP protocol. More specifically, with how an established connection goes about graciously ending. And, if you haven't guessed, the reason the question gets asked so often is that, with all the different states a graceful TCP disconnect goes through, lots of folks (involved in troubleshooting) are curious as to whether the output they're pouring over is "good" or "bad.""

ConMan is a serial console management program designed to support a large number of console devices and simultaneous users. It supports local serial devices, remote terminal servers (via the telnet protocol), Unix domain sockets, and external processes (e.g., using Expect to control connections over telnet, ssh, or IPMI Serial-Over-LAN). Its features include logging (and optionally timestamping) console device output to file, connecting to consoles in monitor (R/O) or interactive (R/W) mode, allowing clients to share or steal console write privileges, and broadcasting client output to multiple consoles. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / Support was added for the creation of intermediate directories. The HP LO100 (Lights Out 100) console script was added. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/GYyTZvGcD22j9HY2rSfc8Mrdceg/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/GYyTZvGcD22j9HY2rSfc8Mrdceg/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix/~4/2JvYNHY6KFg" height="1" width="1"/

ConMan is a serial console management program designed to support a large number of console devices and simultaneous users. It supports local serial devices, remote terminal servers (via the telnet protocol), Unix domain sockets, and external processes (e.g., using Expect to control connections over telnet, ssh, or IPMI Serial-Over-LAN). Its features include logging (and optionally timestamping) console device output to file, connecting to consoles in monitor (R/O) or interactive (R/W) mode, allowing clients to share or steal console write privileges, and broadcasting client output to multiple consoles. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU General Public License (GPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / Support was added for the creation of intermediate directories. The HP LO100 (Lights Out 100) console script was added. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/AHC-vffQ2SXrrvpty8y8_nCy3yI/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/AHC-vffQ2SXrrvpty8y8_nCy3yI/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-global/~4/2JvYNHY6KFg" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/openid225.jpg" width="150"Do you think that open standards, data portability and questions of online identity are important? We do; we think these issues are the foundation upon which many of the most exciting and important online innovations are being built. That's only going to be more true in the future, so if you'd like to have a say in how it all goes down - now's the time to get involved. The a href="http://openid.net"OpenID Foundation/a is one of the leading organizations in the new standards world and it's having its first ever election of community board members this month. Nominations close Monday and the voting begins on Wednesday. /p pThere are big issues on the table right now and the outcome of the election is going to make a big difference in the future of the internet. The Foundation has had incredible success in the past year but it needs your help to determine its direction in the future./p p align="right"emSponsor/embr /a href='http://d.openx.org/ck.php?n=12805amp;cb=12805' target='_blank'img src='http://d.openx.org/avw.php?zoneid=861amp;cb=12805amp;n=12805' border='0' alt='' align="right" //a/p pIndividuals will have to a href="https://openid.net/foundation/members/registration"pay a $25 Foundation membership fee/a in order to vote, but this author just paid his and is looking forward to pulling the virtual voter's lever. Nominees so far are listed below./p h2What Are the Issues?/h2 pOpenID usability, getting major players to respect incoming OpenID and not just authenticate their own users elsewhere with OpenID, the personal data payload that travels with OpenID and many other difficult questions remain unanswered, despite all the progress the Foundation and other organizations have made in the last year./p pA year ago this week we wrote a post saying that a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_troubles_with_openid_20.php"OpenID was in serious trouble/a. One year later, the situation seems to have improved quite a lot. That's thanks not just to the work of the OpenID Foundation, but they deserve a large part of the credit./p pThe protocol is far from out of the woods, though, and so this election is going to be an important one./p h2Who's Been Nominated?/h2 pSo far twelve people have been nominated. Once you register as a Foundation member, you can see the nominees and their position statements. More nominations will likely occur before this weekend is over. Seven of the following twelve people will get positions on the board./p pJohannes Ernst - founder and CEO of startup a href="http://netmesh.us/"Netmesh/abr / David Recordon - is from a href="http://sixapart.com"SixApart/a and is one of the most publicly visible members of the OpenID communitybr / Mike Kirkwood - CEO of iPhone-centric medical patient data service a href="http://www.polka.com/index.php"Polka/abr / Eric Sachs - a href="http://eric.sachs.googlepages.com/"Product Manager/a at Googlebr / Snorri Giorgetti - OpenID Foundation's a href="http://www.openid2009.org/"European Representative/abr / Eran Hammer-Lahav - Open Web Evangelist at Yahoo! and a href="http://www.hueniverse.com/hueniverse/2007/10/beginners-gui-1.html"OAuth lover/abr / Allen Tom - Architect, a href="http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/10/open_id_research.html"Yahoo! Membership/abr / Scott Kveton - Current OpenID Foundation Chair and VP Open Platforms at a href="http://vidoop.com"Vidoop/abr / Nat Sakimura - a href="http://www.sakimura.org/en/modules/wordpress/"Identity tech wonk/a from Japanbr / Brian Kissel - CEO of JanRain, makers of a href="http://bkkissel.myopenid.com/"MyOpenID.com/abr / John Bradley - OpenID security wonkbr / Martin Atkins - an OpenSocial and identity a href="http://www.apparently.me.uk/"developer/a/p pWhich seven of those people do you want driving the future of the OpenID Foundation? a href="https://openid.net/foundation/members/registration"Register as a member/a, read their policy statements and you can have your hopes for this important technology paradigm recognized./p stronga href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_openid_foundation_board.php#comments-open"Discuss/a/strong pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/WmFAn7YG3ElYeQOu2yvu6K_fEoc/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~at/WmFAn7YG3ElYeQOu2yvu6K_fEoc/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=RqiiF2AL"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1035" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=rnVALbY8"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=W4ER2t1X"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=W4ER2t1X" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=RWrIlniH"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=RWrIlniH" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=KgkxmhS9"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?i=KgkxmhS9" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=6q1YC2nC"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=52" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?a=S08s96ca"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/readwriteweb?d=1034" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~4/jh4fsGzdL84" height="1" width="1"/

Motivation: DNA sequence reads from Sanger and pyrosequencing platforms differ in cost, accuracy, typical coverage, average read length and the variety of available paired-end protocols. Both read types can complement one another in a ‘hybrid’ approach to whole-genome shotgun sequencing projects, but assembly software must be modified to accommodate their different characteristics. This is true even of pyrosequencing mated and unmated read combinations. Without special modifications, assemblers tuned for homogeneous sequence data may perform poorly on hybrid data.

Results: Celera Assembler was modified for combinations of ABI 3730 and 454 FLX reads. The revised pipeline called CABOG (Celera Assembler with the Best Overlap Graph) is robust to homopolymer run length uncertainty, high read coverage and heterogeneous read lengths. In tests on four genomes, it generated the longest contigs among all assemblers tested. It exploited the mate constraints provided by paired-end reads from either platform to build larger contigs and scaffolds, which were validated by comparison to a finished reference sequence. A low rate of contig mis-assembly was detected in some CABOG assemblies, but this was reduced in the presence of sufficient mate pair data.

Availability: The software is freely available as open-source from http://wgs-assembler.sf.net under the GNU Public License.

Contact: jmiller@jcvi.org

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Expression cloning and radiotracer uptakes in Xenopus laevis oocytes

Nature Protocols 3, 1975 (2008). doi:10.1038/nprot.2008.151

Author: Daniel Markovich

This protocol describes the method of expression cloning of heterologous proteins using Xenopus laevis oocytes and the functional characterization of membrane proteins using radiotracer assays. It can be used to isolate proteins for which sequence data is unavailable and to characterize the functions of

Cryopreservation and banking of mammalian cell lines

Nature Protocols 3, 1981 (2008). doi:10.1038/nprot.2008.190

Authors: Glyn N Stacey & John R Masters

This protocol describes the principles and methods used for the preparation of cryopreserved cell stocks. Following these procedures will ensure the availability of reproducible cultures for use within a single laboratory at different times and for different collaborating laboratories. Although the basic principle is simple,