With ongoing court case battles, like with Oracle v. Google, it brings to mind: what is patentable? How did we get to this point? How can legitimate, well-intended inventors work within a legal minefield? This talk explores the breadth and history of patent law. Particularly, the talk focuses on software and software-related patents.

A Raspberry Pi is a low power $35 Linux PC the size of a deck of cards with powerful features including hardware-accelerated h.264 video playback at 1080p. In this talk, Allan will present an overview of the educational mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, available hardware variants and accessories, precompiled Linux distributions, and a live demo including a demonstration of XBMC playing back HD video.

I’ll be covering IPv6 basics and using IPv6 on Linux. You can get a 6to4 tunnel and start using IPv6 now, you don’t need to wait for your ISP. How to set up IPv6 networking. How to make some common services work with IPv6.

Kyle just got a 3d printer and loves show and tell. In this talk Kyle will give an overview of 3d printers and then dive into how to get started with 3d printers on Linux. He’ll cover some of the different software choices for firmware, slicing, and overall printer control and also discuss printer calibration, ABS vs. PLA plastic, and some of the 3d printer options out there today. He might even risk a live demo.

What is longer than a lightning talk but shorter than a normal talk? This month you’ll find out as we have two different speakers giving talks:

Mike Higgins:

Title: “Life without an Evil Cellphone Company”
Summary: Why Cellphone Companies are Evil. How I hacked a ‘Droid phone without realizing it. Using Skype and Wifi hotspots to make calls on my Droid phone without a cellphone carrier. Trouble in paradise (things are not working perfectly yet).

Jezra:

Title “Creating a media player that suits my needs”
Summary: Jezra will discuss the what, why, and how of creating media playing software that is (hopefully) suitable for a low end HTPC.

In light of February’s meeting falling on Valentine’s Day there will be NO MEETING. We will resume NBLUG meetings in March.

Instead of a regular speaker, this month we are going to do a hackfest. Like the previous hackfests we will take half of the meeting to conduct lightning talks from the first four people who sign up for one. After that we will spend the rest of the time in a more loosely-structured social setting where everyone can show each other what they have been working on or ask for help. This would be a good meeting to bring your computers.

While it is fun to learn how to hack, sometimes it’s tough to practice your skills without breaking any laws. It turns out if you have any consumer devices on your local network, you already have everything you need to practice penetration testing. In this talk I will discuss my experience with the Dlink DIR-685 Wireless N router and how with just a few basic skills I was able to find multiple exploits, including one that gave me root, all through the web interface. As I describe the attacks I’ll demonstrate the exploits with a live demo. If you’ve ever wanted to get started with penetration testing of web services, this talk with introduce you to some basic concepts you can apply to all sorts of poorly-coded PHP sites. If you are interested in how to root consumer devices that don’t already have special firmware, this talk will give you some pointers on how to break in via the web interface.

Have you been wondering what you are going to do with all those high-powered graphics cards you bought now that Bitcoins have declined in value? Why not use them to crack passwords? In this talk Kyle Rankin will discuss the basics of how to use the processing power of your graphics card to crack various types of password hashes.

We will also hold our 2011 NBLUG Board elections at this meeting to be sure to turn up and vote.

Instead of a regular speaker, this month we are going to do a hackfest. Like the previous hackfests we will take half of the meeting to conduct lightning talks from the first four people who sign up for one. After that we will spend the rest of the time in a more loosely-structured social setting where everyone can show each other what they have been working on or ask for help. This would be a good meeting to bring your computers.

Desktop, laptop, phone, tablet … car! Which OS should we run on car “in-vehicle infotainment” systems: Windows, Android, WebOS, MeeGo or a traditional embedded choice like Angstrom? What are the associated opportunities for app developers and systems programmers? Two Chinese companies, Geely and HawTai, sell cars with MeeGo pre-installs. The automotive business model diverges significantly from that of consumer electronics products, giving MeeGo some advantages over Android. Who are the players in the automotive Linux space and what are their plans? What reference hardware is suitable for testing automotive apps? I’ll describe what’s new in IVI and show a simple demo running on the Atom-based ExoPC.

Alison Chaiken is a recovering physicist who has been rendering expensive hardware inoperable in Silicon Valley since 1992, most recently at Nokia. She has recently joined Open Mobile World Wide to work on Android virtualization on Linux. Alison is on the OSCON 2012 Program Committee and solicits suggests for Linuxy presentations and activities.

In this talk I’ll describe what Bitcoin is, how and why it’s used, and how it works under the hood. I’ll also show a live demo in Linux of bitcoind, pooled mining, and Namecoin (a distributed DNS). If you are completely unfamiliar with Bitcoin there’s a short overview video at weusecoins.com - if you are familiar with Bitcoin, please feel free to speak up during a Q&A at the end!