Episode: 604
Title: HPR0604: Community Run Projects
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0604/hpr0604.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 23:46:56

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This is for us and today's podcast is a bit of a continuation of the last one,
the importance of community, which was Hacker Public Radio Episode 596.
One of the best ways to be part of the community is to help out with various projects.
Most of you listening are probably already active in several projects,
but for those of you who aren't, and for those of you who are looking for some new places to participate,
hopefully I can be of some help today.
The Free Rainbow Tables project is the first project I'll talk about.
What this project is doing is it's harnessing the power of the Boyk system,
which is the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing,
and it uses this system to generate rainbow tables,
which they then distribute freely to anyone who would like them.
They do this both over direct downloads and they're also utilized torrents.
Now the Boyk is a system for volunteer and grid computing.
At this time there are over 35 projects listed on Boyk's website,
but there are many more smaller projects around the web that you can find.
I'd suggest that you look into all of them,
because there are many of them that interest me, and I enjoy being a part of them.
My first experience in volunteer computing was with SETI at home around 2003,
and the idea that instead of my computer just wasting processor power that I wasn't using,
and it would use that power to solve larger problems with other volunteered computers around the world,
sounded really cool to me.
I used SETI in the beginning because that was the only project I knew about,
but Boyk ended up springing from SETI,
and it allows other people to do similar projects without having to go through all the hard work
of building the infrastructure and the underlying system.
They can just use the Boyk framework.
The reason that I mentioned the free RamboTables project specifically is because
now it's the main one that I contribute to as I use the fruit of the labor,
so everybody is doing there.
I know how hard it is to create full RamboTables individually,
so I figured that contributing to this project that will share the tables freely
with anyone who needs them is a great project to be a part of.
If you don't know what RamboTables are, Wikipedia has a good write-up explaining the theory,
but you can find the free RamboTables project at freeranbotables.com.
The next project I'd like to talk about is the archive team project,
and that's being run by Jason Scott over at textfiles.com.
You may have heard of archive team recently as they were the ones who...
they're very big on saving geo cities recently.
When Yahoo shut down geo cities, archive team worked very hard to scrape the servers
and back up as much of it as they could.
They just released a torrent of all that they saved from geo cities.
The torrent is about 690 gigabytes, and when you uncompress everything,
it comes out just under a terabyte, and one easy way you could help out with archive team
is to help seed that torrent, even if you just seed a small part of it.
But there's other ways you can help out with archive team.
If you go to archive team.org, it's a Wiki type website, and if you go to the who we are section,
you can see that they have different ways there that people can help.
They're looking for writers who can help write blog posts and write to concerned people
and to the different websites that you're thinking of removing things.
They're looking for people with lots of disk space to help mirror sites and people to help with torrents.
And then just individuals that want to download things to help keep things smeared.
And with a bunch of different projects with geo cities right now that they're looking for some help with.
If you go to the archive team website, you can contact Jason Scott and find out what you can do to help them.
If nothing else, just helping spread the word is a great thing for that in any of these other projects.
Another good project that I haven't had the fortune of being a part of yet,
but I look forward to it in the future is the security besides conferences.
From the website, I'll read, it says, each B-sides is a community driven framework for building events for and by information security community members.
The goal is to expand the spectrum of conversation beyond the traditional confines of space and time.
It creates opportunities for individuals to both present and participate in an intimate atmosphere that encourages collaboration.
It's an intensive event with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants.
It is where conversations for the next big thing are happening.
You can find out about security B-sides at securitybesides.com.
But needless to say, what it is is there's conferences all over the country and now all over the world that are B-sides.
And what they're doing is they're small, fairly informal conferences.
They'll have really good speakers and just lots of people will show up just like any of the other conferences we go to.
But it's completely community driven.
If you want to have a B-sides where you are, you can do that.
If you know anybody that wants to have a B-sides, they can do that.
And it's just a great thing that's being done now all over the world.
If you go to securitybesides.com, you can find out more about the project.
Now the next project I'd like to talk about is the Infosec Mentors project.
And the Infosec Mentors project can be found at site.infosecmentors.com.
Now the Infosec Mentors was inspired by the Mentors Workshop at Source Boston of this year.
And from the website what they say is that they hope to increase the positive impacts of mentoring relationships and the information security community.
Now security being my passion first and foremost in the computing world.
This is something that I would really love to be a part of.
I'd love to have a mentor and I do have some informal mentors.
But I really like the idea behind this one.
If you go to the website, they've got some different pages about how you can get involved and who you need to contact to become a mentor and part of the project.
So I highly suggest people do that.
A great way to get involved with your local community and not just the community at large is what the hacker space.
There's hacker spaces all over the country.
It's growing very quickly. There's new ones starting up all the time.
I know that a bunch of different websites keep track of the new ones that are starting up.
If you go to conferences, you probably hear about the new ones all the time.
But then at hackerspaces.org is a great resource for people who are looking for a hacker space or looking to start a hacker space.
There's a bunch of resources on there.
They have a list of hacker spaces that are currently running.
And just a description of what a hacker space is just in case anybody doesn't know from the hacker spaces.org website says hacker spaces or community operated physical places where people can meet and work on their projects.
This website is for anyone and everyone who wants to share with their hacker space with international hackerspaces.
And there's also some makers local groups that are very similar.
I know the guys at makers local 256 in Huntsville, Alabama.
Every con I've been to, I've talked with them a lot.
Just the sense of community that they have.
It's a great thing, not just for the community at all when you go and meet with other hacker spaces to trade ideas.
But it will help you find local people that maybe you didn't know.
It's one of those things that if you build it, they will come.
You start a hacker space and sometimes you'll find that people are coming out of the woodwork that you didn't even know were there but are interested in the same things you are.
And you can help teach other people things.
You know you'll learn from the other people and it's just all around a great idea when it's done well.
And most of the time it has been.
Some things that anybody can get involved with very easily if you have any programming experience or even if you don't or various open source projects.
You can find some on source forage, you can find some on GitHub, other sites like that.
It's just different software that's completely open source and they're looking for people all the time who, you know, you look at the source, you find bugs, you find, if you think, you know, this is a feature I'd like to have.
You code it yourself, submit it to them.
It becomes a part of the project.
And when you help out with that, you're helping everybody who uses the software, you know, whereas you might write a plugin or something for your own use.
And yes, that helps you.
But if you share it with everybody else, you've helped the community.
And a great thing that I just found out about today on Twitter from a person on Twitter when I put out a call out for some different things.
Reddit.com slash R slash code raid.
I didn't know about this before, but what it is is from the site.
It says each month, we choose one open source project and do a 24 hour bug raid fixing outstanding bugs, improving documentation, and generally being also OSS citizens.
Even if you have no coding experience, there's something for everyone.
And I was looking through the projects they have on here and they've been helping with some really big projects.
And I'm not quite sure how widespread this code raid project is, but I'd love to see it a lot bigger.
Because the first time I heard about it was today from at EMKIV2 on Twitter.
I just thought I'd do a little shout out there.
But this is something that I'm going to be looking into participating with this in the future. And I'm glad I found out about this.
Like I said, you can find them at Reddit.com slash R slash code raid.
And you can also find them on free node in IRC at the channel pound code raid.
And last but not least, there's hacker public radio, which is what you're listening to right now.
And just in case you stumbled on this podcast without knowing anything about hacker public radio, what it is is an internet radio show that releases shows.
All through the work week and it's been going for several years now.
And if you go to Stankdog's introduction to HPR, which is HPR episode one, you can find out more about what hacker public radio is.
And hacker public radio right now is really looking for more contributors.
Look, if you look at the calendar, you can see that there just really aren't many people on there right now who are who have something lined up.
And there are no there really are no rules. It's whatever you want to talk about that you think would be interesting to the hacker community.
You can talk about it. That's what I'm doing right now.
But I only see a handful of shows listed and the more the merrier new people are welcome all the time and be glad to have you.
Now, there's many other community projects all around the web all over the place.
There's different hardware hacking things like the we PS3 Xbox hacking communities.
There's the Arduino community.
Just all sorts of stuff. You can find it anywhere you ask around. You'll find something like this is just barely scratching the surface.
I wanted to highlight a few different projects around the web.
Thank you for listening. This has been hacker public radio. This is spores. You can find me on Twitter at jmstit if you'd like to talk about this some more or give me some feedback.
And that's all. Thank you.
Thank you for listening to hacker public radio.
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Thank you very much.