Free communications software for linux

Rapid Application Development Library 2.8.3 is yet another excellent utility you should not miss. It is actually a C language library developed to abstract details of interprocess communications and common linux/unix system facilities so that application developers can concentrate on application solutions. It encourages developers (whether expert or novice) to use a proven paradigm of event-driven, asynchronous design. By abstracting interprocess messaging, events, timers, and any I/O device that can be represented as a file descriptor, radlib simplifies the implementation of multi-purpose processes, as well as multi-process applications.

Radlib greatly improves typical process performance through the use of shared memory buffers to avoid costly "malloc" and "free" library calls. These buffers are used for interprocess messages. radlib utilizes shared memory constructs to provide global message queue management and global "Queue Groups" for increased interprocess communications flexibility. All shared resources are semaphore protected to avoid issues with concurrent access.

In short, radlib is a sincere attempt to provide real-time OS capability on a non-real-time OS. It has been successfully deployed on linux, MacOSX and FreeBSD but there is no reason it would not build and run on any flavor of unix supporting System V IPC.

Specifically, radlib provides fast system buffers, a simple config file utility, events, doubly-linked lists, process logging through syslog, message queues, semaphores, shared memory utilities, timers, stacks, state machine utilities, a process framework, a process management utility to start/stop groups of processes, optional MySQL or PostgreSQL database API, a straightforward TCP/streams socket API, a UDP/datagram unicast/multicast/broadcast API, CRC and SHA utility APIs, and other assorted system utilities.

An example application template is provided in the distribution (see the "Example Application Template" link in the left column of this page). The template example serves two purposes: it demonstrates, through source code inspection, how a well constructed radlib process is implemented and it provides an example build environment with the capability for someone new to radlib to build and execute an example application "right out of the box".

Proprietary forms of radlib have been used in several mission-critical commercial applications with excellent results. It is light yet very powerful and efficient in real time. radlib is BSD-licensed (free to use in binary or source forms) and distributed as source to be built on the target platform. Build instructions are included in the distribution. See the file "COPYING" in the distribution for details concerning open source software and the BSD license.

HTTPTunnel is a simple client/server application for creating an HTTP tunnel between two machines, optionally via a Web proxy.
This is a small application for tunnelling an arbitrary TCP socket connection over HTTP. It can be used, for example, to tunnel traffic out from behind a restrictive firewall that only allows outgoing HTTP web connections.
The basic idea is that you run an instance of the HTTP Tunnel application locally in client mode, that then connects out to another instance that you run at the remote end of the tunnel in server mode.
You then connect to the local client end of the tunnel with the application whose traffic you wish to tunnel, and all communications are then wrapped in HTTP. The tunnel may also go via a HTTP proxy, either explicitly or transparently.
Enhancements:
- This release includes some major bugfixes and improvements in the tunneling error detection and retransmission code.
- It also introduces support for building and running under Cygwin.

Apple Disk Transfer ProDOS (or ADTPro for short) transfers diskettes and logical disk images between Apple ][-era computers and the modern world. If youre familiar with the original ADT, ADTPro extends ADTs reach by working with more logical disk formats, drive types, communications devices, and host operating systems.
Main features:
- Compatibility with any device ProDOS can read
- Compatibility with any Apple ][ (or clone) computer with 64k memory
- Compatibility with many logical disk image formats: .DSK, .PO, .NIB, 2IMG
- Server compatibility with original ADT client program
- Server compatibility with Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and probably Solaris
- Ability to bootstrap an Apple ][ from bare metal over serial or cassette ports
- Ability to send floppies in "batch" mode without having to name each one
Server
The server program runs on a computer capable of running Java. Depending on how you want to connect to your Apple, you might also need a serial port and cables, an Uthernet card for your apple, or a couple of audio patch cables. The server offers a compact user interface that shows what communications are taking place between the host and the Apple ][.
The servers primary role is to send and receive disk images as requested from the client. But if you have recently acquired an Apple and a disk drive, and you have no software for it - youre in a bit of a tricky situation if you want to move software from the Internet all the way to your shiny new Apple. ADTPros server can help get you get bootstrapped.
Client
The client side runs on the Apple ][. It handles most of the user interaction. When choosing disks/volumes to transfer, anything that ProDOS can see is fair game. Transferring data occurs with a 20k buffer on the Apple, so all transfers are broken up into 20k chunks. A progress indicator shows how far it is into the current chunk, as well as a running count of the total progress.
Enhancements:
- This release has been enhanced with Jean-Marc Boutillon (Deckard)s FASTDSK fast Disk II reading routines.
- This results in a speed boost of 25%-33% for Disk II to host transfers.
- Bootstrapping operations have been reduced, as there is no longer a dependency on ProDOS BASIC.

Genoa Active Message MAchine is a low-latency, high-throughput driver wrapper for the Linux kernel, using Active Ports (a version of Active Messages).
Genoa Active Message MAchine runs parallel to the IP stack and is designed for LANs only.
Main features:
- A low latency, high throughput communication system for clusters of PCs
- Supports both single and dual CPU processing nodes (Intel IA-32 or x86_64)
- Runs on Gigabit Ethernet
- SPMD parallel processing with message passing
- Can run IP traffic when not in use
- Good programmability thanks to fairly high abstraction level
- Reliable thanks to mechanisms for retransmission of missing packets
- Implemented as a network device driver for Linux 2.6, and released under GNU GPL
Network Of Workstations (NOWs) and clusters of PCs interconnected by modern, industry-standard LAN fabrics (Gigabit Ethernet, Myrinet, SCI) and running the Linux operating system, have became an attractive and cost-effective architecture for parallel and distributed applications. The usual drawback of a standard PC cluster is the poor performance of the support to inter-process communication over the interconnect. Current implementations of industry-standard communication primitives, APIs, and protocols, usually show high communication latencies and low communication throughput.
We have developed a system for inter-process communication, called the Genoa Active Message MAchine (GAMMA). GAMMA runs on Linux clusters of PCs with Intel IA-32 processors (Intel Pentium, AMD K6, and superior models), or x86_64 processors (AMD Athlon64, AMD Opteron, Intel EMT-64), networked by a Gigabit Ethernet.
The core of GAMMA is a custom Linux network device driver, which operates the Network Interface Card (NIC). The GAMMA driver delivers low latency, high throughput communication services based on Active Ports, a mechanism derived from Active Messages. Both point-to-point and broadcast communications are provided. Broadcast communication exploits the Ethernet broadcast directly.
The GAMMA driver is able to manage standard IP traffic as long as no parallel job is running. Therefore, all IP services are up and running whenever the cluster is not in use by any parallel job.
The communication mechanisms implemented in the GAMMA driver are made available to application writers through the GAMMA user library. The GAMMA library provides support to application launch, process grouping, point-to-point/broadcast communications based on the Active Ports mechanisms, and some collective routines (barrier synchronization, and broadcast).
GAMMA provides two levels of QoS. The lower one, corresponding to the fastest communications, is a best-effort service. With this service, network congestion and ``hot spots may cause the receiver NIC or even the LAN switch to loose packets by overrun. The other QoS level provides flow-controlled communication, ensuring reliability up to hardware faults, at a negligible performance penalty.
Installing the GAMMA driver requires only two small and marginal patches to the original Linux kernel. The Linux kernel extended by the GAMMA driver must be installed on each PC in the cluster.
A porting of MPI atop GAMMA is available, called MPI/GAMMA.

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improve their safety and security on the Internet.
Using Tor can help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor also provides a platform on which software developers can build new applications with built-in anonymity, safety, and privacy features.
Your traffic is safer when you use Tor, because communications are bounced around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers. Instead of taking a direct route from source to destination, data packets on the Tor network take a random pathway through several servers that cover your tracks so no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from or where its going.
This makes it hard for recipients, observers, and even the onion routers themselves to figure out who and where you are. Tors technology aims to provide Internet users with protection against "traffic analysis," a form of network surveillance that threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security.
Traffic analysis is used every day by companies, governments, and individuals that want to keep track of where people and organizations go and what they do on the Internet. Instead of looking at the content of your communications, traffic analysis tracks where your data goes and when, as well as how much is sent.
For example, online advertising companies like Fastclick and Doubleclick uses traffic analysis to record what web pages youve visited, and can build a profile of your interests from that. A pharmaceutical company could use traffic analysis to monitor when the research wing of a competitor visits its website, and track what pages or products that interest the competitor.
IBM hosts a searchable patent index, and it could keep a list of every query your company makes. A stalker could use traffic analysis to learn whether youre in a certain Internet cafe.
Tor aims to make traffic analysis more difficult by preventing eavesdroppers from finding out where your communications are going online, and by letting you decide whether to identify yourself when you communicate.
Tors security is improved as its user base grows and as more people volunteer to run servers. Please consider installing it and then helping out. You can also learn more about Tor here.
Part of the goal of the Tor project is to deploy a public testbed for experimenting with design trade-offs, to teach us how best to provide privacy online. We welcome research into the security of Tor and related anonymity systems, and want to hear about any vulnerabilities you find.
Tor is an important piece of building more safety, privacy, and anonymity online, but it is not a complete solution. And remember that this is development code?its not a good idea to rely on the current Tor network if you really need strong anonymity.
Whats New in 0.1.2.16 Stable Release:
- This release fixes a critical security vulnerability that allowed a remote attacker in certain situations to rewrite the users torrc configuration file. This could completely compromise anonymity of users in most configurations, including those running the Vidalia bundles, TorK, etc.
Whats New in 0.2.0.2 Alpha Development Release:
- This release provide new features for people running Tor as both a client and a server.
- Tor may now be run as a DNS proxy.

Cream is designed to meet the unique demands publishers have, including features that allow subscription management, support for multiple products (print subscriptions, advertising, online subscriptions, books, etc.), customer communications (both incoming and outgoing), and easy-to-use reporting and analytical functions.
The project also enables publishers to track special offers, such as seasonal discounts and trade shows. With Cream, media organizations can put their business data to work, increasing sales and customer satisfaction. It allows employees to have up-to-date information throughout the sales cycle, and lets managers have greater insight into sales patterns.
Main features:
- receiving e-mails functionality (text and HTML)
- sending HTML emails
- editing HTML emails with a WYSIWYG HTML editor
- newletter subscriptions for anonymous users
- external HTML forms for newsletter subcribe and unsubscribe
- sending HTML newsletters
- editing HTML newsletters with WYSIWYG HTML editor
- powerful filter for sending newsletters to either newsletter subscribers or all customers based on type, category, product, campaign...
- Import of products and customers
- Communication and Sales tabs in user interface
- completely localizable user interface
- localizations to Dutch, German, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian and Serbian languages
- Home page with shortcut and summary links
- Help page with FAQ, Support and Forum links
- Cream now works on Windows too
Enhancements:
- This version works with MySQL database and features new functionality for contacts, opportunity and task management, external HTML forms for support and information requests, CMS integration, and many new fields and options.