Free what enables a bird to fly software for linux

blueMarine project is about an open source workflow for digital photography.

What does it mean?

Start thinking of an opensource application like Aperture or Lightroom that enables you to organize, develop, print and publish your photos. Pretty standard stuff nowadays. Opensource, at first sight, means that the application is free. Now think of an application written with the Java™ language: the application runs everywhere, Mac OS X, Linux, Windows. Now think of a community of people that adds code, plugins, crazy ideas, integrating some of the latest, cool technologies around, such as GPS positioning or geo-mapping.

Well, this is just the core concept of the blueMarine project.

Lets go on and lets think of the workflow. For the existing commercial applications the workflow starts just after shooting the photo and ends with a print on paper, the photo archived and maybe a web gallery published.

Just for a starter, we could do these things in innovative ways. For instance, trip reports could take advantage of GPS positioning data and Google Maps. Galleries could be presented in form of a virtual 3d gallery with walls and pictures hang on them.

Thinking of it twice, there are holes in workflows supported by current commercial applications. For instance, if you want to filter your images with a sophisticated noise reduction algorithm or if you want to create a bigger composite photo out of several shots, you likely have to use an external application. Some communities, such as amateur astrophotographers, need some very special processing that is usually performed by means of specific software. Wouldnt be better to have all of these facilities integrated in a single front end?

Now, lets broaden our workflow horizon. It can extend well beyond the print or the archival. For instance, an ornithologist usually manages field notes about the bird observed and photographed: directly binding them to photos and maybe GPS positioning data is much better than keeping a separate Excel sheet. It can also start much before shooting the photo. Think of trip planning: maybe you travel to nice places and spot interesting subjects, but not all the conditions are favorable: the weather, the light, the sun position, or the season (snow, blossomed flowers, foliage colors). Maybe you take some photos but at home you decide: hey, Im going to return there next Fall when the trees are reddish. Wouldnt be cool if a software application could allow you to easily manage all of these wanna-shoot-again photos, maybe providing assistance to guess which will be the sun position in a certain day and hour and integrating weather forecasts? And synthetising a trip program that can be uploaded on your palm gear?

Theres a further point with opensource photo workflow. Its related to the world of camera raw formats, that is the way professional DSLR cameras work. They provide you with the raw bits from the sensor that need to be extensively cooked, or developed, for getting a good image. This approach gives a tremendous amount of control to the photographers - too bad that most formats are proprietary and not documented. blueMarine supports the OpenRAW initiative and provide an opensource implementation of developing tools for camera raw formats from an ever increasing number of vendors.

Well, all of this and more is the aim of the blueMarine project.

Zfone uses a new protocol called ZRTP, which is better than the other approaches to secure VoIP, because it achieves security without reliance on a PKI, key certification, trust models, certificate authorities, or key management complexity that bedevils the email encryption world.

Zfone also does not rely on SIP signaling for the key management, and in fact does not rely on any servers at all. It performs its key agreements and key management in a purely peer-to-peer manner over the RTP packet stream. It interoperates with any standard SIP phone, but naturally only encrypts the call if you are calling another ZRTP client. This new protocol has been submitted to the IETF as a proposal for a public standard, to enable interoperability of SIP endpoints from different vendors.

In the future, the ZRTP protocol will be integrated into standalone secure VoIP clients, but today we have a software product that lets you turn your existing VoIP client into a secure phone.

The current Zfone software runs in the Internet Protocol stack on any Windows XP, Mac OS X, or Linux PC, and intercepts and filters all the VoIP packets as they go in and out of the machine, and secures the call on the fly. You can use a variety of different software VoIP clients to make a VoIP call.

The Zfone software detects when the call starts, and initiates a cryptographic key agreement between the two parties, and then proceeds to encrypt and decrypt the voice packets on the fly. It has its own little separate GUI, telling the user if the call is secure. Its as if Zfone were a "bump on the cord", sitting between the VoIP client and the Internet. Think of it as a software bump-on-the-cord. Maybe a bump in the protocol stack.

There is also a ZRTP SDK for VoIP client developers to integrate this protocol into their VoIP clients, for both software and hardware VoIP clients. The software is implemented in C.