Summer of code 2010 ideas

Mark Doliner mark at kingant.net
Mon Mar 15 01:30:30 EDT 2010


On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 4:16 AM, ashish shubham <ashubham at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am a student in India and I intend to apply for a google summer of code
> 2010 project with Pidgin. I wanted to share an idea of windows like file
> share integrated with the pidgin IM client for the Gtalk protocol.
>
> I have made a webpage detailing my proposal (as the limit here was 40KB :(
> ), please give ideas and suggestions to help me formalize as a good summer
> project.
>
> the link is :
> http://cse.iitkgp.ac.in/~ashishs/test.html
>
> Thanks
> Ashish Shubham

Hi Ashish.  I think that's a cool idea.  Older AIM clients used to
have something similar, right?  Called "get file" or something?  Newer
clients might have it, too.

A few concerns:

* "The file share information can be shared via the use of special
format text recognized by the pidgin client."

I haven't spoken to other developers, but I suspect we would want this
functionality to use a more formal XMPP XEP (they may be one already)
rather than a specially formatted IM.  The XML nature of Jabber allows
for a lot of flexibility and custom add-ons--it probably doesn't make
sense to overload the meaning of IMs.

* "Security may be built by putting a password for viewing the file share."

Maybe also restrict based on JID?

* This code for this type of functionality has the potential to
contain REALLY horrible bugs.  For example, a buffer overflow that
allows an attacker skip authentication or access any file on your
system.  If you do submit a proposal for this, you may want to include
information about your knowledge of cautious network programming.

--Mark




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