I had to alter the MultimediaWiki permissions to disallow new user registrations. There was a curious case of vandalism that was suspected to be a bot which would register a new 6-character username and use that username once in order to either delete a large swath of text from a random wiki page or delete all the plus (+) symbols from a random wiki page. The latter vandalism could be far more damaging if left unnoticed. There might be better access control mechanisms but I wanted to cut this nuisance off quickly. I finally upgraded to the latest MediaWiki verison in the 1.6 line and am looking into a 1.9 upgrade as well. There are probably better controls in the latest line, though they are likely sparsely documented.

Every time something like this happens I always find myself wondering what the originators of the wiki concept were thinking in the first place. A wide open website where anyone can edit anything. And we’re supposed to just trust everyone to behave. At least there are trade-offs built in to the software that can be adjusted, as I did today. It just stuns me to realize how fragile the model is, how much more damage someone could do if they wanted, and what kind of measures that Wikipedia must have to take to thwart this on a larger scale.

The deadline for students to submit an application to Google’s Summer of Code, 2007 Edition looms. Tomorrow, March 24th, is it. If you are interested in participating in FFmpeg for the SoC, go here to apply. The FFmpeg project does have the qualification requirement this year. However, that does not need to be done by tomorrow. You still have about 2 weeks to complete that.

Update: As noted by Monsieur Swain in the comments, the deadline Google has extended the application deadline to March 26th.

I became curious how many other multimedia-related open source projects were competing with FFmpeg for students in Google’s Summer of Code 2007. There is quite an assortment of 3D modelers, audio editors and players, and games on the list. Among them:

• Aqsis
• Ardour
• Audacious Media Player
• Blender
• BZFlag
• CLAM
• Crystal Space
• Freevo
• GGI
• IEM – Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, Graz
• K-3D
• Mixxx
• OGRE
• Rockbox
• ScummVM
• Thousand Parsec
• VideoLAN
• Xiph
• XMMS2

As in 2006, Google has once again accepted FFmpeg as a mentoring organization in their Summer of Code. For review, this is the program that last year sponsored Kostya’s work on an open source VC-1 decoder implementation for FFmpeg. We have been signing up a great crew of mentors and have a number of interesting projects lined up on the Summer of Code 2007 page on the MultimediaWiki.

However, we on the FFmpeg project recognize that multimedia is a tough area and the summer may not provide enough time to really come up to speed on multimedia technology and complete an involved multimedia-related project. Thus, we have prepared a list of qualification tasks on the MultimediaWiki page. These are fairly straightforward mini-projects that should be simple to someone at least marginally skilled in the art. We would like to see an SoC candidate complete one of the tasks in order to qualify for a coveted SoC project. If you are interested in applying, please move quickly as the student application deadline is March 24, 2007.

If you have any questions about this, you can email me privately or subscribe and post to the ffmpeg-devel mailing list. Good luck!