Poupou's Corner of the Web

Stuart has released version 0.20 of NRobot. This is the first version to use a sandbox to execute the bots (which are limited to the Internet permission set, minus the ability to call back "home"). So now instead of specific tests and unit tests I can now produce my own bad robots ;-).

Although limited support (but enough for NRobot needs) for sandboxing is present in Mono's SVN, the NRobot sandboxing feature won't work today (but you can still enjoy it using the --insecure switch of NRobot assembly). The first (of probably many) problem is that Mono isn't shipping any policy files, so the Internet NamedPermissionSet doesn't map to anything useful (in fact you'll get an exception about this).

Anyway I hope to fix most problems NRobot exhibit on Mono very soon as this will make a good test for the work I've been doing (and somehow I don't feel my own tests are enough ;-). Note that this won't make executing non-trusted bots secure because very few permissions are present (i.e. enforced) in the class librairies. This will be true for a long time (i.e. until they are all present, audited and a bunch of other things) but each passing day should make it a little better - and more visual.

Thanks Stuart and good luck. We wish you, and your family, well!

P.S. On a more positive note both the Gtk# and the System.Windows.Forms versions of NRobot works well with Mono :-).

I haven't had much time to hack on the two past weekends, so there is no new graphics to show. However I did take the time to commit my old ASN.1 viewer in SVN. It didn't change much in the last few months but, since the last screenshot, it does have a not so new but nice feature: a FireFox-like find bar :-).