The telnet protocol allows you to log onto a remote computer but you should never ever use it (unless protected by a secure session/ VPN etc) because it sends passwords in clear text. That said, FTP also does the same but it's still used widely and email!

The Secure Shell (SSH) alternative to telnet was created in 1995 by Tatu Ylönen, a researcher at Helsinki University of Technology, Finland after a password sniffing attack at his university. This lead to the creation of PuTTY; one of those rare open source utilities that was created for Windows and ported to Linux/Unix systems by Simon Tatham, an English developer who created NASM, the Netwide Assembler. The C games source code library has some of his puzzles.

The PuTTY suite consists of

• PuTTY (the Telnet and SSH client itself)
• PSCP (an SCP client, i.e. command-line secure file copy)
• PSFTP (an SFTP client, i.e. general file transfer sessions much like FTP)
• PuTTYtel (a Telnet-only client)
• Plink (a command-line interface to the PuTTY back ends)
• Pageant (an SSH authentication agent for PuTTY, PSCP and Plink)
• PuTTYgen (an RSA and DSA key generation utility).

• Link to C Code Library
• Link to C Games Code Library

• Link to Programming Challenge Twenty Nine Manage the Hunters

As part of the Chromium project Google is releasing an Operating System. This is based on Linux however it is highly secured so the only applications that can run on it are web apps. Does this include Flash or Silverlight? Its meant for people who spend their time browsing the web, not writing applications. Thus it's not a challenge to Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. Cynics of course cite the analogy of the original iPhone which didn't run Apps locally and look what happened with the App store and the 2nd generation iPhones which took off.

In that sense Chrome OS is like the Android phones which could only run Java applications though Google did subsequently publish a native NDK which let developers write part of their apps in C or C++. So Goolge Chrome OS could spur development in Silverlight.

The design docs make for an interesting read particularly about system security. This has been a key element with the Google Chrome browser and they're using lessons learned from that. Trying to keep the user safe on the web is a challenging problem, though easier for Chrome OS devices as the underlying Linux has been hardened. This make it very difficult for malware to get on the device and even if that happens, it will be unable to do very much. This is defense in depth, much like very large military bases that have an outer fence and then extra defenses around each of the installations within the base.

• Silverlight 2 source code library

One of the most ingenious web sites (in Flash) is Zoomii.com which lets you visually browse 32,000 book covers from Amazon and then view the book details. It solves a fundamental problem: how do you browse books on the web (instead of searching) like you would walking around a bookshop?