I'm curious as to what's happened in the past five months, with regards to the Skype protocol. I know that in July, a talented reverse engineer did what those before him didn't want to bother with (PDF, slide 52/72) and reimplemented the seed-to-RC4-key function (the core of Skype obfuscation/encrypted messages) in nearly 3000 lines of C. He was supposed to present at 27c3, but apparently didn't. The code, however, is still out there.
As a major fan of open-source software, I'm wondering: has anyone bothered documenting the (current) Skype protocol? I'd love to see a free/open-source implementation of the Skype protocol, say, for Telepathy. If the docs exist out there somewhere, then it shouldn't be terribly hard to write - Telepathy was made to be quite flexible. If, on the other hand, the protocol is still undocumented, well, maybe I have a good semester project. How to construe this as a computer security project...hrm.
Switching topics: the GNOME 3 website has launched. I can't help but read down the feature list and think "wow, KDE's had that for X releases!"
Activities? Plasma has had these for years. Notifications system? KDE led the design of the freedesktop.org spec that's in use by all. And it ships in 4.5. Keyboard launch/switch? See KRunner and its multitude of searchable capabilities. System settings? Let's not go there again. Window tiling? Shipped in KDE 4.5; now I can't operate efficiently without it. Netbook interface? Marco Martin did that in time for KDE 4.4. Dark application themes? Is that even a feature? (If it is, KDE's had the Obsidian Coast theme since at least 2006.)
I'm not saying that GNOME isn't an awesome software project; it absolutely is, and provides a ton of people with exactly what they want and need. I'm just noting that KDE is the innovation powerhouse and ships good ideas, despite its comparable lack of commercial funding.