Have you ever wanted to call your friend's home phone from your computer? You Will! And SigNET is going to bring it to you. SigNET, the Special Interest Group for Computer Networking and Security has finalized its idea for this year's Engineering Open House. We will be writing an application that will allow you to connect to a server which will dial a local phone number for you and digitize the audio for transmision over the Internet. Your computer will then play it through a speaker and allow you to talk into a microphone.

In other news, SigNET had just finished its introductory workshop series: an overview of the TCP/IP networking protocols, as well as an introduction to socket programming on UNIX based platforms. Our members can now write chat programs and muds, among other client-server applications.

We are also looking into soliciting firewall companies to loan their products to us so that we can setup and test the firewall systems.

If you have any interest in computer networking or security please feel free to stop on by to one of our meetings. New members are very welcome. We are a group dedicated to aquiring and spreading knowledge. We meet every wednesday at 7pm in 1330 DCL. Our web site is http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/signet/ If you have any questions please mail signet@uiuc.edu. I look forward to seeing you at our next meeting.