As Gaim began life as an AIM client, there are still some parts that are somewhat AIM-centric. Currently, one of the areas most uncomfortable for users of other protocols is privacy support. Your task would be to improve Gaim's privacy support.

This job entails surveying other IM clients and determining what sort of privacy capabilities they offer, abstracting these all into a concise Gaim backend API, designing a UI capable of handling the diversity of different privacy features, then finally, implementing and documenting your work.

Some of our protocols, namely Jabber, IRC, and MSN, use SSL encryption. However, Gaim currently has no way to ensure the user that she's actually connecting to the correct server. If a malicious cracker stood between you and your Jabber server, he could trick you into thinking he was the server. You would think your messages are encrypted, but the malicious cracker could read them all.

This is solved by a system known as "certificates." An SSL certificate authenticates that the server is who it claims to be. If the user trusts the certificate, she'll know her communications are safe.

Your task this summer is to write a certificate manager for Gaim. This manager would display SSL certificates to the user and keep track of those the user has trusted. This way, the first time the user connects to a server, she'll be required to confirm the certificate is valid; subsequent connections to the same server with the same certificate will not prompt her again.

This same interface can be used elsewhere in Gaim not directly related to SSL. For instance, several third-party plugins exist to encrypt Gaim messages. These would benefit from a generic certificate manager.

There are a number of places where Gaim runs slower than it needs to, or takes up more memory than is necessary. Your task this summer is to profile Gaim, determine where it's spending most of its time and memory, and optimize in order to improve performance.

Newer features of MSN Messenger are available only in protocols greater than what Gaim currently supports. The latest version of the MSN protocol is MSNP13, used by the MSN Messenger 8.0 beta.

Your task this summer is to implement the newest MSN Messenger protocol, and as many of its features as time allows.

Gaim's current logging system is powerful and modularlly extensible, however it would benefit from added functionality. Moving searching into the logger modules, for instance, could greatly improve search performance. The log viewer should also allow you to delete logs directly from the UI. The UI for log management should be improved to reflect your design changes.