Encryption is not an option but a default
13. July 2013
Actually it was a pleasure for me to see the GNOME privacy campaign being announced prior to recent developments of U.S. surveillance has become a rather big success and is heading for the 20.000$ goal quickly. However, I didn’t find much information for a roadmap about the plans to spend the money on.
There was a lot of press coverage in the last days that all the technology for encrypting your data in a way to make it much harder for secret services (and other so-called “security” agencies) is already there and that it is just missing the correct user interface. Some random ideas how I would imaging the next generation privacy desktop:
Infrastructure
GNOME has seahorse, gnome-online-accounts and gnome-keyring – I would consider this mostly done đ
Initial Setup
gnome-initial-setup should ask for your GnuPG-key before it even asks for any accounts and offer the option to create one and/or upload the public key to a popular keyserver and backup the private key somewhere. It should then automatically try to connect other accounts (e.g. Jabber) with the key. This setup step should feel more or less mandatory for the user – of course with the option to skip it.
E-Mail might not be as big for private communication anymore but it is still the way most businesses exchange data and information. For now, e-mail in GNOME is tightly connected to Evolution although, of course, it would be cool to also integrate encryption infrastructure in popular webmail services but I have not much idea if and how that would be possible.
However, lets stick to Evolution for now. Once you compose a mail Evolution would lookup the recipient(s) mail addresses locally and on a key-server probably also querying some information if PGP/MIME or S/MIME is supported. Once you click on sent and the recipients public key(s) is/are available Evolution will ask you to sent an encrypted mail (with the obvious always/never for this address/don’t bother me options). This should spread the use of encrypted messaging not only for real secrets but for any mail which will avoid the “you wouldn’t encrypt if you didn’t have anything to hide”-problem.
Chat
Empathy is the obvious choice here. All chats should be encrypted by default and I feel that the user shouldn’t even be queried if to encrypt of not because there is absolutely no reason why end-to-end encryption shouldn’t be used. Jabber supports encryption by default, it probably also works for most other jabber-based services if the client supports it but might run into problems with facebook-chat.
In addition and as a probably more educational use-case it would be cool to have a “Encrypt this chat” button that would give your chat partner hints how to configure his client to support encrypted conversations. As there are various programs for any platform that should be too difficult with a quick link to a wiki page.
Conclusion
The good thing: We are 90% there – all the technology is there, all the applications are there, it is just a matter of good user-interface design and bringing some bits together.
Some personal hint in the end: I won’t be at GUADEC this year because I planned holidays far before the final dates were announced…maybe see you all next year.
Take the roundabout twice before going ahead!
24. November 2012
From an outside view it might look pretty calm on the Anjuta development side of things but that is basically a wrong impression. There haven’t been many breath-taking feature additions recently but everybody concentrated on polishing:
- SĂ©bastien Granjoux overhauled gdl completely so the whole docking / undocking is much smoother (not only in anjuta)
- Carl-Anton Ingmarsson polished uncounted bits including usage of deprecated methods, user-interface issues and small bugs
- James Liggett took care of all the releases that I missed and on fixing the builds
- not to forget all the other people that fixed strings, translation and meta-data issues
Of course we might return with some new feature at some point and there is also a hackfest planned so stay tuned.
GUADEC – a tech conference
28. July 2012
GUADEC is a tech conference and as such it can be a very lame place to hang out if you are not bound to sitting on your laptop 24/7. Some examples:
- Horrible location:
- People failing with simplest real-life tasks:
- Beer was banned after the Istanbul boat party:
- No Beach:
- And finally still far too many unfixed bugs (waiting for you in the ocean):
Disclaimer: This posts employs irony – it has been checked with interested parties of all sex if this is funny and that was approved. If you disagree that’s ok – I don’t want to make everybody to agree with me. I especially don’t think this discriminated women in any way and I am actually glad to have seen so many female, male and other contributers during this GUADEC.
Make GNOME a more inviting place
27. July 2012
Following up to Frederico’s talk /session yesterday I created an initial wiki page to help people that want to use parts of the GNOME stack in their project to do the right thing (e.g. not fork!). I am not sure about the title yet but that was the best I could think of.
The content is still very basic – just saying what I hope we as project want and how we want to handle contributions. Feel free to change / extend / kill that page. We were even talking about a GNOME goal yesterday but somehow I think that doesn’t really fit.
Possible things we could add:
- Examples of GNOME software used elsewhere
- Best pratices when trying to do so
- etc.
GUADEC…
22. July 2012
But I have one question: What’s the best way to travel from Santiago de compostela’s airport to A Coruna? Help appreciated…there only seems to be one bus / day that I cannot catch because of flight times.
What else am I doing and why didn’t you hear much of me:
- I am working full-time building trains since a while
- I feel that life is so much more important than writing code far more often than in the past which makes me hanging around in parks much more often in sunny weather with great people
- Apart from that, I am still fixing bugs in Anjuta and maintain the whole thing. Other people work much more on this so, SĂ©bastien is fixing a lot of gdl issues and of course of GSoC-Student Moritz does a great job with refactoring and integrating clang.
- If time permits I am adding a bit more FinTS-Support to GnuCash, esspecially international transfers (mostly ready) and standing orders (planned) because I need it for banking
What’s up?
3. February 2012
So as usual I need an excuse for not blogging for so long. This times it’s work, moving to Berlin and some other things.
Anjuta
While I haven’t contributed that much code in that cycle apart from minor bug-fixing there have been a couple of nice contributions:
- SĂ©bastien Granjoux did amazing work to improve our project management which is now much easier to use and more powerful
- Marco Diego Aurélio Mesquita (what a name) improved the glade integration by allowing to automatically connect widgets and code
- But I guess I should cover all this in a “What’s new in Anjuta 3.4” post pretty soon
Gdl
The often forgotten but still heavily used docking library…Inkscape forked that library into their repository and added some fixes for them that were never magically contributed back and at some point (especially with the gtk+3.0 transition of gdl) I became very hard to merge between the projects. However, lately Alex Valavanis stepped up and ported most of the Inkscape patches back into gdl master and hopefully Inkscape will be able to use stock gdl (or probably better gdlmm) really soon.
Gnucash
As I tried to organize all my banking stuff I made some contribution to the best linux banking software in the area of HBCI/FinTS which is a german standard to securely initiate online transactions with your bank. I hope to find some time to actually implement SEPA (read EU- or international transactions using IBAN and BIC) at least originating from german accounts. But I have to think about how to compute (98 – (x mod 97)) for x being larger than a 64-bit integer and while I found some strategies on the web this was too much math for a late evening. Before you ask, this is part of the way an IBAN checksum is computed and I need this checksum because at least for Germany the IBAN can be generated as a combination of account number and bank-code.
Brno Hackfest
/me will be there saving the world or drinking beer, maybe both.
Laptop
After having been for a couple of hackfests which my much loved white netbook (read: “Oh, it’s so cute…”) I though it’s time for a real (male đ laptop. It doesn’t seem very easy to get a reasonably priced laptop without a Windows license or preferably with a preinstalled and working Linux. After some searching I ended up buying a ThinkPad Edge 320 from linux-laptop.de which arrived pretty quickly (apart from some problems with the postal service). I ordered it preinstalled with Linux Mint after having only used Fedora for a while.
The installation was complete but the fan was constantly running which annoyed me but can be fixed by installing the thinkfan utility and now things are quite again! I reported this back as I kind of assume things like that installed when I order a laptop with operating system.
Code-In time!
27. October 2011
It is time for Google Code-In again! In short, this is the little sister of Summer of Code for high-school students. Instead of one big task for a student it consists of many small tasks that can be finished in a couple of hours/days. From the experience of the last years we can expect highly motivated and skilled students there, that are eager finishing as many tasks a possible.
This is a great opportunity for GNOME to invite new contributors and it also helps us to fix all these small things we don’t have time for usually.
But…
We need tasks!
In order to participate we need to provide
at least 5 tasks in all of the 8 categories sorted by difficulty level
and therefore we have already setup a wiki page that is slowly filling up with tasks. There are categories for Code, Documentation, Outreach, Q&A, Research, Training, Translation and UI therefore everybody should be able to contribute something.
Deadline is Monday, 2011-10-31!
For more details, please check Andre’s post on DDL and if you have any questions, please ask Andre, me or preferably post on gnome-soc-list.
MontrĂ©al – shit…
8. October 2011
So the Boston Summit happens in MontrĂ©al between 8th and 10th of October and I arrive in MontrĂ©al on…11th of October…
Well, sometimes things just go wrong but I couldn’t change my travel plans easily and when I left home MontrĂ©al summit was still in planing stage.
Anyway, if somebody is still around in MontrĂ©al, drop me a note…
Leaving on a jet plane
25. July 2011
On August 3rd I will leave for a two and half months round the world journey. This is also the reason why I won’t attend Desktop Summit this year đ In case you still want to reach me there might be some chance to catch me by mail but don’t expect and immediate reply.
Some places I will visit include the Australian east-coast (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane), southern Japan (Tokia, Hiroshima, Nagasaki) and briefly the U.S. (San Francisco, Washington D.C., New York). In case you feel I should say hello to you and some point you may of course drop me a line. Interested parties might find some photos on Facebook (or Google+?) at some point.
These are my last months as an official student! In November I will start my first “real” job as a system engineer in Berlin building trams and trains!
Have a nice summer (or winter for those on the southern hemisphere)!
Opt-Out of LinkedIn
5. July 2011
As I tend to get LinkedIn invitations but are generally not interested in joining that network and/or make connections with somebody I found a good article how you can stop LinkedIn from sending you messages:
http://www.electrictoolbox.com/opting-out-linkedin-invite-emails/
I would definitly prefer if they had an opt-out link in the e-mail footer like about everybody else has but I hope this it least works. Hope this is useful for some people!