It’s winter again and it was clear that FOSDEM was coming. However, preparation fell through the cracks, at least for me, mainly because my personal life is fast-paced at the moment. We had a table again, and our EventsBox, which is filled with goodness to demo GNOME, made its way from Gothenburg, where I actually carried it to a couple of months ago.
Unfortunately though, we didn’t have t-shirts to sell. We do have boxes of t-shirts left, but they didn’t make it to FOSDEM :-\ So this FOSDEM didn’t generate nearly as much revenue as the last years. It’s a pity that this year’s preparation was suboptimal. I hope we can improve next year. Were able to get rid of other people’s things, though 😉 Like last year, the SuSE people brought beer, but it was different this time. Better, even 😉
The fact that there wasn’t as much action at our booth as last years, I could actually attend talks. I was able to see Sri and Pam talking on the Groupon incident that shook us up a couple of months ago. It was really nice to see her, because I wanted to shake hands and say thanks. She did an amazing job. Interestingly enough, she praised us, the GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors, for working very professionally. Much better than any client she has worked with. I am surprised, because I didn’t really have the feeling we were acting as promptly as we could. You know, we’re volunteers, after all. Also, we didn’t really prepare as much as we could have which led to some things being done rather spontaneously. Anyway, I take that as a compliment and I guess that our work can’t be all too bad. The talk itself showed our side of things and, if you ask me, was painting things in a too bright light. Sure, we were successful, but I attribute much of that success to network effects and a bit of luck. I don’t think we could replicate that success easily.
GNOME’s presence at FOSDEM was not too bad though, despite the lack of shirts. We had a packed beer event and more talks by GNOMEy people. The list includes Karen‘s keynote, Benzo‘s talk on SDAPDS, and Sri‘s talk on GNOME’s impact on the Free Software ecosystem. You can find more here.
A talk that I did see was on improving the keysigning situation. I really mean to write about this some more. For now, let me just say that I am pleased to see people working on solutions. Solutions to a problem I’m not sure many people see and that I want to devote some time for explaining it, i.e. in s separate post. The gist is, that contemporary “keysigning parties” come with non-negligible costs for both, the organiser and the participant. KeySigningPartyTools were presented which intend to improve they way things are currently done. That’s already quite good as it’ll reduce the number of errors people typically make when attending such a party.
However, I think that we need to rethink keysigning. Mostly, because the state of the art is a massive SecOps fail. There is about a gazillion traps to be avoided and many things don’t actually make so much sense. For example, I am unable to comprehend why we are muttering a base16 encoded version of your 160 bit fingerprint to ourselves. Or why we must queue outside in the cold without being able to jump the queue if a single person is a bit slow, because then everybody will be terribly confused and the whole thing taking even longer. Or why we need to do everything on paper (well, I know the arguments: Your computer can be hacked, be social, yadda yadda). I did actually give a talk on rethinking the keysigning problem (slides). It’s about a project that I have only briefly mentioned here and which I should really write about in the near future. GNOME Keysign intends to be less of a SecOps fail by letting the scan a barcode and click “next”. The rest will be operations known to the user such as sending an email. No more manually comparing fingerprints. No more leaking data to the Internet about who you want to contact. No more MITM attacks against your OpenPGP installation. No more short key ids that you accidentally use or because you mistyped a letter of the fingerprint. No more editing raw Perl in order to configure your keysigning tool. The talk went surprisingly well. I actually expected the people in the security devroom to be mad when someone like me is taking their perl and their command line away. I received good questions and interesting feedback. I’ll follow up here with another post once real-life lets me get to it.
Brussels itself is a very nice city. We were lucky, I guess, because we had some sunshine when we were walking around the city. I love the plethora of restaurants. And I like that Brussels is very open and cultural. Unfortunately, the makerspace was deserted when we arrived, but it is was somewhat expected as it was daytime… I hope to return again and check it out during the night 😉
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