muellis blog – Page 6 – …und alle so “Yeaahh!”

Open Source Hong Kong 2015

Recently, I’ve been to Hong Kong for Open Source Hong Kong 2015, which is the heritage of the GNOME.Asia Summit 2012 we’ve had in Hong Kong. The organisers apparently liked their experience when organising GNOME.Asia Summit in 2012 and continued to organise Free Software events. When talking to organisers, they said that more than 1000 people registered for the gratis event. While those 1000 were not present, half of them are more realistic.

Olivier from Amazon Web Services Klein was opening the conference with his keynote on Big Data and Open Source. He began with a quote from RMS: about the “Free” in Free Software referring to freedom, not price. He followed with the question of how does Big Data fit into the spirit of Free Software. He answered shortly afterwards by saying that technologies like Hadoop allow you to mess around with large data sets on commodity hardware rather than requiring you to build a heavy data center first. The talk then, although he said it would not, went into a subtle sales pitch for AWS. So we learned about AWS’ Global Infrastructure, like how well located the AWS servers are, how the AWS architecture helps you to perform your tasks, how everything in AWS is an API, etc. I wasn’t all too impressed, but then he demoed how he uses various Amazon services to analyse Twitter for certain keywords. Of course, analysing Twitter is not that impressive, but being able to do that within a few second with relatively few lines of code impressed me. I was also impressed by his demoing skills. Of course, one part of his demo failed, but he was reacting very professionally, e.g. he quickly opened a WiFi hotspot on his phone to use that as an alternative uplink. Also, he quickly grasped what was going on on his remote Amazon machine by quickly glancing over netstat and ps output.

The next talk I attended was on trans-compiling given by Andi Li. He was talking about Haxe and how it compiles to various other languages. Think Closure, Scala, and Groovy which all compile to Java bytecode. But on steroids. Haxe apparently compiles to code in another language. So Haxe is a in a sense like Emcripten or Vala, but a much more generic source-to-source compiler. He referred about the advantages and disadvantages of Haxe, but he lost me when he was saying that more abstraction is better. The examples he gave were quite impressive. I still don’t think trans-compiling is particularly useful outside the realm of academic experiments, but I’m still intrigued by the fact that you can make use of Haxe’s own language features to conveniently write programs in languages that don’t provide those features. That seems to be the origin of the tool: Flash. So unless you have a proper language with a proper stdlib, you don’t need Haxe…

From the six parallel tracks, I chose to attend the one on BDD in Mediawiki by Baochuan Lu. He started out by providing his motivation for his work. He loves Free/Libre and Open Source software, because it provides a life-long learning environment as well as a very supportive community. He is also a teacher and makes his students contribute to Free Software projects in order to get real-life experience with software development. As a professor, he said, one of his fears when starting these projects was being considered as the expert™ although he doesn’t know much about Free Software development. This, he said, is shared by many professors which is why they would not consider entering the public realm of contributing to Free Software projects. But he reached out to the (Mediawiki) community and got amazing responses and an awful lot of help.
He continued by introducing to Mediawiki, which, he said, is a platform which powers many Wikimedia Foundation projects such as the Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and others. One of the strategies for testing the Mediawiki is to use Selenium and Cucumber for automated tests. He introduced the basic concepts of Behaviour Driven Development (BDD), such as being short and concise in your test cases or being iterative in the test design phase. Afterwards, he showed us how his tests look like and how they run.

The after-lunch talk titled Data Transformation in Camel Style was given by Red Hat’s Roger Hui and was concerned with Apache Camel, an “Enterprise Integration” software. I had never heard of that and I am not much smarter know. From what I understood, Camel allows you to program message workflows. So depending on the content of a message, you can make it go certain ways, i.e. to a file or to an ActiveMQ queue. The second important part is data transformation. For example, if you want to change the data format from XML to JSON, you can use their tooling with a nice clicky pointy GUI to drag your messages around and route them through various translators.

From the next talk by Thomas Kuiper I learned a lot about Gandi, the domain registrar. But they do much more than that. And you can do that with a command line interface! So they are very tech savvy and enjoy having such customers, too. They really seem to be a cool company with an appropriate attitude.

The next day began with Jon’s Kernel Report. If you’re reading LWN then you haven’t missed anything. He said that the kernel grows and grows. The upcoming 4.2 kernel, probably going to be released on August 23rd. might very well be the busiest we’ve seen with the most changesets so far. The trend seems to be unstoppable. The length of the development cycle is getting shorter and shorter, currently being at around 63 days. The only thing that can delay a kernel release is Linus’ vacation… The rate of volunteer contribution is dropping from 20% as seen for 2.6.26 to about 12% in 3.10. That trend is also continuing. Another analysis he did was to look at the patches and their timezone. He found that that a third of the code comes from the Americas, that Europe contributes another third, and so does Australasia. As for Linux itself, he explained new system calls and other features of the kernel that have been added over the last year. While many things go well and probably will continue to do so, he worries about the real time Linux project. Real time, he said, was the system reacting to an external event within a bounded time. No company is supporting the real time Linux currently, he said. According to him, being a real time general purpose kernel makes Linux very attractive and if we should leverage that potential. Security is another area of concern. 2014 was the year of high profile security incidents, like various Bash and OpenSSL bugs. He expects that 2015 will be no less interesting. Also because the Kernel carries lots of old and unmaintained code. Three million lines of code haven’t been touch in at least ten years. Shellshock, he said, was in code more than 20 years old code. Also, we have a long list of motivated attackers while not having people working on making the Kernel more secure although “our users are relying on us to keep them safe in a world full of threats”

The next presentation was given by Microsoft on .NET going Open Source. She presented the .NET stack which Microsoft has open sourced at the end of last year as well as on Visual Studio. Their vision, she said, is that Visual Studio is a general purpose IDE for every app and every developer. So they have good Python and Android support, she said. A “free cross platform code editor” named Visual Studio Code exists now which is a bit more than an editor. So it does understand some languages and can help you while debugging. I tried to get more information on that Patent Grant, but she couldn’t help me much.

There was also a talk on Luwrain by Michael Pozhidaev which is GPLv3 software for blind people. It is not a screen reader but more of a framework for writing software for blind people. They provide an API that guarantees that your program will be accessible without the application programmer needing to have knowledge of accessibility technology. They haven’t had a stable release just yet, but it is expected for the end of 2015. The demo unveiled some a text oriented desktop which reads out text on the screen. Several applications already exist, including a file editor and a Twitter client. The user is able to scroll through the text by word or character which reminded of ChorusText I’ve seen at GNOME.Asia Summit earlier this year.

I had the keynote slot which allowed me to throw out my ideas for the future of the Free Software movement. I presented on GNOME and how I see that security and privacy can make a distinguishing feature of Free Software. We had an interesting discussion afterwards as to how to enable users to make security decisions without prompts. I conclude that people do care about creating usable secure software which I found very refreshing.

Both the conference and Hong Kong were great. The local team did their job pretty well and I am proud that the GNOME.Asia Summit in Hong Kong inspired them to continue doing Free Software events. I hope I can be back soon 🙂

GNOME.Asia Summit 2015 in Depok, Indonesia

I have just returned from the GNOME.Asia Summit 2015 in Depok, Indonesia.

Out of the talks, the most interesting talk I have seen, I think, was the one from Iwan S. Tahari, the manager of a local shoe producer who also sponsored GNOME shoes!

“Open Source Software in Shoes Industry” was the title and he talked about how his company, FANS Shoes, est 2001, would use “Open Source”. They are also a BlankOn Linux partner which seems to be a rather big thing in Indonesia. In fact, the keynote presentation earlier was on that distribution and mentioned how they try to make it easier for people of their culture to contribute to Free Software.
Anyway, the speaker went on to claim that in Indonesia, they have 82 million Internet users out of which 69 million use Facebook. But few use “Open Source”, he asserted. The machines sold ship with either Windows or DOS, he said. He said that FANS preferred FOSS because it increased their productivity, not only because of viruses (he mentioned BRONTOK.A as a pretty annoying example), but also because of the re-installation time. To re-install Windows costs about 90 minutes, he said. The average time to install Blank On (on an SSD), was 15 minutes. According to him, the install time is especially annoying for them, because they don’t have IT people on staff. He liked Blank On Linux because it comes with “all the apps” and that there is not much to install afterwards. Another advantage he mentioned is the costs. He estimated the costs of their IT landscape going Windows to be 136,57 million Rupees (12000 USD). With Blank On, it comes down to 0, he said. That money, he can now spend on a Van and a transporter scooter instead. Another feature of his GNU/Linux based system, he said, was the ability to cut the power at will without stuff breaking. Indonesia, he said, is known for frequent power cuts. He explicitly mentioned printer support to be a major pain point for them.

When they bootstrapped their Free Software usage, they first tried to do Dual Boot for their 5 employees. But it was not worth their efforts, because everybody selected Windows on boot, anyway. They then migrated the accounting manager to a GNU/Linux based operating system. And that laptop still runs the LinuxMint version 13 they installed… He mentioned that you have to migrate top down, never from bottom to top, so senior management needs to go first. Later Q&A revealed that this is because of cultural issues. The leaders need to set an example and the workers will not change unless their superiors do. Only their RnD department was hard to migrate, he said, because they need to be compatible to Corel Draw. With the help of an Indonesian Inkscape book, though, they managed to run Inkscape. The areas where they lack support is CAD (think AutoCAD), Statistics (think SPSS), Kanban information system (like iceScrum), and integration with “Computer Aided Machinery”. He also identified the lack of documentation to be a problem not only for them, but for the general uptake of Free Software in Indonesia. In order to amend the situation, they provide gifts for people writing documentation or books!

All in all, it was quite interesting to see an actual (non-computer) business running exclusively on Free Software. I had a chat with Iwan afterwards and maybe we can get GNOME shaped flip-flops in the future 🙂

The next talk was given by Ahmad Haris with GNOME on an Android TV Dongle. He brought GNOME to those 30 USD TV sticks that can turn your TV into a “smart” device. He showed various commands and parameters which enable you to run Linux on these devices. For the reasons as to why put GNOME on those devices, he said, that it has a comparatively small memory footprint. I didn’t really understand the motivation, but I blame mostly myself, because I don’t even have a TV… Anyway, bringing GNOME to more platforms is good, of course, and I was happy to see that people are actively working on bringing GNOME to various hardware.

Similarly, Running GNOME on a Nexus 7 by Bin Li was presenting how he tried to make his Android tabled run GNOME. There is previous work done by VadimRutkovsky:

He gave instructions as to how to create a custom kernel for the Nexus 7 device. He also encountered some problems, such as compilations errors, and showed how he fixed them. After building the kernel, he installed Arch-Linux with the help of some scripts. This, however, turned out to not be successful, so he couldn’t run his custom Arch Linux with GNOME.
He wanted to have a tool like “ubuntu-device-flash” such that hacking on this device is much easier. Also, downloading and flashing a working image is too hard for casually hacking on it, he said.

A presentation I was not impressed by was “In-memory computing on GNU/Linux”. More and more companies, he said, would be using in-memory computing on a general operating system. Examples of products which use in-memory computing were GridGain, SAP HANA, IBM DB2, and Oracle 12c. These products, he said, allow you to make better and faster decision making and to avoid risks. He also pointed out that you won’t have breaking down hard-drives and less energy consumption. While in-memory is blazingly fast, all your data is lost when you have a power failure. The users of big data, according to him, are businesses, academics, government, or software developers. The last one surprised me, but he didn’t go into detail as to why it is useful for an ordinary developer. The benchmarks he showed were impressive. Up to hundred-fold improvements for various tests were recorded in the in-memory setting compared to the traditional on-disk setting. The methodology wasn’t comprehensive, so I am yet not convinced that the convoluted charts show anything useful. But the speaker is an academic, so I guess he’s got at least compelling arguments for his test setup. In order to build a Linux suitable for in-memory computation, they installed a regular GNU/Linux on a drive and modify the boot scripts such that the disk will be copied into a tmpfs. I am wondering though, wouldn’t it be enough to set up a very aggressive disk cache…?

I was impressed by David’s work on ChorusText. I couldn’t follow the talk, because my Indonesian wasn’t good enough. But I talked to him privately and he showed me his device which, as far as I understand, is an assistive screen reader. It has various sliders with tactile feedback to help you navigating through text with the screen reader. Apparently, he has low vision himself so he’s way better suited to tell whether this device is useful. For now, I think it’s great and I hope that it helps more people and that we can integrate it nicely into GNOME.

My own keynote went fairly well. I spent my time with explaining what I think GNOME is, why it’s good, and what it should become in the future. If you know GNOME, me, and my interests, then it doesn’t come as a surprise that I talked about the history of GNOME, how it tries to bring Free computing to everyone, and how I think security and privacy will going to matter in the future. I tried to set the tone for the conference, hoping that discussions about GNOME’s future would spark in the coffee breaks. I had some people discussing with afterwards, so I think it was successful enough.

When I went home, I saw that the Jakarta airport runs GNOME 3, but probably haven’t done that for too long, because the airport’s UX is terrible. In fact, it is one of the worst ones I’ve seen so far. I arrived at the domestic terminal, but I didn’t know which one it was, i.e. its number. There were no signs or indications that tell you in which terminal you are in. Let alone where you need to go to in order to catch your international flight. Their self-information computer system couldn’t deliver. The information desk was able to help, though. The transfer to the international terminal requires you to take a bus (fair enough), but whatever the drivers yell when they stop is not comprehensible. When you were lucky enough to get out at the right terminal, you needed to have a printed version of your ticket. I think the last time I’ve seen this was about ten years ago in Mumbai. The airport itself is big and bulky with no clear indications as to where to go. Worst of all, it doesn’t have any air conditioning. I was not sure whether I had to pay the 150000 Rupees departure tax, but again, the guy at the information desk was able to help. Although I was disappointed to learn that they won’t take a credit card, but cash only. So I drew the money out of the next ATM that wasn’t broken (I only needed three attempts). But it was good to find the non-broken ATM, because the shops wouldn’t take my credit card, either, so I already knew where to get cash from. The WiFi’s performance matches the other airport’s infrastructure well: It’s quite dirty. Because it turned out that the information the guy gave me was wrong, I invested my spare hundred somewhat thousands rupees in dough-nuts in order to help me waiting for my 2.5 hours delayed flight. But I couldn’t really enjoy the food, because the moment I sat on any bench, cockroaches began to invade the place. I think the airport hosts the dirtiest benches of all Indonesia. The good thing is, that they have toilets. With no drinkable water, but at least you can wash your hands. Fortunately, my flight was only two hours late, so I could escape relatively quickly. I’m looking forward to going back, but maybe not via CGK 😉

All in all, many kudos to the organisers. I think this year’s edition was quite successful.

AMCIS Towards inter-organizational Enterprise Architecture Management – Applicability of TOGAF 9.1 for Network Organizations

First of all, there is a LaTeX template for the ACMIS conference now. I couldn’t believe that those academics use Word to typeset their papers. I am way too lazy to use Word so I decided to implement their (incomplete and somewhat incoherent) style guide as a LaTeX class. I guess it was an investment but it paid off the moment we needed to compile our list of references. Because, well, we didn’t have to do it… Our colleagues used Word and they spent at least a day to double check whether references are coherent. Not fun. On the technical side: Writing LaTeX classes is surprisingly annoying. The infrastructure is very limited. Everything feels like a big hack. Managing control flow, implementing data structures, de-duplicating code… How did people manage to write all these awesome LaTeX packages without having even the very basic infrastructure?!

As I promised in a recent post, I am coming back to literature databases. We wrote a literature review and thus needed to query databases. While doing the research I took note of some features and oddities and to save some souls from having to find out all that manually, I want to provide my list of these databases. One of my requirements was to export to a sane format. Something text based, well defined, easy to parse. The export shall include as much meta-data as possible, like keywords, citations, and other simple bibliographic data. Another requirement was the ability to deep link to a search. Something simple, you would guess. But many fall short. Not only do I want the convenience of not having to enter rather complex search queries manually (again), I also want to collaborate. And sending a link to results is much easier than exchanging instructions as to where to click.

Proquest
- Export to RIS with keywords
- Deeplink is hidden, after “My Searches” and “actions”
Palgrave
- Export as CSV: Title, Subtitle, Authors/Editors, Publication, Date, Online, Date, Ebook, Collection, Journal, Title, ISBN13, ISSN, Content Type, URL
- No ability to link to a search
Wiley
- Export possible (BibTex, others), with keywords, but limited to 20 at a time
- Link to Search not possible
JSTOR
- Deeplinks to a search are possible (just copy the URL)
- Export works (BibTeX, RIS), but not with keywords
EBSCO
- Link to search a bit hidden via “Share”
- No mass export of search results. Individual records can be exported.
bepress
- Linking to a search is possible
- Export not possible directly, but via other bepress services, such as AISNet. But then it’s hidden behind “show search”, then “advanced search” and then you can select “Bibliography Export” (Endote)
Science Direct
- Not possible to link to a search. But one can create an RSS feed.
- But it export with Keywords
Some custom web interface
- Export with Keywords: ?
- link to a search

On the paper (pdf link) itself: It’s called “Towards inter-organizational Enterprise Architecture Management – Applicability of TOGAF 9.1 for Network Organizations” and we investigated what problems the research community identified for modern enterprises and how well an EAM framework catered for those needs.

The abstract is as follows:

Network organizations and inter-organizational systems (IOS) have recently been the subjects of extensive research and practice.
Various papers discuss technical issues as well as several complex business considerations and cultural issues. However, one interesting aspect of this context has only received adequate coverage so far, namely the ability of existing Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) frameworks to address the diverse challenges of inter-organizational collaboration. The relevance of this question is grounded in the increasing significance of IOS and the insight that many organizations model their architecture using such frameworks. This paper addresses the question by firstly conducting a conceptual literature review in order to identify a set of challenges. An EAM framework was then chosen and its ability to address the challenges was evaluated. The chosen framework is The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) 9.1 and the analysis conducted with regard to the support of network organizations highlights which issues it deals with. TOGAF serves as a good basis to solve the challenges of “Process and Data Integration” and “Infrastructure and Application Integration”. Other areas such as the “Organization of the Network Organization” need further support. Both the identification of challenges and the analysis of TOGAF assist academics and practitioners alike to identify further
research topics as well as to find documentation related to inter-organizational problems in EAM.

FTR: The permissions I needed to give away were surprisingly relaxed:

By checking the box below, I grant AMCIS 2013 Manuscript Submission on behalf of AMCIS 2013 the non-exclusive right to distribute my submission (“the Work”) over the Internet and make it part of the AIS Electronic Library (AISeL).
I warrant as follows:

that I have the full power and authority to make this agreement;

that the Work does not infringe any copyright, nor violate any proprietary rights, nor contain any libelous matter, nor invade the privacy of any person or third party;

that the Work has not been published elsewhere with the same content or in the same format; and

that no right in the Work has in any way been sold, mortgaged, or otherwise disposed of, and that the Work is free from all liens and claims.

I understand that once a peer-reviewed Work is deposited in the repository, it may not be removed.

DFN Workshop 2015

As in the last few years, the DFN Workshop happened in Hamburg, Germany.

The conference was keynoted by Steven Le Blond who talked about targeted attacks, e.g. against dissidents. He mentioned that he already presented the content at the USENIX security conference which some people think is very excellent. He first showed how he used Skype to look up IP addresses of his boss and how similarly targeted attacks were executed in the past. Think Stuxnet. His main focus were attacks on NGOs though. He focussed on an attacker sending malicious emails to the victim.

In order to find out what attack vectors were used, they contacted over 100 NGOs to ask whether they were attacked. Two NGOs, which are affiliated with the Chinese WUC, which represents the Uyghur minority, received 1500 malicious emails, out of which 1100 were carrying malware. He showed examples of those emails and some of them were indeed very targeted. They contained a personalised message with enough context to look genuine. However, the mail also had a malicious DOC file attached. Interestingly enough though, the infrastructure used by the attacker for the targeted attacks was re-used for several victims. You could have expected the attacker to have their infrastructure separated for the various victims, especially when carrying out targeted attacks.

They also investigated how quickly the attacker exploited publicly known vulnerabilities. They measured the time of the malicious email sent minus the release date of the vulnerability. They found that some of the attacks were launched on day 0, meaning that as soon as a vulnerability was publicly disclosed, an NGO was attacked with a relevant exploit. Maybe interestingly, they did not find any 0-day exploits launched. They also measured how the security precautions taken by Adobe for their Acrobat Reader and Microsoft for their Office product (think sandboxing) affected the frequency of attacks. It turned out that it does help to make your software more secure!

To defend against targeted attacks based on spoofed emails he proposed to detect whether the writing style of an email corresponds to that of previously seen emails of the presumed contact. In fact, their research shows that they are able to tell whether the writing style matches that of previous emails with very high probability.

The following talk assessed end-to-end email solutions. It was interesting, because they created a taxonomy for 36 existing projects and assessed qualities such as their compatibility, the trust-model used, or the platform it runs on.
The 36 solutions they identified were (don’t hold your breath, wall of links coming): Neomailbox, Countermail, salusafe, Tutanota, Shazzlemail, Safe-Mail, Enlocked, Lockbin, virtru, APG, gpg4o, gpg4win, Enigmail, Jumble Mail, opaqueMail, Scramble.io, whiteout.io, Mailpile, Bitmail, Mailvelope, pEp, openKeychain, Shwyz, Lavaboom, ProtonMail, StartMail, PrivateSky, Lavabit, FreedomBox, Parley, Mega, Dark Mail, opencom, okTurtles, End-to-End, kinko.me, and LEAP (Bitmask).

Many of them could be discarded right away, because they were not production ready. The list could be further reduced by discarding solutions which do not use open standards such as OpenPGP, but rather proprietary message formats. After applying more filters, such as that the private key must not leave the realm of the user, the list could be condensed to seven projects. Those were: APG, Enigmail, gpg4o, Mailvelope, pEp, Scramble.io, and whiteout.io.

Interestingly, the latter two were not compatible with the rest. The speakers attributed that to the use of GPG/MIME vs. GPG/Inline and they favoured the latter. I don’t think it’s a good idea though. The authors attest pEp a lot of potential and they seem to have indeed interesting ideas. For example, they offer to sign another person’s key by reading “safe words” over a secure channel. While this is not a silver bullet to the keysigning problem, it appears to be much easier to use.

As we are on keysigning. I have placed an article in the conference proceedings. It’s about GNOME Keysign. The paper’s title is “Welcome to the 2000s: Enabling casual two-party key signing” which I think reflects in what era the current OpenPGP infrastructure is stuck. The mindsets of the people involved are still a bit left in the old days where dealing with computation machines was a thing for those with long and white beards. The target group of users for secure communication protocols has inevitably grown much larger than it used to be. While this sounds trivial, the interface to GnuPG has not significantly changed since. It also still makes it hard for others to build higher level tools by making bad default decisions, demanding to be in control of “trust” decisions, and by requiring certain environmental conditions (i.e. the filesystem to be used). GnuPG is not a mere library. It seems it understands itself as a complete crypto suite. Anyway, in the paper, I explained how I think contemporary keysigning protocols work, why it’s not a good thing, and how to make it better.

I propose to further decentralise OpenPGP by enabling people to have very small keysigning “parties”. Currently, the setup cost of a keysigning party is very high. This is, amongst other things, due to the fact that an organiser is required to collect all the keys, to compile a list of participant, and to make the keys available for download. Then, depending on the size of the event, the participants queue up for several hours. And to then tick checkboxes on pieces of paper. A gigantic secops fail. The smarter people sign every box they tick so that an attacker cannot “inject” a maliciously ticked box onto the paper sheet. That’s not fun. The not so smart people don’t even bring their sheets of paper or have them printed by a random person who happens to also be at the conference and, surprise, has access to a printer. What a gigantic attack surface. I think this is bad. Let’s try to reduce that surface by reducing the size of the events.

In order to enable people to have very small events, i.e. two people keysigning, I propose to make most of the actions of a keysigning protocol automatic. So instead of requiring the user to manually compare the fingerprint, I propose that we securely transfer the key to be signed. You might rightfully ask, how to do that. My answer is that we’ve passed the 2000s and that we bring devices which are capable of opening a TCP connection on a link local network, e.g. WiFi. I know, this is not necessarily a given, but let’s just assume for the sake of simplicity that one of our device we carry along can actually do WiFi (and that the network does not block connections between machines). This also prevents certain attacks that users of current Best Practises are still vulnerable against, namely using short key ids or leaking who you are communicating with.

Another step that needs to be automated is signing the key. It sounds easy, right? But it’s not just a mere gpg --sign-key. The first problem is, that you don’t want the key to be signed to pollute your keyring. That can be fixed by using --homedir or the GNUPGHOME environment variable. But then you also want to sign each UID on the key separately. And this is were things get a bit more interesting. Anyway, to make a long story short: We’re not able to do that with plain GnuPG (as of now) in a sane manner. And I think it’s a shame.

Lastly, sending the key needs to be as “zero-click” as possible, too. I propose to simply reuse the current MUA of the user. That sounds easy, but unfortunately, it’s only 2015 and we cannot interact with, say, Evolution and Thunderbird in a standardised manner. There is xdg-email, but it has annoying bugs and doesn’t seem to be maintained. I’m waiting for a sane Email-API. I mean, Email has been around for some time now, let’s now try to actually use it. I hope to be able to make another more formal announcement on GNOME Keysign, soon.

the userbase for strong cryptography declines by half with every additional keystroke or mouseclick required to make it work

— attributed to Ellison.

Anyway, the event was good, I am happy to have attended. I hope to be able to make it there next year again.

FOSDEM 2015

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 😉

On Academia…

A paper that I have authored has ~~recently~~ been published a while ago, but I’ve put this post off for a long time now. Before talking about the paper itself, I want to talk about Academia as I have the feeling that I need to defend myself for playing their game™. The following may sounds overly pessimistic and a while a few bright spots are going to be mentioned, many have been left out for ranting reasons. Keep that in mind when reading that somewhat unstructured rant…

Published papers are the currency in Academia. The more you have, the more respected you are. The quantity is the main metric. No wonder, given that quality control measures are not very well deployed. Pretty much the only mechanism to ensure quality is peer review. The holy grail.

Although the more papers at “better” conferences or journals you have, the better you are, the quality of the conference or journal and the quality of the paper are rarely questioned after the publication. Again, I don’t have proper proof for the statements I make as this is supposed to be a more general rant on current practises in Academia. I can only tell from experience. From me listening to people talking about fellow academics, from observing key metrics in various web portals, or seeing people applying for academic positions. Those people usually have an enumeration of their publications. Maybe it’s a “selection”. But I’ve never seen that people put a “ranking” of the quality of the publisher nor the publication itself. And it wouldn’t make sense, because we don’t have metrics for that, anyway. Sure, there are some people or companies trying to come up with something meaningful. But metrics such as “rejection rate”, “number of citations”, or “h-index” are inherently flawed. For many reasons. Mainly because the data is proprietary. You have to rely on the conference or the journal providing you with correct data. You cannot know whether it is correct as there is no right for you to know. Secondarily, the metric might suffer from chilling effects, such that people think the quality of their publication in spe is too weak to be able to be published on a “high ranked” conference. So they don’t even bother to submit. Other metrics like the average citation count after five years resembles much more a stochastic experiment rather than reflecting the quality of the publications (Ike Antkare anyone?). Again, you have the effect of people wanting to cite some paper of a “high ranked” conference, because that is what people will cite in the future. And in order to be found more easily in the future via backwards citation searches, you’d rather cite publications you think will be cited more often in the future (cf.).

Talking about quality…

You have to trust the peer review of the conference or journal but you actually cannot because you don’t even know who the peers were. It’s good to have an informed opinion and it’s a good thing to be able to rely on an informed judgement. But it’s not good having to rely on that. If, for whatever reason, a peer fails to provide appropriate reviews, one should be able to make a decision oneself. Some studies have indeed shown that the peer review process is no better than flipping a coin. So there seems to be some need to review the peer review.

Once again to be clear: I don’t mind peer review. I think it’s good. Blindly publishing without ensuring that there is indeed an advancement of world’s knowledge wouldn’t be good. And peer review could be a tool to control that. But it doesn’t do it right now. I don’t have any concrete proposal. But I think if the reviews themselves and the reviewers were known, then we could make better decisions as to whether to “trust” a publication or not.

Another proposal is to not have “journals” as physical hard copies anymore. It is ~~2014~~2015, we have the Web, we have some cool technologies. But we don’t make use of any of that. Instead, we are maintaining the status from 20, or rather 200, years ago. We still subscribe to one-off bundles of printed and stapled paper. And we pay loads for that. And not only do we pay loads for receiving that, if you wanted to publish in one of those journals (or conferences), you have to pay, too. In fairness, it’s not only the printing and stapling that costs money, but the services around that. Things like proof reading (has anyone ever gotten a lectorate?), the peer review (has any peer ever gotten any reimbursement?), or the maintenance of an online database (why is it so damn hard to use any of these web databases?) are things we pay money for. I doubt that we need Journals in their current form. We probably do need entities (call them “publishers”), who in turn will need to earn some money, to make sure everything is going smoothly. But we don’t need print-and-forget style publishing. If we could add things like comments, annotations, links, reviews, supplementary material, a varying level of detail, to a paper, even after a few years or even decades, we could move to a “permanently peer reviewed” model. A publication is being reviewed all the time. Ideally by the general public. We could model our current workflow by delegating some form of trust to a group of people, say “reviewers of Journal X”, and only see what these people have vouched for. We could then selectively exclude people from that group of trustees, much like the web of trust. We could, if a paper makes an assumption which is falsified in the future, render some warning when opening the publication. We could decentralise the data such that everyone could build their own index, search mechanism, or interface.

On interfaces

Right now, if you wanted to, say, re-conduct the experiments done in published papers and share your results, you would have to create a publication (which is expected, but right now you would likely have to pay for that) and cite the papers whose results you are trying to reproduce. That’s okay. But if I then wanted to see when and how successful people tried to redo the experiments, I’d have to rely on the database I’m using to provide a reverse citation search and have the correct data (which, for some databases, seems to be the ability to do OCR on the PDF…). That’s not how things should work nowdays, right? We’d expect something more interactive, with tags, open data, something wikiesque. While the ability to reverse-search citations, to highlight some key references, or to link to a key contribution that followed a paper at hand would be nice indeed, we probably have to step back and make existing functionality somewhat usable. I’m not talking about advanced stuff like exporting search results in a standardised format or about deep linking to a result set from a query. That would need treatment after we’ve solved actually searching for multiple keywords, excluding some conferences or journals, or joining or intersecting queries. All that only works to some extent and it’s depressing that we cannot do anything about it, because we don’t have the relevant access or data. Don’t believe me? Well, you shouldn’t. But I’ll provide a table, probably in another post, showing what works with which database and what does not.

On experiments

As I was referring to reproducing results: It is pretty much impossible to reproduce any result, at least in my field, computer science. You don’t get the raw data, let alone the programs to run to get the results. You could argue that it is too complicated to maintain a program that can be run on any platform. Fair enough. I don’t have a solution. But the situation right now is not a good status quo. Right now you don’t get anything. So even if you had the very same setup as the authors of some publication, you would not be able to redo the experiments. It’s likely to be similar in other disciplines. I imagine that rocket scientists do experiments with self made devices or with some utterly expensive appliance (think LHC). Nobody will be able to reproduce the results, simply because there is just that one LHC out there… But… fortunately we have many digital things which are easy to archive and distribute. We, computer scientists, should make use of that. Why not require authors to submit a virtual appliance in some openly specified format? Obviously, source code would be nice, but even in academia there doesn’t seem to be a culture of sharing code freely, so I’m not even suggesting that.

Phew. After having criticised Academia and having made some half baked proposals I forgot what I actually wanted to do: Being a good academic (not caring about the public perception of “good” in terms of quantity of publications), and discuss a few things around the paper that we paid a couple of hundred dollars for to get published. But I leave that for another ~~rant~~ post.

In what ways do you think is Academia broken?

WideOpenId – woid.cryptobitch.de

Uh, I meant to blog about this a while ago, but somehow, it got lost… Anyway, I was inspired by http://openid.aliz.es and intrigued by OpenID I set out to find an implementation that comes with an acceptable level of required effort to set up and run.

While the idea of federated authentication sounds nice, the concepts gets a bit flawed if everybody uses Google or Stackexchange as their identity provider. Also, you might not really want to provide your very own OpenID for good reasons. Pretty much as with email, which is why you could make use of mailinator, yopmail, or others.

There is a list of server software on the OpenID page, but none of them really looked like low effort. I wouldn’t want to install Django or any other web framework. But I’d go with a bad Python solution before even looking at PHP.

There is an “official” OpenID example server which is not WSGI aware and thus requires more effort than I am willing to invest. Anyway, I took an existing OpenID server and adapted it such that anyone could log in. Always. When developing and deploying, I noticed that mod_wsgi‘s support for virtualenv is really bad. For example, the PYTHONPATH cannot be inside Apache’s VirtualHosts declaration and you thus need a custom WSGI file which hard codes the Python version. It appears that there is also no helper on the Python level to “load” a virtual env. Weird.

Anyway, you can now enjoy OpenID by providing http://woid.cryptobitch.de/your-id-here as your identity provider. The service will happily tell anyone that any ID is valid. So you can log in as any name you one. A bit like mailinator for OpenID.

To test whether the OpenID provider actually works, you can download the example consumer and start it.

Bahn Bonus Points Saemmeln

The Bahn currently has a Web-based game for you to win some of their loyalty points. It’s not a very exciting game, but you get up to 500 points which is half a free ride across the country. (You get the other half when signing up for their program.)

In order to get these 500 points you need to play for an hour or so. Or you observe the Web traffic your browser generates and look closely. You’ll see that the Flash applet fetches a token from the server and sends your result, along with the token and some hash, to the server. How to get the correct hash you ask? Worry not, you will get the correct hash from the server if you don’t send the correct one. You can resend your request with the hash the server sent you and your POST will be accepted. Neat.

I don’t know why they send the “correct_hash”, but it’s obviously a bad idea.

PS: It seems that Kazam has troubles recording my mouse pointer position correctly.

On GNOME and Groupon

You may have noticed that we ran a campaign calling for support regarding the Groupon trademark issue. Fortunately, everything was over much quicker than everybody expected.

It is fair to say that we were surprised by our campaign and the amount of support we had. And so were they (GroupOn). As Bradley said, the campaign could have failed miserably. It was a pure gamble. And I was everything but excited and full of expectations when we launched the campaign. We didn’t know how it would go and our preparation was.. simple, at best. I don’t mean to discredit any of the great work the volunteers around us (and we, ourselves) did. But it’s true that we’re not experts and that we didn’t have all the things in place you could have expected us to have. For example, we didn’t really have a bar of the money raised on the web page. In fact, that information was only available to a limited extent. It’s mainly my fault, but I also blame the fact that we only had mockups of the page, and not real code just until hours before the launch. Personally, my thinking was that we’d have days, if not weeks, to slowly fix things up.

Fortunately, things went differently. The coverage was amazing. I didn’t expect that our very simple page generated so much traffic. It’s hard to come up with an exact timeline of events as everything happened quickly and, in fairness, a bit chaotically. It may have been OMGUbuntu or Reddit who have reported first on our fundraiser. Other sites, such as Phoronix or Hackernews followed quickly. I was told that the latter was exceptional, because it ranked very high for rather long time.

We also had International coverage, i.e. on Heise (with somewhat interesting discussions), Golem (with two more articles!), Computerbase, and others… The usual suspects such as Slash dot, or, of course, LWN had an article as well. Even Arstechnica and Reuters covered our case. And that although we missed sending press releases to most of those sites. Sorry for that :-/

By quickly checking Google News, I know I haven’t found all the articles on the subject, but so far I’ve only found this article which was not in favour of our move. I think this was surprising to most, if not all of us.

Over the course of the day, this image was floating around, showing Brian’s LinkedIn profile which some people found hilarious. Some other pictures were floating around and comments were made. Some of them not in a not acceptable language but most of them were just expressing their concerns regarding Groupon’s behaviour. Some people cancelled all their accounts with Groupon while others started a petition.

We had close to one retweet per second and money was pouring in. The average amount donated was about 20 USD and the rate at which people donated was about 75 USD per minute. Every single minute. This can indeed be considered success. I think I noticed that this is going to be big when Freenode sent a message to all its 80000 connected users asking for supporting our case. “This is bigger than GNOME“, they said. Very correctly so. And it’s a shame, too. Not only for Groupon, because they needed to use the emergency break here, but for the system at large. It shouldn’t be the case that you need money in order to defend yourself against someone misusing your name.

Dear Internet, thanks. I am overwhelmed. We did not expect that amount of feedback to our recent trademark campaign, let alone the financial contributions. Our campaign was very successful. It was too successful, at least from a technical point of view. We are using a self made, very rudimentary Makefile for the business logic. We are still busy verifying the incoming transactions with Paypal… During the campaign, our servers were very busy handling the incoming requests.

I didn’t expect Groupon to be that cooperative given the behaviour I have observed over the last few months. It might have been Engagdet which were the first to report that Groupon backed up. Other news sites followed suit. All of that happened so quickly, that some news sites couldn’t even report on the case and could only report on Groupon abandoning their marks. That was probably Groupon’s strategy and, I guess, it was a wise choice. They retired their marks, but the app and their page are still online. They also still have a Gnome job posted. But I have no doubt that this will cease to exist.

Again: Thanks to everyone involved. This could as well have been the end to the GNOME Foundation, given that defending the GNOME marks is one of their main reasons for existing. A special thanks to all of you who have spread the word and made this campaign successful. Let’s hope we do not need such a campaign in the future.

For those of you who are interested in some pretty graphs (thanks benzo!), here is another one showing the transaction sizes and their volume. You can see, that we had many many small contributions. This is so amazing. I am very grateful and happy to see our community standing together so closely.

GNOME at FSCONS14 in Gothenburg, Sweden

I was glad to be invited to FSONCS 2014 in Gothenburg, Sweden. Remember that this is also the place for next year’s GUADEC! This year’s FSCONS was attended by around 150 people or so. I guess it was a bit less. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s a very cool event with many interesting people and talks.

We, GNOME, had a presence at the event due to me bringing the EventsBox and T-Shirts to Gothenburg. It was quite a trip, especially with those heavy boxes…

The first keynote of the conference was given by Karl Fogel. He declared the end of copyright in 1993. He imagined copyright as a tree whose bottom has been chopped off, but the, the top hasn’t noticed that just yet. He put copyright on a timeline and drew a strong relation to the printing press. He claimed that in the United Kingdom, a monopoly used to control who prints and distributes books and it then transferred to a differently shaped monopoly which involved the actual authors. These could then transfer their rights to printers. He went on with ranting about the fact that nowadays you cannot tip the author for their (free) work. He appealed to the authors of f-droid or the firefox mobile app market to integrate such a functionality. Overall it was an interesting talk with many aspects. He is a talented speaker.

The second keynote was given by Leigh Honeywell. She talked about communities and community building. She said that she got most of the ideas presented in her talk from Sumana Harihareswara‘s “Models we use to change the world”. During her talk she referred to her experiences when founded the HackLabTO Hackerspace after having attended the CCCamp 2007. She basically shared models of understanding the community and their behaviour. The Q&A session was inspiring and informative. Many questions about managing a community were asked and answered.

Another interesting talk was given by Guilhem Moulin who went on to talk about Fripost. It is a democratic email service provider from Sweden. He gave a bit of an insight regarding the current Email usage on today’s Internet. He claimed that we have 2.7 billion internet users and that the top three email service providers accumulate roughly a third of this population. His numbers were 425 million for GMail, 420 million for Hotmail, and 280 million for Yahoo. All these companies are part of PRISM, he said, which worried him enough to engage with Fripost. In fact, he became a board member after having been a user and a sysadmin. As someone who operates a mail server for oneself and others with similar needs, I was quite interested in seeing concentrated efforts like this. Fripost’s governance seems to be interesting. It’s a democratic body and I wonder how to thwart malicious subversion. Anyway, the talk was about technical details as to how to create your own fripost.org. So I can only encourage to run your own infrastructure and found structures that care about running ecosystem. A memorable quote he provided to underpin this appeal is attributed to Schneier: “We were safer when our email was at 10,000 ISPs than it was at 10“.

My talk went sufficiently well. I guess I preached to the choir regarding Free Software. I don’t think I needed to convince the people that Free Software is a good thing. As for convincing the audience that GNOME is a good thing, I think I faced a big challenge. Some of the attendees didn’t seem to be very enthusiastic about their desktop which is great. But some others were more in the, what I would call, old school category using lynx, xautoscreenlock, and all that stuff from the 90s. Anyway, we had a great session with many questions from the audience such that I couldn’t even go through my slides.

I had a lightning talk about signing OpenPGP keys using GNOME Keysign. I probably need to write up a separate blog post for that. In short, I mentioned that short key IDs are evil, but that long key IDs are also problematic. Actually, using keyservers is inherently problematic and should be avoided. To do so, I showed how I transfer a key securely and sign it following best practices (thanks to Andrei for an initial version!). Bastian was nice enough to do the demo with me. We needed to cheat a little though, as currently, they key is transferred using the WiFi network you are on. The WiFi, however, didn’t allow us to create a TCP connection to each other. We thus opened a WiFi hotspot and used that. I think this would be a useful feature.

The last talk of the conference was given by Hans Lysglimt from Norway. He is, among other things, a politician, an activist, and an entrepreneur who founded an email service. His runbox has around 1000000 accounts and 30000 paid subscriptions, so it’s fairly big, compared to Fripost at least. Again, running email services myself, I found it interesting to listen to the stories he had to tell. His story was that he received a gag order for running his commercial email service provider. It remained unclear whether it was send because of his interview with Julian Assange or not.

Interestingly, he didn’t seem to have received many correct subpoenas in the sense that they were Norwegian court orders. However, in one case the American authorities went through the Norwegian legal system which he found funny in itself because the two legal system were not very similar. He eventually mentioned that every email service provider has at least one gag order, either an implicit or and explicit one. Ultimately, he concluded that you cannot trust a corporation.

FSCONS is an interesting event. Their manifesto is certainly impressive. I am glad to have visited and I am looking forward to visiting again. It is very atmospheric, very relaxed, and friendly. A very nice place to be.