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.
