my blog

Wednesday 6 August 2008

Certificate fun and how Mozilla can help

Yay! Certificates are the latest hot topic. I had a discussion about this with a few people back at the RMLL because lots of users there were complaining about it. I have no strong opinion on this myself, but it strikes me that Mozilla could help here.

The worst problem is self-signed certificates, which are especially common in our free software world. People have commented that using CAcert should help, but as long as the CAcert root certificates are not installed by default with your browser, this won't help much. And it seems this is not going to happen (well, at least for Firefox) because of Mozilla's CA certificate policy. I guess other browsers have a similar policy, and the policy itself probably makes some sense.

So what can Mozilla do? Let's look at the Mozilla Manifesto (which seems to be offline at the moment -- but you can look at the archived version). The fourth principle is related to this issue and reads as Individuals' security on the Internet is fundamental and cannot be treated as optional.. And then in the Mozilla Foundation pledge, you can read use the Mozilla assets (intellectual property such as copyrights and trademarks, infrastructure, funds, and reputation) to keep the Internet an open platform. Can you see where I'm heading?

I believe the Mozilla Foundation could use some of its assets to be a certificate authority that operates in a compitable way with its own CA certificate policy. It would offer this service to non-commercial entities that respects some criteria. I'm not going to put a list of potential criteria here, but I guess many free software projects would qualify and would benefit of this. This would fix what Chris highlights in his post, ie, the fact that it affects the free software community more than others. And it would also help improve the user experience web, which is one of Mozilla's missions.

[18:51] | [Web] | [#483] | [10 comments]

Sunday 3 August 2008

Leaking information about Boston Summit 2008

I heard here and there people wondering about the Boston Summit this year: Will it happen or not? When will it be? Where? Who? What? Why? 42?

It turns out we're starting to have most of the answers to those questions. And I'll leak them now because I'm sure it will help a few people -- there'll probably an official announce with a nice mail and everything later. First, of course it's going to happen :-) And you can already find the important details on the wiki page:

So you can start booking everything and tell us you're coming! If you want to step up and help with the organization, I'm pretty sure you'll be welcome. A good first task would be to help writing an official announce, for example ;-) But you can also propose a session, or help create a schedule for the summit, or propose a few places where people can meet in the evening... I guess many people already know the drill.

Just one small warning: we're trying to organize a small hackfest related to user experience the week before the Summit (I'm saying trying because we're still looking at the financial side of it so we can't confirm it yet). There'd be some hackers, artists and of course UI people. If you think there's a good reason for you to attend this hackfest, then the first thing is to wait a bit before booking your travel for the Summit. No, really, you don't want to book a flight for the Summit and then realize you also want to book a flight for the hackfest :-) Once you're convinced to wait, send a mail to Owen and me. Only around 10 people would attend this hackfest, and we already have some people in mind, but maybe we didn't think about you yet... Hopefully, we'll have more details about this hackfest in a not-too-distant future.

[03:24] | [GNOME] | [#482]

Friday 11 July 2008

GUADEC notes #3

  • Got positive feedbacks about our plans. We still need to write down things for people who are not at GUADEC (sorry that it feels like teasing to you). I'm not posting the slides yet since, well, they're pretty much useless without some text. Some people are worried that we're going to do something big that might destabilize GNOME: we're pretty aware of those kind of risks and that's relly not the plan. We will try to write all the details today or tomorrow, but it's hard to find free time for that during GUADEC.
  • Matt Webb's keynote was good. Many interesting thoughts, and it was funny to see him recommend some kind of documentation for the various D-Bus APIs we have -- something I had in the back of my head: it will indeed encourage people to start playing with them. And doing new stuff.
  • Had a discussion with Dimitris about how to organize the work on Transifex, and he sent his thoughts as a roadmap.
  • Yet another meeting. With Lennart, Bastien, Jens and Marc-André about sound in GNOME. Productive, with action items.
  • The boat party was great. Many thanks to Collabora for such a good time!
  • We of course had the Ice Cream Deathmatch. So, it seems people thought it was all about speed, while really it's all about enjoying :-) On the other hand, Henri Bergius (if I remember well) is just not a human since he ate everything so quickly. But, well, his bio mentions Henri Bergius is a former Viking based in the Nordic country of Finland...
  • A party on a boat is great. There can be some small issues, though. Like: when you don't hear that you have some limited time to go out of the boat before it does another round. We were quite a few people in this situation. Ooops :-)
  • Chatted with Owen and Andreas. Result: we'll try to organize a hackfest. I love how starting to talk about something can lead to some really concrete idea.
  • The gourmet restaurant tradition has been honored. GUADEC wouldn't be GUADEC without this.
  • Lucas and I have been volunteered to do a lightning talk about GNOME Outreach Program: Accessibility. One of the things that people seem to not really know about this program is all the small tasks that are easy to complete. Everybody should at least take a look!
  • To let people know that their lightning talk time was about to end, Behdad hacked some quick & dirty script that beeped quite loudly. Annoying. Amazing.
  • Around 115 people attended the Foundation AGM. Went great -- we actually expecting tougher questions ;-)
  • Federico knows how to do awesome demos during a keynote. Sure, he's cheating with non-live stuff, but still awesome!

[18:18] | [GNOME] | [#481] | [7 comments]

Thursday 10 July 2008

Live from Istanbul: GNOME 3.0

GNOME 2.30 = GNOME 3.0

Slides and details will be posted later. Discuss :-)

[16:43] | [GNOME] | [#480] | [20 comments] | [2 trackbacks]

GUADEC notes #2

  • The GUADEC keys are awesome. So small. Thanks Mandriva!
  • The Drooling Macaque Band was at the cocktail party yesterday evening. Perhaps we should record them live next year? Oh, and we had this idea of doing a GNOME song in the past...
  • Was glad to hear that I tricked some people into drinking some cherry juice, thinking it was wine. Don't steal my glass :-)
  • Looks like I'm completely exhausted most of the time :/ Could be because of the RMLL conference last week, or because of all the meetings... If you come talk to me and see I'm nearly sleeping, don't worry, just come back 30 minutes later -- I'm generally much better after a while.
  • Having Stormy rocks. Every time I see her, she's either explaining some great ideas, or talking with someone different to learn more about the project and the people. She will just know everything, I guess :-)
  • Having Behdad rocks. He's running everywhere, organizing things, and doing tons of stuff.
  • Luis said "don't be afraid to talk to big people like Michael. He's so right. Everybody here is nice and willing to talk with everybody else. But I can also understand why you can be impressed by Michael -- always brings a new perspective, that makes you think for quite some time :-)
  • Since I push people to pronounce Vincent correctly (ie, french way), I also try to pronounce other names correctly. Makes me feel happy to have this international touch.
  • The Ice Cream Deathmatch will happen tonight, at the boat party. If you see Ali, hug him: he's doing all the hard work to organize it!
  • I heard Kris' keynote about GTK+ this afternoon is most interesting.

[08:12] | [GNOME] | [#479] | [3 comments]

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by Vincent