Free Software Melbourne committee meet-up

Attending

• Adam B.
• Ben F.
• Ben S.
• Lillian R.

Apologies

• Andrew

Software Freedom Day 2014-09-20 (Saturday)

• Electron Workshop in North Melbourne
  • Mick Jaffen

Allow for 25–50 attendees

• Events:
  • Installfest
    • in a separate corner; allow people to wander to other events simultaneously
  • Arduino demo
  • Speaker presentations
    • Strive for gender balance
    • Privacy and freedom
    • Adam B.: find workmate to talk about email encryption
    • Maia S.: Open Knowledge Foundation (ref. Lilly)
    • Jacinta R.
    • Dale D.: BitCoin
  • Video
    • Suggestions include:
    • “Indie Game: The Movie”? (I don't think there's any free software in there from memory -Adam)
    • “Patent Absurdity” (re. Bilski patent case) http://patentabsurdity.com/
    • Revolution OS
    • Hope94
    • The FreeBSD Story Lev apparently has the last three. I don't know what the last two are about - DuckDuckGo and Google have failed me, but Lev used them in previous years.
    • Blender demos?
    • A recorded RMS talk?
      • We're heading for a total disaster
      • TED ThemeFreedom@Digital Age

Need:

• Swag — shirts / stickers/ badges?
• Catering — provider, budget
• Sponsorship:*
  • Ben F.: ask VPAC
  • Adam: ask SitePoint
  • Ben S.: Free Software Queensland, Red Hat?
  • Best to have an incorporated entity for sponsors to coordinate with
    • L.U.V.wi Bmotion:
  • Lilly: spot on 3RRR Byte Into It
  • Open Knowledge Foundation
• Leaflet with list of free software
• ISO images
• DHCP/Switch/Samba server setup

Ben F.: hand back FSM secretary to Ben S.

• likely unavailable during late August – September 2014

Ben S.:

• To update http://www.sfd.org.au/ (point to a wiki or have Lilly provide text).
• Setup a SFD mail list

Adam B.:

• To setup a Samba/DHCP server on an EeePC.
• Put together a list of free software on a leaflet
• Download a bunch of GNU/Linux distros

August meet-up

Task list

Ben S.:

• Check with Andrea of the Open Innovation Project Network about giving a talk around Copyright/Patent/Trademark or what Andrea does at the OIPN.
• Ask Les Kitchen if he would like to finish his talk about how he got into free software.

Thoughts

• Provide a 5 minute notice before a meeting needs to end so as to not run overtime.

Meet-up

Hopefully a talk by Andrea

Ask for Software Freedom Day volunteers

• Talks
• Ideas

Les Kitchen/Brian May to complete their talk about how they got into free software.

A talk on Password Managers, depending on how we go for time with the above (if Andrea can make it).

Gnews (last)

General

• Turin, Italy Plans To Be All-FOSS By March 2016
• In Support of WebGL, Microsoft Joins Khronos Group
• Everyday is Goof Off at Work Day at the US Patent & Trademark Office based on results of an internal investigation
  • Some of its 8,300 patent examiners repeatedly lied about the hours they were putting in and many were receiving bonuses for work they did not do
  • More than 70 percent of the 80 managers interviewed also told investigators that a "significant" number of examiners did not work for long periods, then rushed to get their reviews done at the end of each quarter. Supervisors told the review team that the practice "negatively affects" the quality of the work. "Our quality standards are low," one supervisor told the investigators. "We are looking for work that meets minimal requirements."
• Lionsgate: Your Site are Belong to Us
  • "a California federal court has granted Lionsgate's request for a preliminary injunction against six file-sharing sites. As a result, all bank accounts and other financial assets will be frozen. In addition, the sites' domain names are also at risk."

Software releases

• ownCloud 7 is here, with server-to-server file-sharing! We used ownCloud 7 collaborative document editing functionality (which was basically functional, but not ideal). http://owncloud.org/
• DAVdroid (free software CalDAV/CardDAV sync tool) is now available on F-Droid and is fully compatible with ownCloud.
• LibreOffice 4.3
  • Improved support for comments (importing/exporting nested comments, comment formatting and printing comments made in margins).
  • Supports OOXML Strict, as well as a host of legacy file formats such as MS Works Spreadsheets, ClarisWorks, MacWorks SuperPaint and more.
  • Animated 3D model support in Impress.
  • Calc has smarter highlighting of cells in formula, adds a display of the number of selected rows and columns in the status bar and other usability improvements.
  • Native look and feel on OS X.

Controversial decisions

• Systemd
  • Systemd: Harbinger of the Linux apocalypse
  • "[Violates] the rules of Unix, specifically the rule stating it's best to have small tools that do one job perfectly rather than one large tool that is mediocre at performing many jobs" - InfoWorld.com
  • Still hungry!
    • Replaces:
      • sysvinit (replacement is 6Mb+ excluding deps)
      • pm-utils
      • inetd & tcpwrappers
      • acpid
      • syslog (although apparently not very well)
      • watchdog
      • cron
      • atd
      • ntp
      • mount/umount & autofs
      • login
      • PAM
      • getty
      • udev
      • dbus
      • cryptsetup
    • Also includes:
      • Web server (part of the syslog replacement)
      • QRCode generator
  • Now in Debian (testing/jessie)
  • Pushed by Red Hat
  • From some of the devs that brought you PulseAudio.
  • Required by GNOME (See NetworkManager dependencies).
  • Time to switch to Slackware or Gentoo?

Did you know?

• Qupzilla
• LibreOffice on Android is in development
• Counter To Hacienda Spy Program Developed
  • "Five western intelligence agencies are using the Hacienda software to identify vulnerable servers across the world in order to control them and use them for their own purposes."
  • Countered via a new kind of NAT-compatible knock integrating the knock secret in the initial TCP SYN packet in the SQN field.
    • Simple kernel patch (hopefully upstream soon)
    • Not a single extra packet on the wire (no window of opportunity for an attacker to use, as would be the case if a first packet enables the server)
    • Does not merely enable opening the connection, but also can be used to protect the first N bytes of the TCP payload (even an active man-in-the-middle adversary cannot hijack the connection)
    • Unlike SilentKnock (another single-packet port knocking implementation), it's compatible with most NAT implementations.
    • Will hopefully be supported by projects like GNUnet, Tor and OpenSSH in the near future.
• youtube-dl

Privacy

• Google in June announced plans for its own project for spy-proof email. But the addition of Yahoo is notable because the two have access to such a large chunk of world email users.
  • In December 2013, Google had 366 million unique Gmail visitors followed by Yahoo at 273 million, according to ComScore.
  • Both companies say the encryption tool will be an optional feature that users will have to turn on.
  • It will rely on a version of PGP encryption, a long-tested form of encryption that has not yet been cracked.
  • http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/07/yahoo-joins-google-effort-to-encrypt-email/
• NSA May be Working on Powerful Cyberattack Artificial Intelligence Called 'MonsterMind' reports Snowden
  • The autonomous AI would monitor all data traffic entering the U.S. from anywhere in the world looking for potential cyber-attacks. It would then shut down the attack and could launch automated counter-attacks.
  • Of course, this would require analyzing all network traffic in order to design an algorithm that distinguishes normal traffic flow from malicious traffic (against US law).

Campaigns

• AVAAZ - Stop the snooping! - "George Brandis is rushing through a plan to monitor ALL internet users in Australia -- that's information about every phone call we make, every email we send. It’s a huge privacy breach in the name of national security, but we can stop this plan before it becomes law." https://secure.avaaz.org/en/asio_in_your_email_loc/

Korean for dinner