Committee Meeting, 2014-07-03

Original meeting notes

Attending

• Adam B.
• Ben F.

Apologies

• Ben S.
• Andrew S.

Meet-up Agenda

Action Item Status

• Update on tasks from previous meetings
  • Ben S: Still to talk to large LibrePlanet group and contact admins about using their wiki (assumed to be on hold)
  • Ben F.: Successfully contacted Jon Lawrence of EFA and scheduled a meeting
• Confirm details of upcoming meeting (Thu 2014-07-17)
• Andrew S. investigation of alternative dinner venues
• Ben F. now has access card entry for VPAC training room, hooray!

Infrastructure

• Mailing list hosting
  • Members have received bounces from posts to the list
  • Ben F.: look into set Mail-Followup-To set to the general discussion forum?
  • Currently hosted from Ben S.'s host, not for administration by others
  • Ben F. to investigate hosting mailing lists from own server
    • improve expected up-time, administration by multiple FSM committee members

Meeting Structure for 2014-07-17, 18:00–20:00

Gnews: (duration: 0:45)

Adam B.: send Gnews notes to (acting) Secretary prior to meeting

• Software Releases
  • ownCloud 7 beta 2 - Official support for DB migration (eg. SQLite to MySQL) via the included data migration tool. AGPL 3
  • webODF 0.5.0 (stable release) - entirely written in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. Provides OpenDocument Text file support. AGPL 3
  • Salt 2014.1.7 - bug fixe release. Apache 2.0
  • QEMU 2.1.0-rc2 - improved Allwinner SoC emulation, more complete AArch64 handling, USB support for file-sharing via MTP emulation, mouse wheel support for the SDL 2.0 interface. GPL 2 / LGPL 2.1
  • mozjpeg 2.0 - now reduces file sizes for both baseline and progressive JPEGs by 5% on average compared to those produced by libjpeg-turbo, the standard JPEG library upon which mozjpeg is based. Modified BSD license variant
  • KDE Plasma 5.0 - Improvements too numerous to document here. GPL 2 / LGPL 2.1 / GFDL 1.2
  • Speed Dreams 2.1 quietly released (not yet announced on the website) which has numerous improvements including a new engine. Speed Dreams is a racing game forked from TORCS. GPL 2
  • Warsow 1.51 - Bugfixes and speed improvements. GPL 2
  • Debian 7.6 - security and bug fix release. Various licenses
  • Wine 1.7.22 - development release. LGPL 2.1
  • LibreSSL portable 2.0.0 - the first LibreSSL portable release. This is OpenBSD's fork of OpenSSL, which aims to refactor to improve security. Apache 1.0-style
    • And just last night: ‘Overblown’ LibreSSL PRNG Vulnerability Patched - 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 have since been released.s
  • BoringSSL project announced - Google's own OpenSSL fork. Will work with OpenSSL and LibreSSL teams. Apache 1.0-style
  • CentOS-7 on x86_64 released. Various licenses

• Take-down notices
  • "Internet's Own Boy" Briefly Knocked Off YouTube With Bogus DMCA Claim - documentary celebrating Aaron Swartz, the late Internet activist who helped create the Creative Commons, has been taken down from YouTube by a misguided copyright claim."
  • Qualcomm DMCA Notice Takes Down 100+ Git Repositories over alleged copyright infringement - Among the affected Git repositories taken down by GitHub was a CyanogenMod repository, Sony Xperia Developer World, Qualcomm's own QCA repository, and dozens of other affected GitHub accounts.
    • GitHub posted the DMCA take-down letter here.
  • Qualcomm Retracts Its Massive DMCA Takedown Of Git Repositories

• Other
  • Australian Electoral Commission Refuses To Release Vote Counting Source Code
  • 'Hidden From Google' Remembers the Sites Google Is Forced To Forget - Site here: http://hiddenfromgoogle.com/
  • XPrivacy - privacy manager for Android. GPL 3+
  • NSA Says Snowden Emails Exempt From Public Disclosure - one reason given for not allowing the release was "could cause an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy". The letter marks the first time the NSA has publicly acknowledged retaining communication and employment records related to Snowden’s time as a contractor.
  • finnish-national-tv-broadcaster-starts-sending-bitcoin-blockchain - Finnish National TV Broadcaster Starts Sending Bitcoin Blockchain
  • Telcos Move Net Neutrality Fight To Congress - Servers buckled under load of comments as the commenting deadline approached. Deadline was extended until Friday.
  • Panic Button Android app, called “Calculate!” in F-Droid, which looks like a simple calculator, but actually dials someone or messages or some other action. GPL 3
    • Designed as an emergency “help I'm under duress” app
  • Obama Administration Says the World's Servers Are Ours - U.S. Justice Department is claiming that companies served with valid warrants for data must produce that data even if the data is not stored in the U.S.
  • William Binney: NSA Records and Stores 80% of All US Audio Calls
  • Australian Police Use Telcos For Cell "Tower Dump" of All Connected Users' Data
    • Possible solution? Android-IMSI-Catcher-Detector GPL 3+
  • Choice lauds NZ ISP's anti-geo-blocking service
  • New Snowden Leak: of 160000 Intercepted Messages, Only 10% From Official Target
  • Use of Encryption Foiled the Cops a Record 9 Times In 2013

Meet a member: (duration: 0:15)

• Les K. to continue on from the month before? When is Les back?
• Adam B.: ping Les K. to see if he's able and willing. (e-mail sent 2014-07-03)
  • Unable to this month, but seems will be back for next time.
  • Brian May agreed to speak, but mentioned he has to leave no later than 8pm.
  • Chris Samuel provided the following, to be considered CC-BY:

My first taste of Free Software was around 1990-92 when I was a the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and I was helping out at the Computer Unit there. I was asked to build the latest version of X11 (then X11R5) for the MIPS based DECstations in the graphics lab. That was my first taste of free software. Next on the list was getting GCC (1.x from memory) going too, which took many hours to compiler a full bootstrap.

I got into Linux around 1993 when I needed something at work better than KA9Q for getting onto the systems and I had friends who were already using it (and one contributing to the kernel). I got my own PC to run Linux on that same year and never looked back. I've gone from using a friends distro to the MCC Interim distribution through Slackware to Red Hat to Mandrake to Mandriva to Gentoo and finally (for now) to Kubuntu.

In early 1994 I went to work at a research lab in the UK for a group doing portable compiler development. They had about a dozen different UNIX variants on almost as many hardware platforms and so having a consistent set of tools was vital. So we would build bash, zsh, the AMD automounter, GCC, GNU Make, GNU fileutils, GNU tar, Perl, etc, etc, etc on each of them. Well, apart from SCO Unix where we couldn't use the AMD automounter as they hadn't gotten around to implementing symbolic links then.

So I came into free software from perhaps a different angle from others in the group, that of portability of toolsets, something that was vital back then and which was possible *because* everyone could contribute back to the pool and those changes could be passed on to others.

Main Feature (approx. 0:45)

Links:

• http://tppaustralia.org/what-is-the-tppa/ (with short video)
• http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/

• Jon Lawrence of EFA
  • Described Jon's role as being dicussion lead, no fixed presentation expected.
• Do we need another topic? Perhaps as a backup in case Jon suddenly can't make it (which we seem to have happen a lot with guest speakers)? Suggestions?
  • Have the discussion anyway; the preference is that Jon L. leads it, but we can have the discussion in his absence.
  • Adam B. to become up-to-date on latest TPP developments, as back-up discussion lead.
  • Ben F.: find and link Economix graphic-novel explanation of TPP's effects on trade, especially Australia - done, and posted to the list (and added above)

Other

• Ben F.: Secretary role for meeting as per http://freesoftware.org.au/wiki/Secretary

Dinner

• Classic Curry (or other suggestion)

Goals, Ideas and Suggestions

• Publicise committee meetings so the group knows that they happen, and when
• Let general discussion forum know where to find committee meeting notes after they're published
  • Hope to get more involvement and suggestions for what our elected committee should do :-)

Future meeting topics

• Adam B.: Password management: freedom and privacy
• (someone): Mobile apps to help with freedom and privacy (e.g. emergency distress call, track a stolen phone, detect MitM, etc.)

Other