Episode: 1447
Title: HPR1447: HPR Coverage at FOSDEM 2014 Part 1/5
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1447/hpr1447.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:09:17

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Hello everybody, my name is Ken Phalan and you're tuning in to the first of the live reports
from Fostan.
Joining me today is Dave Morris and Needles around as well, we met him last night at the
just come to the first kickoff event welcome to Fostan and Fostan can only be described as
a massive amphitheatre I guess lecture hall and we're hanging around here for the introduction
to the next talk which I have no idea what it is Dave is very organised and knows exactly
what is going to be keynote speech on.
How we found a million style and grammar errors in the English Wikipedia. There are literally
thousands of people here at this event and there is Wi-Fi IPv6 and here's the work. It doesn't
work on the Android phones very well but the guy says developers are going to fix that during
the day. So with that that is the end of the introduction and we will tune in later on for more
live reports from Fostan in 2014.
Hi everybody, this is Ken. I've met my way down as far as the K building. K building is a
correct and I've met up with Kristoff. Kristoff, you're working in the club room. What do you
do for a living area, you're a cloacist? I'm freelance, I'm a bit of a software engineer so I try to help
people make their thing work and how did you end up locking people's laptop bags and cloaks away?
It seemed like the best place to steal stuff. No, it's an excellent idea.
Seriously, I got called by the Fostan staff because I had volunteered in previous years
so they called me and I was unable to resist the social pressure and the expectation
of volunteers to help them out again. How many volunteers are there? I mostly don't know. Lots and
lots with never enough. Yeah, that seems to be the way, although it is amazingly well organized.
This is my first time here and everything seems to be very, very smooth or is that just my misinterpretation
of the chaos? No, it mostly works because some of the organizers get deeply and you're also
talking about things and they shouted people until things mostly work. Plus it's
also exactly the first time that close the misorganized here so most people know how things work.
Okay, and would you be here all day or do you get a chance to go see any of the talks?
So everyone who volunteers gets to pick when they are available and how long they can volunteer.
So I'm here until I think four today and I pick up another shift tomorrow but that will be in
from desk. Okay. But everybody gets to volunteer so if you want to see a certain track you can
volunteer to be on the video team or to introduce people in that room so you're helping out and
you still don't have to miss any of the talks. Yeah, all the talks are available online and even links
will be in the show notes to these episodes. But say somebody was coming here next year and wanted
to volunteer. Well, where did they kick off? Obviously, you know, they don't know anybody,
they're new to the whole thing. How would they do that? There is a web interface where you can
sign up to volunteer but I think it's probably easiest that you just come over to the IRC room
for free and all that. Yeah. Just introduce yourself and say who would like to help out
and then the staff will counsel you and force you to do their bidding.
Okay, you're not making this sound very attractive, but hey. So how you obviously
haven't seen any of the talks or anything yet? Anything you would like to go on, say?
I'm really looking forward to Paul Henning-Camp's closing talk about NSA and SPI.
He's a great speaker. Okay, cool. Thank you very much for taking the time.
Hi, everybody. This is Ken again. I'm still down in Building K and I've come across the OS Geo booth
which is your open source compass. Hi, Anna. Can you tell me a bit about your project? Sure. So,
all OS Geo is an international foundation that is an umbrella organization for many geospatial
projects and we try to connect all of them because they are from various goals so there can be
libraries or desktop applications, web applications that are very popular especially lately.
We have local chapters that are the localizing material, organizing events all around the world
and we have an international event each year. It's the first 4G and you can check it. We try to make
it around the world every three years so once in the US, once in Europe and one in Asia and so
we try to make it close to everyone so that everyone can join and we provide hosting for the
newly incubation for the new projects so they have mailing lists and space for the
version control system of the code. We try to organize events that connect them all together and
that's it so we try to grow up and connect with all the similar minded organizations like
the next one. We provide the software that they provide the data. That's the kind of interaction
we want to add. And what sort of projects are under your umbrella? We have both very young projects
and projects that are from many years being developed like a Gras GIS that is an analysis
software that takes geographical data and makes analysis on them and we have also tools that
make beautiful maps for the printing with all the styles you need. We have web mapping libraries
that allow you to put nice interactive maps on your website which seem to go and we have
also initiatives that connect all these things together so for example we have the live audio
DVD that is a live distribution that contains all these audio software and also some guest projects
that are very interesting because they provide a lot of this functionality and we have educational
goals for example we try to build a network of universities and web that provide open source
free and just special teachings and research material on the network and well you can check
on our website or as you'll talk to see all the updates and on the news on the network that's it.
Okay very cool so I'm looking here what does this display show me here?
It's it's perhaps a bit by KJS. It's these specials gallery of metadata produced with KJS
and the data are mostly coming from public sources that are now part of the video movement of
the open data and rendering is done by KJS itself and it's a KJS-related library and also open
source like reader files and just special tools and it's also bound with other software like SJS
that provides analysis. Okay fantastic thank you very much for the time and thanks to all
this information will be in the show. Thank you very much.
Right next to Anna is Dirk. How are you doing? I'm fine thank you. And what do you
here are doing? Well I'm promoting also DOS-GEO as an organization. Yes and I myself I'm the
spiritual father of Gio Miles which is one of the projects under DOS-GEO environments.
Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yes I can. Well in one simple sentence if you want to create
your own Google Maps environment but you don't want to get sticked with the back end that you
don't have control over then you should look for an open source environment and Gio Miles is just
that. But why can't I use something like OpenStripMapper or something like that? Okay because Gio
Miles is a software so we are focusing on the software infrastructure and OpenStripMap is data.
So we are using OpenStripMap data as one of the data sources that we can combine with other
data sources which can be private data sources from the clients using the Gio Miles framework
which can be governments or governmental agencies of businesses providing solutions to in the Gio
industry. Okay and when you say it's a framework what do you exactly mean? Well it's a framework
because we are providing an environment where people can create Gio-locased solutions without
having to bother about every geographical specific things like mapping coordinates
and whatsoever. Zooming in and out and that sort of yeah okay and it's a you're you're talking
specifically about software here so what sort of languages do you support her as a particular
language are we talking are we on the code level here? Well Gio Miles framework is built on
is a Java framework and we are even using Java for we are using Java for the backend
science and it's a thin-clined front-end framework and there also we are using Java and using the
GWT to get a width from Google to transform that into JavaScript. So we only need one community
of Java developers to support the technology. Okay and what sort of you're from a company here
you're making an actual business out of this? Well I'm trying to to make a business out of open
software so I'm the spiritual father behind the Gio Miles framework and I started a business
which is focusing on providing professional services around that framework and technology
and I'm also making an ecosystem where people from the community can work into and we are combining
Gio Miles experts into projects so that that we can do bigger and and larger projects and that
there is a single point of contact which is Gio Spark which provides these professional services.
Okay and what's what's to say that you know if I go contributing codes that you won't just go
and take it and well for for one thing we don't do that we invested ourselves in the basic
framework so we provide that as an open source framework you can use it and you can on top of that
build your own specific specialization because Gio Miles is a very broad framework it provides
a very generic solution into the Gio industry but now we are looking for partners in vertical
industries and they can invest themselves in software and the thing that they have to do is
provide the software as open source because we are an open source project under the AGPL license
so they are obliged to to donate also their code if they don't want to do that well then they
can use Gio Miles in a dual license licensing way and when there are partners that want to
also work and we have today a developer community not only from our company from almost 15
developers working continuously at Gio Miles well when they want to use at the core they
agree to sign in CLA and at that in that way we can provide the services to the community again
and making money out of it and it should be a win-win situation for Gio Spark and his partners
okay and you're part of the Gio OS
yes we are part of OS Gio because well in OS Gio only with one framework you can't conquer the
world and in OS Gio there are more than 20 different communities working on different several
aspects of the Gio industry and it's what I'm as a person tried to do is to combine the good things
that there are in businesses with propriety software with the good things that there are in open
source businesses and trying to to provide opportunities that can change the world together with
other people that are believing in open source and to do that you can't do that from out of a
company you you should work together with other small businesses and companies and people who
are committed to communities and OS Gio is actually doing just that it's combining different
communities where different small businesses and independent developers and bigger companies
providing software engineers into so that we can talk freely about software but also about
solutions and we want to bring open software one step further into into the ecosystem in the
do you have an example of some project that you've already done that our community might be
familiar with well one example is for the Ministry of Agriculture who is maintaining millions of
parcels for agriculture and they have a crowdsourced based system where agriculture can
can register their own information and their own assets and provide the tax information to
the to the Ministry. Other examples is in the digital what they call digital building permits
to organize building permits and immediately provide also the Gio information about the houses
other examples are asset management for fire so disasters in Australia for instance but there were
many fires last year they have now a management system where governments can use that to create
files for insurance companies that's that are a couple of examples. Okay a lot absolutely fantastic
there will be more information in the show notes and enjoy the rest of the show.
Hi everybody I can hear again and in the trio of mapping we're at the open street map
boot not open street maps it's open street map I guess. Open street map. I'm Gael Miske
I'm the chairman of the open street map France local chapter and can you tell for the one or two
people on our national who don't know what open street map is can you just give a quick rundown.
Oh open street map is a wiki of the of map so like wiki pdia is building an anc
completely we are building an atlas of the world with all data you can map so you can have boundary
you can have trees you can have station in the station you can have calamity or garbage collector
and so on so it is a free maps and open maps and you can use it you can share it you can
sell it under the license OGBL open data based license and you do need to give credit of course
yes you can you you have two clothes in the open open database license you have the shell
like so like interactive commands you can you must shell like and you have the opportunity
in this in this license you must say that open street map is the source of one of your data
of your data not too stringent a request so why are you here first time oh it is
our first participation in first time in order to show what the open street map community is doing
how we are working and how we can build and improve the sustainability of the open source
and geospatial information and how we can work with other community like gnome like
a modzilla for example and now we can build a real open source geospatial services there is
software but in order to make this software working we must have data and as governmental
agency not give us data freely and open data we must build an open source and a
a maps of the world so this is why we are here in order to show the our data and we are also here
to have the temperature of other communities because there is a lot of community that already
use our data and they tell us here what they are doing with their data and each year I'm it's
really amazing to see our this project is really useful is really bringing people new idea of
a new way of to use and to collect data and I meet some people from friends here that I don't
meet in France and it is really funny and people say I can talk about this because my code is not
really clean and same but show it it's really nice what you have already done there is a lot
of people who can help you to improve your code to improve your service to improve your product
so it is a good start of point we have a lot of campaign now in France municipal campaign
so I have some people who are candidate to the municipal campaign political campaign who said
I use your data in order to to make a web 2.0 campaign and I say nice it's really nice this
another way that people are using data in political field so if it is useful use it if it is useful
contribute and improve your city absolutely I'm what is the stage you're from France yes what's
the stage of the map in France oh the state of the map is a huge conference of all the mappers
of open sheet maps so this year it will be in Buenos Aires in Argentina in November and in
France we have a state of the map in april it will be 4 5 and 6 of april and it will be in Paris
so everybody can come it's free it's open and the Paris region give us the the the the place
where they are deliberate the laws and so on the local government is sitting and it will be
very very on the on Friday it will be really nice because it is a huge proof of the sustainability
of this community in France and it is a great recognize of the Paris region president
to our community and our work on the region to give us this great place yeah so that just to
clarify for for people who might know you're talking about the local government of Paris have given
you the parliament buildings yes all over all over Paris so the the most important region
in France so we will be there in april so one year one day in the Paris region
parliament and the the other two to us it will be in Numa Numa is a building
by silicon Sancia with a startup association so we will be there for hacking for discussing
for joking and exchange with all the community and people who love us in the Netherlands I live in
the Netherlands the maps are fantastic it's based they were very lucky to get a base map and now
you know things like postboxes and everything are mapped is it is that level of detail worldwide
or how is it in France you know can you can you use it to do navigation for example in France you
can use it in grid town a huge town you have a grid accuracy the French community is really really
active so we have a lot of contributors but if you are going in some rural towns it's a little
bit less detailed you have you have an opportunity to improve the map let's follow like us exactly
in other countries like in Africa for example there is a lot of our contributors like Nikola Shava
or Savannah or some of the experts of the humanitarian open street map team this guys are both
strapping community in Senegal in Chad in Ivory Coast in Kenya in Brazil in Haiti so I'm from
the Caribbean for example and I'm bootstrapping also community in the Caribbean so open street map
France can be one of the boats for example well you are we are trying to bootstrapping community
and to make people to be in each of their countries independent of of us of course because we
give us materials we give us GPS we give us training and afterwards they are continuing to
mapping their countries because they are the best people to map because they know their countries
they know their towns they know their their neighborhoods so this is a good opportunity for them
to start to map in France okay one thing that I'd like to know is say I wanted to get into editing
the map what is the best place to learn about what the way is what a street is what an area is
is there introductory videos or somewhere some resource that I there is some tutorials there is a
learn osm.org who is a great tutorial right in French English and other languages so it is a good
point in order to start to learn of course there is also mapping parties with some events we
leading in the community so we have on the website on the wiki wiki.osm.org a list of all events
that are happening in the world so feel free to join a group a local group in France it is the
last Friday of each month in Paris and in other regions also in southern France there is a lot
of meeting each month so feel free to join one of this meeting and ask questions train yourself
to contribute to open fit map people will be very very happy to receive you and to help you
and if any of our listeners are going to one of those can you bring a microphone and just
record it for us here on the hpr network so that we'll be able to listen to of course yes you can
follow us and on the open fit map twitter account we have a lot of events that we are participate in
so feel free to join us and to record us and to we'll do can you tell us about we were talking
earlier about these two devices can you give us a rundown on the yes we are has just come up and I'm
I'm taking over all the booth when you should actually be doing stuff so tell us about these two
okay so this is a board photos in the show notes for I'll put photos into the show notes for
this episode okay you can presume people can you can presume people can see it okay this is a
modules built around MV O A O H C minus CSM with films with building GNSS receiver so you
can receive GPS we can receive Galileo we can receive GLONAS signals and these are all so that's the
us version Galileo's European GLONAS is the GPS from Russia Galileo is GPS from Europe it is not
fully operational so you have also Baidu from China you have QZSS from Japan you have a lot of
constellation so this module is able is able to listen to each this satellites and give you a
accurate position our goal is to use these cheap modules our cheapest cheap it is less the module
himself is less than four zeros and if you buy all the boards you have about 100 euros and how
accurate is that so this board help you to have sub matrix so you mean accuracy tolerance is
under a meter sub matrix and 2.5 meters you are between 2.5 and 1 meters accuracy wow that's
amazing so if you use two modules you can build a differential GPS can you tell us what a differential
GPS is okay differential GPS is the fact that you subtract the noise with another receiver you have
some perturbation is the you know sphere for example that perturbate that the signal of the GPS
and GNSS signals so if you have one you are if you are too receiver you have one receiver who sends
this perturbation to the other it makes a subtraction and you have a greater signal and all the
road data that helps you to improve your accuracy and how much can you improve the accuracy so with
these modules there is some works we have done with an Italian guy and some Japanese guy who builds
an article with a free software tool and we have about 10 centimeters accurate all over the road
so 10 centimeters yes so we have less than 200 euros you can build a network of GPS station
real-time kinematic if you need it in real-time or post processing GNSS treatment processing for
example so you record the two signals on your station and in your rover so you are in mobility in
your car in your on your bike and all vehicle you you have and afterwards you merge these two signals
you process it and you have a trace or all the dots with a symmetric accuracy and less than
five 50 centimeters accuracy and we have in the best in the best best condition 10 centimeters
accuracy that is as phenomenal that's something that they has been criticized about the open
street map that the accuracy is never going to be as good as you know the royal ordinance
surveyors and not what not is there a way then to when you're uploading your gfx files is there
is there a way to gfx dpx thank you to write in information about how accurate that that
traces oh you can you can precise it in the commentaries and so on and in fact more we are
more accurate trace gpx trace we have more create the map will be because we will have reference for
have good imagery to size correctly because you can have shifting of the the photography
so this type of trace helps us to have a higher imagery correctly placed on the right place so
if you have some point some p y for example point of interest for example the wall a wall a roundabout
trees a particular trees a pottery places you can have the right place of your imagery so you
so an aerial photographer could then use this more accurate to say that tree is definitely there
that tree is definitely over there so those two points on that photograph can be cropped down
yes so this is the first things we can do and afterwards of course trace
trees trace some entrance of station transition for example for people who are with wheelchair
if you have a accurate position of the door afterwards you can go indoor and start to map the indoor
of the of the real station from the from the how many times the wheel goes around for yes for
example we can map it if you photograph take a shot of the plan of the of the real station for
example so you can place some amenities some shop and so on in the real station because we
have reference outside of the so you take you take photo of the plan of the building you go to
an entrance get an accurate point there you go to another entrance get an accurate point there
another exit then you get an accurate point and then you by by that you be able to scale the image
to be able to use it as a scale image as opposed to that is really good so we use all the ways and
this is a good point for ordinal survey this is a good point for our geographical institute in
France to tell us tell them tell them yes keep it simple stupid we are really trying to have the
best solution to have information they are not so accurate so complete that their data but
each time we find a new way a new product a new board a new GNSS board a new processor that
help us to improve our accuracy indoor or outdoor or new imagery from drones UAV and so on
we help the community to innovate and we help the world to have a new way to map for
developing countries but also for south countries so if we are sending this type of GPS station
for differential GPS in Africa as it is really cheap we can send more stations and we can have
more countries that can be mapped with a real accuracy solution yeah what sort of device is this
so there's two devices here this is like a plug-on board which is a USB device and presumably
with an aerial antenna on that that's dedicated for GPS okay gotcha and this is a great great
product from Olimex this is guys from Bulgaria you can go to the AW building they are there
it is the first time we'll do and this is the most open source silicon chip boards they will
have a torque it is an all-weiner 810 processors so all these processors is reverse and geno
so you can run a DBN a new Ubuntu and nixbmc distribution on it you have HDMI port you have
USB OTG you have SD card you have SATA port you have B3 ports you have two USB ports and you have
network ports so it is how much is that it is 30 euros it cost 30 euros you're personally
you're joking me 30 euros 30 euros wow cool it is just 30 euros and this is the 810 version there
is an 820 version with dual core with more RAM too so you can go to the the AW and these guys
are really really amazing they will talk about their works and their job and this is a great
demonstration our cell phones are give us a way to build cheap device open source device
with open source software open source operating system and this is a way for us to have some
meteorological station to have thunderstorms station you have GPIO and so I'll talk to these guys
separately but so this device just so I'm holding up the receiver in device that's you say we
were talking earlier and you were saying that this can plug into any little machine I'm presenting
yes and I can put this open my attic and just contribute to a project can you tell me about that
project oh there is a network built by the German people from a lab or a geophysical laboratory
and they built a network of n-trip caster so n-trip caster is a network of
gps differential gps through the internet so there is already gps differential through radio
and this guy builds a server on open to server that casting streaming all the raw data from gps
through the internet so you just have to go to the n-trip caster network and register your station
and say that on this URL on this port you are streaming raw gps data in the n-trip format
so it is really useful for there we already have a lot of station in europe and so on but for
example agriculture in the agriculture field for example there are big frams and this is a good
way for them to have this type of station because that helps them to have a way to locate precisely
what are where are their all cards each trees and so on so for us in in in France and in other
countries the goal is to build an international network cheap network of n-trip caster all over
the other in Africa in Caribbean and to have a way from governmental sources but also from citizen
sources to have real greed and actuate gps position okay just correct me up from wrong so I would
have a a server running anyway and I just had to plug in one of these you know highly accurate
devices and I'm streaming that to the internet so then that would mean anyone going round with
another one of those devices or a device similar to that capable of picking up the stream
in a region around my location would be able to benefit from a more accurate map but then as
they move further away from my location the accuracy would decrease obviously but then hopefully
there would be more people so it will be more precise if you are doing a real-time kinematic
positioning but if you want to have post-processing you can save the stream locally to save the
stream on your server too because the server is saving the stream and afterwards download
the same stream at the same time but in two places different place and more station you will have
on your cities more accurate will be your post-processing this will be something for local
governments in each of their buildings around the city to have this and then that would allow
the community then to get more and more accurate detailed information down to like very high
yes as we have this type of network for meteorological station we have this type of network for
example also for quick chasing network we have city at home for example we have folding at home
where this type of project you can distribute and calculate and so on we have this same type of
community of people who are deploying on the roof on their house of their office of the local
government building and so on this type of station of cheap and as cheap as we can station so we
will have more and more and more station and more and more accurate stream and more accurate position
in fact okay I've taken enough of your time you need to talk to the people here across them
listen thank you very much and look forward to following your progress here
hi this is Ken we're at the k-building and I've just come up to the lever graphics
table and I'm going to talk to Ginger how you do I'm very good how are you not too bad can you
tell me a bit about what your table is what's lever graphics absolutely so we're lever graphics
magazine and we're a print publication devoted to showcasing good work done with floss in graphic
design and art and in this day and age of actually killing trees and stuff and everybody having
e-pubs why have you decided to go for physical print media you know we find that having a
print magazine instead of just a digital one a gives us a sense of legitimacy and B also makes
us a sort of record right and something that you can share more easily you can show it to someone
and say look at this awesome thing I just saw when you say okay tell me why what is it what's
what's the point well I mean one of the things that we've always heard so the three editors of this
magazine we're all trained as graphic designers and we all first trained using Adobe right oh yes
and so one of the things that people always say in floss is that floss graphic software is
fine for the web and it's fine for hobbyists but it's not good for professional work or for print
work so we try to show people that it is yes I think I've heard you on another podcast yeah
and how many how many publications have you got at this point so we've done six official issues we
actually started in May 2010 with something that we call issue zero which isn't in our catalog now
it was a sort of limited run 200 issue or 200 obvious yeah so since we started officially we've
done six issues okay and how much is this and where is it available well you can buy it from our
website and at FOSM it's a little cheaper than online because we don't have to ship it so online
I think we charge gosh $16 to ship it within your for a copy within Europe yeah and then a little
bit more if you're shipping it elsewhere that seems to be about right for what a magazine
subscription would be it's it's the cut well that's per issue but it's the cost of a normal
magazine right exactly yeah yeah definitely I knew that because they in the Netherlands you can
expect to pay up to 20 quid for a Linux magazine yeah well then that's the thing we cost about
the same as a regular art magazine right or a regular specialist magazine okay and talk me to
one of your issues if you would mind yeah so our most recent one which we call gendering
flaws just came out this week we're actually releasing it at FOSM and because all of our issues
are thematic this one is about the issue of gender in free software and so we're very interested in
discussions about what it is to be you know a man or a woman or other in a floss community so we
have some stuff from you know we have a new releases section which is standard we have some
columnists who are addressing the issue of the magazine we have a really nice piece from a group
called hacker moms which is in California and they're a set of women who find that their
relationship to the world has changed when they become mothers and so they started a hacker space
from mothers we have a nice showcase actually and this is where you know buying it is great
because I must say the quality looks absolutely stunning we are designers so our showcase this time
is about gendered craft so about knitting about embroidery about things that are sort of traditional
women's work and then about Kota's craft okay and all of this is produced with free software oh yes
yes it is so like for what example I'm thinking the game in escape well so for layout we use
scribes we definitely use inkscape we use gimp but we also do version control so all of our working
assets are actually available in our Git repository you know we use IRC we use mailing lists we
operate like a floss project but we happen to be publishing a magazine and do you have a is it a
for-profit company or how is your company met up do you have a company we're pretty ad hoc
one of the things that we want to do in future once we get the money to pay a lawyer is
incorporate as a nonprofit could you not go as an umbrella under one of the we would love to
if anyone would take us on why don't they want to take I sense that there may be a little issue
no it's not that no one wants to take us on it's that for us the major issue is putting out the
magazine and so a lot of the administrative stuff falls by the wayside so if we had the time to
approach say no or the free software foundation or one of those nice umbrella groups you know
that would be great or if one of our listeners could was experienced enough it could maybe get
in touch and give you a hand so that is can you just give us a URL again for the craft so the
magazine is at libragraphicsmag.com yeah okay fantastic thanks very much
hi everybody this is Ken again and at the open suzer boot and I'm going to talk to Richard Brown
how are you Richard I'm fine how are you I am not too bad enjoying the film good and you're still
here at the boot not stuck no I'm actually quite enjoy it I do it every year for open suzer you're
faster do you work for open suzer you work for suzer I work for suzer as of two months so for the
last 10 years I've been doing open suzer the community member and now I'm working for suzer as
well as QA but the there you go folks you contribute to a project eventually they'll pay here
yep eventually they'll pay with yeah so tell us what a day at fast and feels like for you
therefore well for open suzer it's you know normally starting early you know we we try and have
fast numbers up sort of biggest event of the year but part of my own so yep second of the booth up
we try our best to sort of show off our new merchandise and a most more importantly show off
our distribution and what is your distribution our distribution is open suzer 13.1 at the moment
which is sort of the latest and greatest of of everything from every upstream project which we
we've listened to which I think something like five thousand packages are now in our main
distribution it's getting really quite large we're spending a lot of time thinking at new ways
of integrating and and releasing this stuff as quickly as we want to while actually still drawing
from all these different upstream projects and so we have lots we behind our main distribution we
have a lot of sort of interesting sub projects like our open build service which you know I'm
trying to remember the Ubuntu account launchpad yeah which is sort of like our launchpad but then
with a really powerful clever build engine behind it so we can take one package and build it for
all of our distros and everybody else's distros as well so that's you also build RPMs and
Red Hat RPMs and WM Dubs I mean we like other when other projects are using it as well
guys like the own cloud project do all of their building on our build service and then they
actually use our infrastructure to down to give everyone your downer packages and do you need to
pay for us distribution service no it's all very gladly sponsored by Susan okay very good but
if you want to sponsor us the Open Suzy project it's interesting and what is the relationship
between the Open Suzy project and Suzy itself surprisingly independent so you know with a name
like Open Suzy there's often a perception of you know Suzy control it whereas in reality it is
a independent project very closely sponsored by Suzy so the board is independent a five person board
which can have no more than two Suzy employees on it and so you know we and you know so we have
two Suzy employees and arm employee and you know two other community members who I can't remember
now then the project the project is very closely sponsored but in terms of technical
direction project direction it is a community effort you know we very much believe in the idea
of those who do decide so if you are a community member working on something you know it's your
cool to get it in the distra and who owns Suzy now who owns Suzy now the attachment group
owns Suzy now so they're a group that contains Suzy in the Vell attachment and NetIQ all
run is completely independent business yet so okay management stuff but we shared services
between for a lot of people the whole attachment was a very strange company to take over how did
that go down with the open Suzy community it hasn't really well it hasn't really impacted us
directly much the biggest thing you've probably noticed is the sort of corporate culture change in
Suzy has made it a lot more how open Suzy wanted it to work anyway so yeah the open source
philosophy is much more embedded in Suzy than it was when it was in the Vell slash Suzy so
a bit of a distillation away from the Vell yeah Suzy is now the separate business unit with
its separate corporate culture separate management etc so it's very easy to be very different from
Vell while still at the heart of it you know sharing things like finance and infrastructure
okay there might be quite a lot of listeners actually you might know what Suzy is as a distribution
yeah can you can you give us a quick rundown what your target audience is what you do
the target audience for open Suzy is pretty much anybody interested in open source you know we
kind of target that sort of core enthusiast hacker but very very nicely we wanted to be stable we
wanted to be to work with it but at the same time we always sort of like to stretch the
limit on cutting edge so we've done put something in there that's out right broken obviously but
you know we're always upgrading to latest version of our various upstream packages latest
known latest KDE if it's stable we include it and that's kind of the role that open Suzy
takes so from Suzy's corporate device sponsor we fit a role for them very similar to
Fedora's yeah but because of the difference in how open open Suzy is maybe with a bit less of
direct control that they read how you know how I wrote I don't think red hat make any
bonds about the fact that they're using Fedora to steer development whereas you're saying
whereas the open Suzy Suzy relationship is much more Suzy open Suzy go its own direction
and perfect example being the default choice of desktop the default choice of desktop for open
Suzy is KDE we include no I actually work on the num team it's a it's a perfectly equal partner
but the default if you install another open Suzy is KDE whereas on Suzy's look distributions it's
currently you know they they have no bones of going okay you know open Suzy's up
Suzy's upstream and then downstream for their enterprise distributions they pick something
entirely different okay and what other choices of this old desktop do you have our
our current our current collection of sort of main desktop these known KDE XFC XFC LXD and
enlightenment whereas we have other side projects or the community projects where they're adding
things like matter and other ones as well so do you have the build service you can pretty much
just add whatever you want to that and then it'll build for open Suzy's so rather than having
PPAs you put it into the build service exactly thank god yeah I don't I know I've spoken and this
is nothing to do with the interview but hey I've spoken about this before that you know RPM
is what PPAs are going to be for people they're going to get their bots burned we the model of OBS
so open build service is it's constantly evolving we're constantly trying to improve it
but we very much avoid the whole sort of okay tell it you better tell us what the open build
service is then yeah the open build service it's sort of a hybrid between launchpad and PPAs
so it's where we do all of our so I don't blow I've got an application I wanted package for
everybody I upload the source code up there and then and then it will automatically build for
the distributions you've targeted and then once it's built the open build service will host that
as an RPM repository for or dev repository for all of your users to use so I could then add that
into my sources that list and Debian I'm going to a Suzy repository and get my that's just weird
it's weird but it works I mean we're an open source project that's you know part you know
we've got this great technology why why shouldn't we share it with other distributions this was
the call call call call collaborative something yeah yeah all that all that stuff and in fact
it's it's really helped with a lot of a lot of the collaboration we've done with like the
Fedora guys and Red Hat you know a lot of we we're finding a lot of really nice benefits with
things like just basic RPM packaging because they're doing things and we're doing things in a way
that we both understand much more now so a new bit of software comes out we're getting that
spec file built way quicker than we used to and you know when crazy upstream stuff changes happen
it's having much less of an impact on us which is great because we've got five thousand
blooming packages and I'm in distribution there and growing so if you're a small software
you have like widgets X software uploaded up there and then instantaneously it's it's available
to all the other projects yeah that's just phenomenal and then when it fails you get a decent build
log from that server because it's all done in VMs of why it failed how it's failed that's great
to start debugging it and messing with it there and there's I think one of the most the reasons
people use open source in my experience has been the YAST and one of the main reasons people
don't use open source it has YAST can you tell me about YAST what is YAST 10 years I totally
understand that so YAST is our system administration tool and yet another system administration tool
that's what the better we really yeah and it's it tries to be this nice central control panel for
every conceivable aspect of the looking after your installation so it's what we use as our install
of it's our an icon and a condo equivalent and it's very very modulus so things like Apache
management and you know it all the other services firewall etc all in now all controlled in
YAST historically in the past and speaking of the system I have been burnt by this you know
having a lovely administration tool is great but then when you want to go under the hood and
start messing around with things like config files you're going to start getting complex you know
you modify a config file YAST comes along and undoes your edits or just breaks everything
yeah that was the past I it's been three years now since I've had any problem with that
the way that our YAST teams have worked now is very much it will either merge those changes very
very elegantly or YAST will pretty much keep its hands off and know that this has been such that
and and both my experience and open Susie and internally at Susie we don't see these sort of YAST
hell issues that we used to and that would be considered then a bug if I for example you know edited
added another virtual host in Apache and it didn't appear then that would be a bug totally yeah
and and I actually my my personal service now I am actually using puppet modules to modify files
directly and yet that is still compatible with YAST so YAST is actually in reading something that's
coming from a totally fove and source interesting that is that's fantastic actually
might me actually make me have another look at open Susie yeah that'd be good
anything else I missed in this whole journey what's what's the beer tickets well yeah our
conferences here every year we we have our own conference so this year OFC 14 is going to be in
Dubrovnik and you we're giving away free free beer token so if you turn up there you you know
hand over your you'll you'll want to get your money and get yourself a free beer in Dubrovnik
after being at the pub last night I can your you know your target audience very well yes in
previous years at first then we actually have a brewery in near the office in Nuremberg that
actually makes Susie branded or open Susie branded beer this year we decided not to bring it because
it got a little bit crazy last year but yeah exactly we know our target audience okay Richard
thank you very much I appreciate the interview
and this is Ken again for Hacker Public Radio we're down as the Debian Root and I've just pulled
somebody away from beating up an open Susie guy who are next to us and your name is
Joost Fombal Ilic and you're from the Netherlands and you're here with a I'm selling Debian T-shirts
and it's that's all that the Debian boot is a a commercial a way to generate revenue for the Debian
project to have world domination yeah well Debian makes an operating system but I suppose you
read us new about it well I think probably everybody knows about it but can you give us an idea
of what Debian is and where it started and okay Debian is something like 18 years old I believe
it's an open source Linux distribution so it's one of the old ones Ubuntu is based upon Debian
we're a global community of about one thousand hackers and we take the Linux kernel and
free software tools and combine them into an operating system and are you a developer for Debian
I'm a developer for Debian. What packages do you minted? Well some they're mainly
interesting for system administrators I work as a system administrator and I package some tools
I use in my daily work okay cool and I help doing publicity telling these shirts stuff like that
and why did you come to foster? Oh I'm a foster regular I think I was also at Osdam the first
tradition about ten years ago or something I love it it's a grassroots thing it's a really
community based conference it's you it's international it's beautiful I really love it
I'm only just why would you sorry this interview is all over the shop but it's nothing new for me
but why would somebody come why would a user install Debian instead of Ubuntu for instance?
I think Debian still has more of a grassroots atmosphere around it it's made by the hackers there's
no commercial entity behind the distribution and people come together and work on the operating
system not because they're boss tells them to or they're employed or whatever but because they
want to do it and what is your relationship with the Ubuntu teams? Fine I'm happy I'm happy I'm
happy Ubuntu exists because I think it really helped also Debian getting more popularity and more
people are I mean Ubuntu is basically a large part of Ubuntu it's just plain Debian so more people
run Debian software and I like that so I'm happy about that and how why are you selling t-shirts?
Where does the money go? Oh the money goes to some foundations who are the official institutions
behind Debian it's foundations who basically collect money and if people want to travel to
meet other hackers or go to conferences you can get your travel costs and reimburse so in order
to cover that cost and also cost for hosting the profit we make for the t-shirts goes to that
these costs okay and the t-shirts are actually excellent okay that's cool there's a t-shirt with
sweets flag on a cool completely distracted so whatever you got here you got some CDs
I know you're about the t-shirts I used to print t-shirts myself yeah so I'm in the Netherlands and I
went to a print shop and downloaded the Debian logo printed t-shirts sold them here and the
profit went to this institution if you make any profit because most I think a lot of t-shirts are
usually sold for cost price so it's profit is almost nothing but yeah people love them and
we are here each year and we sell huge much t-shirts it's crazy yeah and people want to wear a
Debian t-shirt because they love Debian and they want to show it to the people so the locals are
are they designs on the Debian t-shirts always seem to be fantastic who comes up with them?
well we have the Debian swirl which is the logo and yeah I know that's very boring but
what like they you had a few years ago I think the green one with the heineken logo with the
Debian on it yeah yeah I just I think the the gross one is made by Stephen UK and I think he
just liked the idea and he makes it makes the Debian thing with the beer brand yeah it's just
anything goes people come up with ideas and they print them and they got them sold so what is
what's the state of Debian at the minute what's anything coming up anything new that we should know
about we're working on a new stable release as always which is I'm not supposed to say real
ship it when it's ready that's obviously yes well if if more the technical people are more
interested in technology might be interested in debate about whether we're going to ship a
system D or upstart yeah there's a really big debate going on what will be the default
init system on the operating system so we'll see what what comes out what else why does
there need to change is what's wrong with init system system five minutes that's the old one
well it's just been old probably does that make it in any way worse being old doesn't make it worse
but it has just less features I mean the new ones have more features and they're I think some
things within the way system V in it is implemented are just buggy if you want to have an inner
system and you want to rely with starter stop demons then you shouldn't do it as it's now being done
it's it's really broken and so people are trying to fix it but the migration costs are huge
so a lot of people are hesitating about really changing those systems and switching to a new
init system so that that's just because the migration is so so turf that's why people still
stuck with system five minutes okay yeah and no sign as to which is going to be which
sorry there's there's no decision yet as to which is going to be chosen uh no uh I think
on Monday the Debian Technical Committee will vote on some something and you're also changing
your default desktop or is that just a vicious rumor oh yeah yeah yeah so system D is
GNOME depends upon system D so if you want to run a GNOME desktop then you kind of have to have
system D unless you want to go to real pain so what one point in the debate somebody said yeah
well let's just drop GNOME or ship with a default another desktop environment yeah well I don't
know I don't use GNOME I don't use any proper desktop environment so for me personally it doesn't
mean a matter uh well let's see what comes out I don't know yeah these things are all yeah it's
a very democratic process the the Debian community yes yes and well I don't know if the listeners
might not be aware or can you tell me about what the DPL is and okay so uh yes Debian is a
is a doorker series as I say but still it's nice to have a role to have a project leader because
that if you have a presence of you well we have one request to be in our I'm not the DPL
it's nice to have one person representing the whole project so that's basically why we have a DPL
and sometimes we have technical debates which are so tough that we can't decide and so we have some
infrastructure to to smooth in the decision making process but generally most decisions
I just well people just build something which works which attracts more people and then turns out
to be the default that's basically the way it works but yeah with friends the net system it's
not possible to do it like that so we have a technical committee who are a bunch of
experienced Debian developers who are supposed to know what they're talking about and so they can
make a decision we can the Debian developers as a group can ask the technical committee please
decide upon this because we can't go on flaming in sort of for five years so that's what happened
with the net system but now there are also people saying yeah maybe we should have a vote
because in Debian the developers also have a right to vote and friends we vote for our new DPL
but we can also we can vote upon anything any developer could say we should vote upon this
please take one of these four boxes and then ask other developers to support this idea that
there should be a vote and then there will be a vote so maybe maybe there will be a vote upon
the developers whether they wish in a system to run so what makes sorry what makes Debian different
from say open suzer a red hat or any of the other districts yeah well I'm assistant my
man's thread so I look at the thing from a technical point of view and Debian has the
dot-depth packaging format which I think is superior to our PM open suzer and rather both both
use RPM what about software philosophy your choice of software packages well I think Debian ships
the most but yeah you could also yeah Debian ships a lot of stuff with nobody uses that's also
true yeah it just depends on what you want and yeah but I myself I feel I'm also at home with
Debian and Debian community it's both a software project but it's also a group of people
like each other and they will meet and it's all social network there's been some criticism level
that Debian that you're not in free distribution either free software foundation okay yes yes yes
yeah yeah we have some debates with FSF about this I think in the very early days Debian started
as an FSF project actually but that's a long time ago there was there still is this issue about
the GNU Debian people said the GNU not so free documentation license so the GNU free documentation
license which is considered not Debian free software guidelines free by Debian and FSF probably
of course things differently about that and there was some other issues I forgot I can't think of
them now so yeah I mean if you really into this nitpicking then you can have a real interesting
time framing people and making a big fuss about it but I think generally there's
way more connecting FSF with Debian than splitting FSF in Debian in my opinion but
so yeah well and do you have any developer conferences are where can people how can people get
involved if they were interested in Debian well they can meet it at the booth of course yeah and
there are some distro room across distro yeah I don't know for sure there is actually there's
one place where Debian specific talks are being given okay so there's a track about this
and you have Debian conferences around the world as well yes do you ever attendles
yes we have Debian since a couple years which is your yearly conference it's year in a different
country I've been to a couple of them it's really nice do you have a killed no I don't have a
killed the killed is not really connected with Debian for better bits yes yes the killed are
quite expensive actually but they're really nice it's really nice yeah so yeah yeah okay cool
listen I'll let you get back to the selling t-shirts and improving Debian and thanks very much for
the interview I'm here at the Google Summer of Code table and probably everybody knows about
Google Summer of Code by now but I'm here with two people who partake in the Google Summer of Code
you are I'm Martin Jetsky I'm Jakub Irmar and what are you here talking about today
today we are presenting our operating system project which participated in two previous years
of Google Summer of Code okay and what's a code it's called Hellenos and what does Hellenos do that's
sets it apart from all the other distros that are out there well if I have to think of anything
particle or it's it's written from scratch it's not trying to be compatible with the existing
operating systems and it's multi-platform what does that mean actually that it is multi-platform
that means that we support from seven to eight different processor architectures and regarding
that thing about not being compatible with the existing systems it's probably best expressed by
saying that we are not trying to be a better Linux because the best Linux out there is Linux itself
and instead of that we are trying to focus on designing software in a simpler way maybe
sometimes in a better way which gets rid of some of the some of the bloat that you get when you
pour libraries and other software components from third parties so if I was us if I was task
either of you what the difference would be in packaging between Hellenos and Debian for instance
what would you reply me well my reply would be that it's an undefined question because we don't
have any mature packaging at all it's the the goals of the system are totally different so the
goals of Debian are probably linked to it to to its end user usability to to to be able
for you to to make your stuff make your work on on the system our goals are more tied to the
operating system itself to re rethinking it re designing it in a in a way that might allow you
to build unusable operating systems in 20 years that would be more reliable more dependable and
more secure than the current operating systems but our goal and our limited manpower cannot allow us
to create and and user usable system but we want to create an perfect operating system and what's
your definition of perfect then that's complicated and we have all the time in the world or at least
until fast ends over well I have mentioned some of the criteria so so we want to be do you do
the Linux kernel first start no we are we have implemented and designed hello noes or halanos
completely from scratch so the our micro kernel is written from scratch our user space is
written from scratch and we we have several design principles that we try to follow like being a
micro kernel system using small grain of fine grain user space components so that there is a
possibility for for more verification of them or easier for more verification of them and this
leads leads to to to the goes so we want to be more dependable more secure easier to be
formally verified and well generally speaking a better operating system okay fair enough so
what sort of licenses this whole released on let's let's start with that and that's easy it's
I think it's 100% BSD license the three clause BSD license and where is the project hosted
well it's hosted on Martins infrastructure and because we are using Bazaar as our version
control system we host some of our branches on launchpad okay and what is it written in hot language
so the kernel and the user space components are written in plain C obviously some parts of the
kernel especially are written in the assembly language of the respective processor how many people
are working on this project let's say that the core team the core developers which contribute to
the project regularly has the size of 10 people but they are they are like less frequent contributors
or I let's say occasional contributors so again depending how you count it it might be as far as
50 people I think I've done these statistics about two years ago and I included the students
that work on a Linux as part of their master thesis and also the Google Summer of Code students
and the random contributors and the number was around 45 and if we add the additional two years I
think it's as Martins said 50 so it's unlikely that I'll be able to go to Firefox and install Firefox
on this how far along are you now to a usable desktop or is that the goal of desktop or is it a
what is the goal or is it should be up to the individual it should be a general purpose operating system
so the desktop is as important go as an embedded system so we don't we don't want to be biased in
that and when we should speak about the practical usability we have a web server we still like a
web client a web browser which you have a download utility which works sort of like the wget
application okay and is it your intention to bring in other applications to share code or are
you thinking this is more philosophical approach that I for your desktop or for your project you want
called only coming from your project in the end in the end of the day I think porting
for example a web browser an existing web browser is unnecessary because we don't have the
manpower to implement our own and it would be probably foolish to implement our own web browser
but a web browser is not not a core component of the system so so it's just one one and user
application but we so in that case we are not opposed of porting applications from other systems
but we don't want to port the core components from other systems so the core components the
components that create the foundation of the system should be it should be highly not native
okay and so describe how far you are already so we have already spent some 12 years on it
we started small and only gradually were able to attract interest of other people
so what we already have we have a working kernel which supports everything else we have a file
system layer with support for multiple commonly used file systems such as extended four
minix file system the cd file system udf you name it we also have fully decomposed
and I think we were the first in the world to have it a fully decomposed networking stack
what does that mean fully deep yeah let me explain that and normally the networking stack
is either part of the monolithic kernel or even in case of micro kernels it will be
implemented as only one component meaning that it runs in one process so it's so it's either
a monolithic component in the kernel or a monolithic component in the user space but not not so
much or not like that in our case where we have decomposed it into many different processes so we
have a different process for TCP a different one for UDP different one for IP so there are about
like five different processes that together implement the networking stack why is that a good thing
well if you imagine that your UDP server crashes it doesn't take down the whole system and it
doesn't take down the whole networking stack even if UDP dies you will still be able or that's
the ideal you will still be able to use your TCP connections and they will just continue to
to go on okay so do you then further subdivide that to to a network port level so thinking
of a wired ethernet versus a Wi-Fi ethernet I'm not your answer well say you're being attacked on
you have a multi-home system and you're being attacked on the on the public internet port and
they manage to crash that you could still continue to operate on the back end so that your
management will be able to access this server the the same principle as Jakub described on the
networking level goes also to our device drivers which also run in user space and are also decomposed
so so we have a separate driver for each individual device so yeah even even this is not so related
to the networking even if a device driver crashes one driving one device the other device drivers
are still running and the operating system itself is still running and you can for example respawn
the the that device driver and re-inshuise the hardware this seems to be very minixi in its approach
well to a certain degree I was just going to say that we are applying a similar principle to our
file systems layer where it is possible to have multiple instances of the same file system say
the fat file system which works or which serves the root file system and also which serves some
mounted fat file system you can either have it served by only one process or you can split it into
two fat servers and both of them serves one of these file systems so let's say that your non-root
fat file system crashes and you will still be able to continue to use your root fat file system
but unlike the minix guys we do not do this responding of killed processes so how do you how do you
recover the manual is manual invention required well if if the if the component that crashes is not
essential to the degree that it's no longer possible to use the system after it crashes you can still
spawn new instances or you should be in theory able to spawn new instances of it okay so this is
a lovely project your students I assume because you're in G no no no I'm employed I have two kids
or so this is an attempt to rip off google summer of cold from poor worthy students now it
isn't because because we used to be google summer of code mentors oh and people come onto your
project and you mentioned them and you went off how successful has that been for your project
how many students have you already had in google summer of code it was like eight students in total
and the total success rate was like 70% or something like that so obviously there were some
dropouts but but otherwise the students the students who passed the evaluation we were very
sex we were very very happy with their work and they were was integrated into our
okay the google summer of code is something put on by the google corporation to say spare
students computer students I guess from flippin burgers during the summer and this is for people
listeners who may not know and other software projects get the benefit of that so do you two
work on this or is this a part-time job for you guys well this is my hobby project basically I
work on it in my spare time and for me it's part-time hobby work part-time actual work because I'm
working as a computer science operating system researcher at Charles University in Prague so
basically I'm doing the research part of the Helena West use okay fantastic and do you
has anybody using this in practice in out in the field in industry at this point or are we still
in early development well I think it's still too early but I would like to use ND Tannenbaum's
phrase for it because it's a bsd license we don't know if there is anybody who is using it or who
might be using it okay guys and if somebody is interested in joining the project helping out
what's where can they go have you got contact to the website or something so that's easy just go
to flannels.org and there you will find anything important including the addresses of the mailing
list our IRC channel okay links to all that will be in the show notes for this episode I see you've
got two IBM think pads is what's the safest piece of hardware I know I've installed some
experimental OSes before what's what's the safest piece of hardware to to go and install this on
if somebody wants to have ego I would say it's Qemu but other than that it's probably the commodity
PC and any standardized PC any enough standard PC can run hell and was and do you have your own
bootloader as well do you use grubber light or something we use grub okay well at least at least
on the PC we use some some some immediate bootloaders on the other architectures with
resupport because grub is very is very comfortable bootloader it allows you to load multiple
components not only the kernel which the other bootloaders and the other platforms like this they
are like this functionality so so we use the native bootloader to load a huge huge single binary and
then we unpack this huge single binary into into the micro kernel and some some initial user
space components that are required I know there's some people who will definitely be interested in
downloading and trying this thank you very much guys appreciate taking the time for this and
hopefully you'll get some interest from the HBR audience thank you very much
hi this is Ken again for Hector Public Radio as in the K building down going around the boots and
I've come across Michael is it Michael hi I'm Michael from C A-cert I'm hot C A-cert
C A-cert is a community certificate authority that means you can get those certificates that you
use to establish an SSL connection a secure connection to some web server or use it to
sign email messages but you also can you get PGP keys yeah and we sign those certificates
and we do that by bringing the web of trust that you know from PGP to the X509 the SSL world
okay at your table it's a hive of activity there are loads of people it looks like a
scene from CSI Miami or something there's everybody's looking at passports and drivers license
with jeweled glasses and infrared torches and stuff so what's going on over there
yeah hopefully there's nobody dying over there but yeah over there we do the verification process
so if you want to include your name in your certificate then we obviously have to verify that you
are the one you are claiming to be so we need to check your passport or your ID card or
driver's license and match it to your face and to the data you're giving us
why are you doing that I can just go to a very sign or somebody and just give them my credit card
details and get a cert yeah but there are a less cool and b it costs money so if you go to
very sign you need to give the money and here it's everything is for free and we are building this
around the community so it's more like open source approach because we publish all of our
source code so you can you can look at what we are doing wrong on what we do right and that you
can't at very time so maybe you trust us a little bit more than Beresan so if I had a website I
think the ideal use case would be I've got Ken from on that come for instance and I want to
put up an encrypted version at HGCBS can fellon.com and then I would need a top level security
certificate to so that the web browser knows well I trust CA cert so therefore I can trust
that if I go to this site CA cert has verified that they are who they are would that be they
the short 1000 for view of what's going on here yeah yeah we the browser can check your certificate
and we can check that you are you okay are you already built into money browsers unfortunately
no not at the moment we are working on that still but it's a huge amount of work and money
and everything you can think of so we always need more more help helping people yeah and we are
in some of the Linux distributions but not unfortunately not in the browsers that has some drawback
that most users will see these warning signs when they visit your page on an SSL connection
but we our target is that we secure all those sites that are currently not secured at all
okay that's not that's quite good so but even if even if I was using in an organization with
Internet Explorer I could still download and deploy your public key to all my clients yeah we have
an for Windows platforms we have a easy installer for all other other platforms it's even it's
still easy even without an installer so you just download the certificate say yeah I want to
really import this and click okay and that's it you publish the MD5 summer that show some of
that you can you can actually read it from there I can also also read it right now the fingerprint
for a Rootsie is let's see which one is the one prepared be prepared I think this one is the
one it will be on the forum in the show notes for this episode so what have I got here
inflamed me give me an A4 document yeah what is this this is the form you can you have to fill out
when you want to verify your identity so when you come to a booth you have to fill out one of
these forms and then sure will will verify that the data you're entering in this form matches
your ID card and then he will take this paper with it and with him and in at home he will enter
the data into the system and check that everything is okay so you basically enter the name date of
birth and email address not that many data and you have to agree to the CSR community agreement
and that's it I'm what's what's covered in that community agreement yeah we have to I like GPG
where you can where everything is well more anarchic in CSR we have certain rules that you have
to follow and if you don't adhere to these rules you can be held liable so that's that's the
the more that's to build more trust in in the process because if you if you have no liability at all
then you can basically do anything or no one is held accountable so
what we what you do here is is to set up these rules and set up the accountability thing we have
an internal dispute resolution policy that you can file if anything goes wrong in the process
somebody can file a dispute and then we will handle all the the stuff and make sure that the result
is now fair I guess yeah yeah so they you can you I suppose if you know that you're going to an
event where CA search is going to be at you could read this policy prior to coming to the event I
guess what else would I need to bring with me yeah you would read need at least one government
issued a photo ID card so a passport driver's license or anything in that direction and ideally
another document and that's it if you want to you can create your account before coming to an
event and print out some pre-filled forms on on on your in your account so that you don't have
the to fill out each form by hand and it's much more readable for us but that's that's it pretty
cool and who determines who the volunteers are how do you bet the people who are are examining
these search once you have got enough assurances once you have verified your identity often enough
you yourself become an assurer you you get enough trust points and then you make a small
multiple choice online test and then if you if you pass a test you can you are an assurer and
part of the community that that verifies the identity of other people and how would I go about
doing that um you know what what more can I do I bring a passport and driver's license to you
I get my excerpt then then what else do I have to do sorry can I how would I become a
an assurer how do you get those additional points oh you you go to multiple people you you
you don't fill out one form you have to fill out four forms or something like that and you go
to multiple people and each one verifies your identity so that more eyes have seen your documents
and if there are errors more more people are able to spot them at least and so you gain some
more trust by repeating the process and after that you you have enough points basically
and are you allowed to verify this by yourself or is there always a policy of having multiple
CA certifiers or multiple verifying people it's okay if you if you just meet two people if just
two people meet to do the assurance that's perfectly okay and in some areas it's the only way
it's it's feasible but you have to do multiple assurances in total because you have to go to
different meeting points yeah okay getcha that's absolutely fantastic so the view of course is
you're going to try and get this into more browsers going forward and stuff have you met any
objections from other security companies or not objections I think they don't regard us as
a real threat yet because we are not in the browser yet so they're not I don't know of any
any major major province there okay I don't really see a reason why Mozilla for instance wouldn't
put your CA search into the browser yeah and that's that's because for the browser vendors to
integrate and certificate into their browser you have to do a security audit over your whole system
and we have have have done and begun an audit over our registration authority that means the
identity verification part and it seems that it would be auditable but the systems part is is
something we have to figure out yet so we we are working on that and once we have done an
audit we can begin a proper audit and how many people have been certified oh I don't know really
I think it's something like 3000 users or something but I'm I can't read it don't know the
number from top we what I can say is that I think last week so two weeks ago we have the one
million certificate signed wow cool congratulations okay Michael is there anything else I missed
or that you wanted to talk about yeah come to our booth get get assured assure others bring
the CA search community to all parts of the world do you if people a lot of our listeners go to a
lot of different events is there a place that we can find out if you're going to if you're going
to be at that first or not or if they would like to get somebody to come to that first how are we
going to go about that we have a wiki where we organize the event section there you can have a
look and also some some some days or weeks before the event we will also usually do a blog post
so if you subscribe to our RSS feed from the blog or something then you'll probably get notice
when when there's an event around your area okay perfect links to all that information will be
in the show notes for this episode Michael thank you very much for taking the time and tune in for
another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio you have been listening to Hacker Public Radio
at Hacker Public Radio does our we are a community podcast network that releases shows every week
day on day through Friday today's show like all our shows was contributed by a HBR listener like
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for all your hosting needs unless otherwise stasis today's show is released under a creative
commons attribution share a life lead us our lives
you have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does our we are a community
podcast network that releases shows every week day on day through Friday today's show like all
our shows was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself if you ever consider recording a podcast
then visit our website to find out how easy it really is Hacker Public Radio was founded by the
digital dog pound and the economical and computer club HBR is funded by the binary revolution
at binref.com all binref projects are proudly sponsored by linear pages from shared hosting
to custom private clouds go to lunar pages.com for all your hosting needs
unless otherwise stasis today's show is released under a creative commons attribution share a
life lead us our lives