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FISL10 day 4 0

Today I finally went to attend some lectures. I decided that since I was to give one and Arena was over, I was allowed to just sit there and pretend I was just attending FISL10 and not organizing it.

Well, first things first. My lecture was on my fork to implement PubSub in XMPP4R-Simple. Nothing really fancy, just describing what we’re doing in Propus with that fork. I can upload the slides if somebody asks to, but everything there’s to know about it is in the code.

After having had lunch with some friends and talking with others I haven’t seen since last year (and that I still hadn’t seen in FISL), I went to the Key Signing Party we organized. That went fine. We had 114 different keys sent, but just 42 showed up for the party (including my 2). I don’t know what is the average in other parties, but I think it was enough given we had the competition of other 12 other activities, and it was a first-time experience.

Later I attended to High-Speed Cryptography and DNSCurve lecture by DJB, which was a really amazing talk. I was moderator for a panel between him and Frederico Neves on Wednesday (as I told you before), and I was present when they debated about NSEC3 and how prone to enumeration attacks it is. Frederico challenged DJB to enumerate NIC.br’s NSEC3 testing network under sec3.br. In this talk he told the audience that he enumerated 23 of the 26 hosts in that network just using desktop-level computers (and not some fancy Gigaflop crypto-breaker station)... that is until he had to prepare the last talk. (I am guessing, but he described the technique here)...

After I just learned how to Fail Faster and Succeed Sooner with Michael Tiemann, another good lecture in which Tiemann told how Fedora is coming from failure to failure until the successful last releases (and how did that tied up with RHEL strategy).

Then I went to the Panel on Electronic Frontier, one I was most curious to go. Really interesting panel talking about freedom in the Internet and how we, as citizens, have to oppose anything that takes away this freedom. One of the many good ideas I learned from that panel was how to fight against traffic shaping (one of the many things almost all ISP does in Brazil and don’t say a word about): building our own Community ISP. I found it an interesting idea, but have to research on how it fits in Brazilian legislation (it may even be unlawful).

My initial intent was to escape before the end of that panel in order to attend the session were DJB would announce this year’s Programming Arena winner group. But before I could get out, Marcelo Branco called me to join the panel in his place, since he had to take care of the proceedings to FISL10 final session. So that was it. I still have to ask Organization Committee who own the Arena…

The final session was kind of crazy. The usual announcements of numbers and a presentation of a piece of President Lula speech. Jon ‘maddog’ Hall recorded a video of the audience inviting Linus to come. It were also announced that FISL11 will be in Usina do Gasômetro. I am not too excited about this place, and I still doubt it’ll be ready to hold an event such as FISL… I’ll just play “wait and see” ;)

As usual, FISL10 most lasting “side-effect” was to see old friends. I am already missing people I am sure I’ll just see again next FISL

I’d like to thank all the people that came to FISL10. Hope you enjoyed and come back for FISL11.

100-thousand and counting 1

For those of you wondering how is the battle against the Brazilian Internet Surveillance Bill, I have to report we already got more than 100-thousand people to sign the petition. You can check the current count in the image on the right. I am updating it every 15 minutes, so you can even use its URL in another place (as are some people doing already).

The bill will be voted by the Chamber-of-Deputies any time now… We heard it would be on yesterday, but apparently it was not even enlisted for this week. This doesn’t mean much, since the Deputies can hold an “out-of-list” voting… we’ll be watching.

Meanwhile, I read an article by Sérgio Amadeu that summarizes some of our feeling about that bill. Are we in the Western World (allegedly freedom lovers) turning into control-freaks? A whole lot of people I know are not even offended by this bill! These are the same people that don’t think it’s weird that USA claimed the right to seize any storage device entering their borders, for any time they want, with no warranted privacy. Are we in a middle of a paradigm shift? Are we accepting less freedom? What would George Orwell think of that?

Maybe we got in a wormhole and ended up in 1984…