[tor-reports] Report from FOSDEM’14

[Lunar]

Hi!

The 15th Free and Open Source Developper European Meeting was held
February 1-2 in Brussels, Belgium. FOSDEM is a massive event with more
than 5000 attendees, a main track and 35 developer rooms, for a total of
512 events.

Quite at the last minute, I went forward and organized a booth for Tor.
Benoît Leseul [1] from Mozilla answered positively to the last minute
request and so we had a piece of their table, close to the Free Software
Foundation Europe booth. I held a good share of the booth over the two
days, sometimes relieved by Ximin and Moritz.

   [1]: https://reps.mozilla.org/u/benoit_leseul/

Unfortunately, due to printing delays we did not have a big Tor poster
to attract attention. So we had to use smaller signs made with sharpies
and stickers.

Moritz brought two kinds of posters: “run a Tor relay” [2] and “I want
you to blow the whistle” [3]. We also stuck them on the wall behind us
and many visitors paused to grab one for their home or office. Moritz
also had a good amount of Tor stickers, and they were nearly all gone by
the end of the two days. The most popular items were the whistleblower
poster and the 76mm x 50mm Tor Project stickers.

   [2]: http://i.imgur.com/RMff2ZV.jpg
   [3]: https://www.torservers.net/wiki/_media/tor-relay-poster.resized.jpg

When people asked the price for stickers or posters, my answer was:
“If you want some stickers, take some; if you want to donate, that's
great”. We gathered 78.42€ on Saturday [4]. Moritz had the idea to have
a more visible donation box for running Tor exit nodes. This really
helped and we gathered an additional 401.16€ on Sunday [5].

   [4]: https://twitter.com/torservers/status/429669793952956416
   [5]: https://twitter.com/torservers/status/430319282367791104

One other thing that was on the table was flyers from Nos Oignons [6].
Nearly 200 were taken out. The Tor Project really needs flyers with
general information and another set about running relays, at least.

   [6]: https://nos-oignons.net/Diffusion/nos-oignons-flyer-grand-public-201306-en.pdf

The most common user misconception was “Tor is slow“. There were
a good amount of questions on
how to run a Tor relay, or the legal risks regarding exit nodes. A
sysadmin came and asked why they were seeing so many connections coming
from Tor on their Intrusion Detection System. Several students also
asked about how to contribute to Tor.

One question that came really often was “do you have any t-shirts?”
So it was clearly lacking and I'm pretty sure we could have raised some
more money for the project. Moritz also had the idea to make the t-shirt
we send out to relay operators a special one that would say “Tor relay
operator” on the back.

I was interviewed by Hacker Public Radio [7] and by someone else who I
unfortunately did not get the references.

   [7]: http://hackerpublicradio.org/

The booth sheltered intrigeri while he was building the new Firefox
package for Tails. As far as I understood, Nicolas Vigier spent his
Sunday in the “testing and automation devroom” [8].

   [8]: https://fosdem.org/2014/schedule/track/testing_and_automation/

I had a pretty long discussion on Sunday with Florian Quèze to discuss
Instantbird matters, the instant messaging application based on
Mozilla's platform. It should become the core component of the Tor
Instant Messaging Bundle according to our current plans [9].

Here's what I can remember: Instantbird is much alive, and getting more
integrated into Mozilla's infrastructure. There's four regular
contributors. Most of the code is shared with Thunderbird and the bug
tracker has been merged with Thunderbird's one recently. They are
working on streamlining the release process. It's currently taking them
a full week to release. They release around every 3 months. Most
security issues affecting Firefox did not affect Instantbird though, as
there no untrusted data is fed to the HTML engine. We've discussed
libpurple and the modification they had to do for Instantbird. This
embedded code copy prevented a Debian package to be made so far.
We thought some more about the latter issue with intrigeri who had a
couple of suggestions as Tails might be interested in getting rid of
Pidgin. XMPP and IRC both have working JS implementations. Due to some
limitations of Mozilla's resolver, there is no support for SRV records
in XMPP currently. This is why Instantbird is still using the libpurple
implementation by default, but as Tor can't resolve SRV, we don't care.
js-ctypes is getting used more and more throughout Mozilla's codebase so
it's not getting away. Implementing OTR using libotr is fine. Florian
would be happy to take patches. He think he could use one of Mozilla's
GSoC slot for OTR work provided there is mentors on our side. We ended
our chat by discussing the general situation of XMPP in the world and
how Twitter was killing its API…

   [9]: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/Otter/Attentive/Plan

After spending two days close to the Mozilla booth, I had the
opportunity to hear quite a lot about FirefoxOS. The shiny blinking
GeekPhone they had as demos made their booth always crowded. I was
demonstrated how the camera application was asking about accessing
geolocalization data, so there is some understanding of privacy in
there. I wonder if we could made them interested enough to put Tor in
the default build…

I have talked to some Mozilla folks from their Paris' office about our
summer dev. meeting. Interest was definitely there. :)

Kai Engert who work on libnss was again very helpful and eager to help
if we needed changes for OTR support in Instantbird.

I've heard that Mailpile developers mentioned they wanted to have direct
SMTP connections between Mailpile users using hidden services.

I also did a talk about reproducible builds in Debian [10] for which I
had very good feedback. I met some people who want to help. One of the
idea that came up is that we could maybe focus on the set of packages
used to create a “build daemon”. This would be close of the set of
packages we currently use for the virtual machine used to build the Tor
Browser Bundle.

  [10]: http://reproducible.alioth.debian.org/presentations/2014-02-01-FOSDEM14.pdf

All talks were recorded thanks to a team of volunteers even crazier than
usual. They should appear shortly on video.fosdem.org.

On a personal level, I found FOSDEM really exhausting, as always…
Basically there is less than 36 hours and so many interesting people to
talk to. But I still think it's crucial for Tor to engage with the free
software community at large and to try to recruit more volunteers for
our many projects.

I sincerely hope next year we could be more prepared and organize a
proper booth. But we'll need more volunteers to hold it! Thanks again to
Moritz, Ximin and torland who helped with these rushed out plans.

Post-scriptum: thanks Moritz, Ximin and George who contributed to this
lengthly report.

-- 
Lunar                                             <lunar at torproject.org>
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