- page 2

I started running an SKS keyserver a couple of years ago (don’t really remember, but I think it was around 2014). I am, as you probably expect me to be given my lines of work, a believer of the Web-of-Trust model upon which the PGP network is built. I have published a couple of academic papers (Strengthening a Curated Web of Trust in a Geographically Distributed Project, with Gina Gallegos, Cryptologia 2016, and Insights on the large-scale deployment of a curated Web-of-Trust: the Debian project’s cryptographic keyring, with Victor González Quiroga, Journal of Internet Services and Applications, 2018) and presented...

When facing a large key signing party in a group, even a group where you are already well socially connected in, you often lose track whom you have cross-signed with already, who is farther away from you (in the interest of better weaving the Web of Trust)… So, having Samuel announce the DebConf19 KSP fingerprints list, I hacked a bit to improve the scripts I used on previous years, and… Behold! The DC19 KSP personalized maps! This time it’s even color-coded! People you have not cross-signed with are in light grey. People whose keys have been signed by you are...

Yay! I was feeling sad and depressed because it’s already late June… And I had not had enough time to get the unofficial Debian Buster Raspberry preview images booting on the entry-level models of the family (Broadcom 2835-based Raspberries 1A, 1B, 0 and 0W). But, this morning I found a very interesting pull request open in our GitHub repository! Dispatched some piled-up work, and set an image build. Some minutes later, I had a shiny image, raspi0w.tar.gz. Quickly fired up dd to prepare an SD card. Searched for my RPi0w under too many papers until I found it. Connected to...

I have been working on several privacy/anonymity topics in the past couple of years. And I am very happy, as we just achieved one of our most important stated goals. I am coordinating LIDSOL, Laboratorio de Investigación y Desarrollo de Software Libre, at the Engineering Faculty, UNAM. LIDSOL is a very interesting and very open lab regularly inhabited by ≈7 bright students, most of them from Computer Engineering (but some from other careers in the faculty), and with over twenty years of history. And I have worked with several of them in my PAPIME project for privacy and anonymity. This...

Today we went to celebrate a good friend’s birthday. And while most of my social circles are in some way geeky or geekier… This one is definitively geekiest. Not so much in the Free Software alignment scale, but in many, many other ways. I was (pleasantly!) surprised to find we were four fellow potential hitchhikers (on the photo above, Jesús Wong; Susana and Aaron were also towel-bearers). Oh, but you are still asking yourself what this is about? I gather you have not yet read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams. The international Towel Day is observed...

Uff! Remember almost two years ago I announced on this same blog I would start coordinating a translation effort for the (excellent!) Made with Creative Commons book into Spanish? Having made the vey wise decision to choose Weblate as our translation platform, only four months later and with the collaboration from people all over Latin America, we amazingly reached 100% translated strings only four months later! Not only that — other languages were also started, and Norwegian (coordinated by Petter Reinholdtsen) also reached 100%. But editting a book is not just a matter of translating it. In my case, as...

After several years of absence, LIDSOL (Laboratorio de Investigación y Desarrollo de Software Libre) is once again organizing a FLISOL! And what is a FLISOL? It is the Festival Latinoamericano de Investigación y Desarrollo de Software Libre — An activity that started off as an installfest, but went on to become a full set of conferences. Set of conferences? Yes, because FLISOL happens more-or-less simultaneously (the official date is the last Saturday of April, but there is tolerance for it to happen up to a couple of weeks around it) all over Latin America. This year, FLISOL will be held...

Today, we had a little get-together of DDs in València, Spain, with some other DDs. Most of us were here to attend the Internet Freedom Festival (IFF), plus Héctor and Filippo, who are locals. We missed some DDs (because in a 2500+ people gathering… Well, you cannot ever find everybody you are looking for!) so, sorry guys for not having you attend! Sadly, we have no further report than having enjoyed a very nice dinner. No bugs were closed, no policy was discussed, no GRs were drafted, no cabals were hatched. Attachments deb_iff.jpg (3041 KB) deb_iff_mini.jpg (180 KB)

I have been busy as hell this year. I might have grabbed a bigger bite than what I can swallow – In many fronts! Anyway, sitting at an airport, at least I have time to spew some random blurbs to The Planet and beyond! VotingWe all feared when no candidates showed up at the first call for DPL. But things sorted out themselves as they tend to (and as we all knew that would happen ;-) ), and we have four top-notch DPL candidates. It's getting tough to sort through their platforms and their answers in the lists; the old-timers...

Some days ago I read a piece of news that shocked me at different levels: Three blocks away from my home, and after being “unclearly” denounced for harassing a woman, a guy was beaten to death. Several sources for this: El Diario MX: Por acosar a mujer lo golpean hasta la muerte; El Siglo de Torreón: Asesinan a hombre por presuntamente acosar a mujer en Coyoacán; Zócalo: Matan a hombre en Coyoacán; Milenio: Por presuntamente acosar a mujer, golpean y matan a hombre en CU. Of course, when anybody cries for help, it should be our natural response (everybody’s!) to...