- page 3

/Known fact: Latin America’s share of participation in different aspects of the free software movement is very low. There are many hypotheses for this, but all in all, it’s mainly economics related: Only a tiny minority of us in this geographic region can spare the time, energy and money needed to donate part of our work and life to a project, no matter how much we agree with it. Of course, this cannot explain it wholly; there are many issues that further contribute with this low participation. Free software development is mostly carried out in English (much more so even...

December starts for our family in Argentina, and in our second day here, I was invited to Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas (FICH) of Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL). FICH-UNL has a short (3 year), distance-learning career called Tecnicatura Universitaria en Software Libre (TUSL). This career opened in 2015, and today we had the graduation exams for three of its students — It’s no small feat for a recently created career to start graduating their first bunch! And we had one for each of TUSL’s “exit tracks” (Administration, development and education). The topics presented by the students were: An...

Back in June, Michael Stapelberg asked for somebody interested in adopting the unofficial Debian image for the Raspberry Pi 3 family. It didn’t take me long to raise my hand. What did take me long is to actually do it. I have adopted Raspberry3 image spec repository, with the recipes to build the image using Lars’ great vmdb2, as well as the raspi3-firmware non-free Debian package. After delaying this for too long, first in order to understand it better, and second because of the workload I had this last semester, I think we are ready to announce… There is a...

I have been honored to be invited as a co-chair (together with Vasilis Ververis and Mario Isaakidis) for a Special Track called «Topics on Internet Censorship and Surveillance» (TICS), at the The Eighteenth International Conference on Networks, which will be held in Valencia, Spain, 2019.03.24–2019.03.28, and organized under IARIA’s name and umbrella. I am reproducing here the Call for Papers. Please do note that if you are interested in participating, the relevant dates are those publicized for the Special Track (submission by 2019.01.29; notification by 2019.02.18; registration and camera-ready by 2019.02.27), not those on ICN’s site. Over the past years...

It’s only two weeks to the beginning of the privacy and anonymity colloquium we will be celebrating at the Engineering Faculty of my University. Of course, it’s not by mere chance we are holding this colloquium starts just after the Tor Meeting, which will happen for the first time in Latin America (and in our city!) So, even though changes are still prone to happen, I am happy to announce the activity program for the colloquium! I know some people will ask, so — We don’t have the infrastructure to commit to having a video feed from it. We will,...

So, I hope this will help me go back to being more productive! I ended up buying a Lenovo Thinkpad SK-8845 keyboard. As it was mentioned by Martin, jelly and Marcos on my previous blog post (hey! This is one of the rare ocasions where I must say Thanks Lazyweb!), it is not a new model, but it seems to be in mint shape… Plus, I got it for only MX$745 (that is, ≈US$37), shipped to my office and all! My experiences so far? Mostly positive. Yes, I would prefer the trackpad to be a bit larger (it is approx...

Our university, among the largest in the world and among the most important in Latin America, had an unexpected and traumatic event last September 3rd: A group of students from one of the high schools our university operates, peacefully protesting, demanding mostly proper study conditions and better security for their area, were violently attacked by a large, organized group. Things are still very much in flux, and we have yet to see what this really meant, and what are its consequences. But in the meantime, I cannot but take as mine the following words, by Comité Cerezo. I am sorry...

After a long rant with a nice and most useful set of replies regarding my keyboard, yesterday I did the mistake –and I am sure it was the first times in five years– of touching my Power key. Of course, my computer (which I never shut down) obliged and proceeded to shut itself down, no questions asked – Of course, probably because I don’t use a desktopesque WM, so it exhibits the same behavior as the system’s actual power switch. I was limited to powerelessly watch it cleanly shut down… It didn’t make me very happy. That key should not...

As most of my readers, I am a heavy keyboard user. Most of my computer usage is mediated through the keyboard, not the mouse as it seems to be the norm nowadays (and don’t even get me started on touchscreens – When I talk about computers, I am not talking about phones. Ever.) In the past, I suffered a lot of upper back pain. It has thankfully improved, but in big part due to changes in the way I interface with the world. Again, if I do most of my work sitting and in front of my computer, being comfortable...

So… Everybody I’ve interacted with along the last couple of weeks knows I’m basically just too busy. If I’m not tied up with stuff regarding my privacy/anonymity project at the university, I am trying to get the DebConf scheduling, or trying to catch up with my perpetual enemy, mail backlog. Of course, there’s also my dayjob — Yes, it’s vacation time, but I’m a sysadmin, and it’s not like I want to give software updates much of a vacation! Of course, my family goes to Argentina for a couple of weeks while I go to DebConf, so there’s quite a...