Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 59

At the beginning of this year, I blogged about a Mexican security-minded hacker conference scaring away its female audience</em> by advertising in a sexist way. I don’t know if it is the need to be l33t or kewl, to show off that hackers are really socially inept, or what… but this seems to carry on. I know many are familiar with the red/yellow card project (and followup) by kdotcdot. I am (rightfully? naively?) proud that at DebConf we have achieved a clean conference environment, without such problems… Yes, I know that, during the last ~year at DebConf11 we discussed an...

The internet was conceived as a network where reliability should be more important than privacy: What matters is to get the messages from their origin to their destination, even though this makes them highly traceable. Throughout the years, a large variety of schemes have been created to protect privacy, both while the packages are in transit and in form of stored documents, and at different levels. In this talk, I present some (relatively) user-friendly programs helping users keep their communications and data more secure. Attachments Presentation exported to PDF format (669 KB) Source presentation in Emacs org-mode for LaTeX Beamer...

Happy 19th birthday, Debian! The Debian project is 19 years old now. Following Francesca’s invitation (and Raphaël’s lead, and using Leandro’s image, collaboratively as it always happens here), I will tell a bit of my memories: How I got to Debian. I am a Debian user since ~2000, and a Debian Developer since April 2003. But, just as Raphaël’s, my history must go somewhat further back in time. In 1992, I got my first 1200bps modem, and almost immediately became an avid BBS user (what’s that? Javier Matuk talks [in Spanish] about BBSes in his newspaper column back in 1994)....

This is one of the days where reading my everyday newspaper was worth more than just getting bitter at the news. I found this text in La Jornada, my usual newspaper. I liked it very much, and decided to translate it for a wider audience. Of course, if you can read Spanish, do yourself a favor and go to the original. It is not that the text is so easy to translate. And, after all, I’m not a native English writer. I’m trying to do a literal translation, even when disagreeing with the author. Ten theses in favor of free...

While we were at DebConf, all busy and in the organizing frenzy, I was supposed to deliver a talk in Moquegua, Perú, on the evening of July 7. Of course, I was unable to attend. Nevertheless, I accepted, if the talk could be delivered as a pre-recorded video with a live Q&A session afterwards. And so it was. The talk went quite smooth, and I think I will use bits of it. Video quality is far from great, but well… it was taken using nothing but a webcam and the laptop’s integrated microphone. To my surprise, sound quality –that’s what...

During DebConf12, and thanks to Fito’s kind invitation, a bunch of us were part of a radio program that’s transmitted in Managua and Chinandega, «La mochila viajera». This program talks about different viewpoints and problematics about migration, seen from the eyes of Nicaraguans, which share quite a bit with us in Mexico — But at the same time, are very different. I was invited as part of a research group in UNAM on the topic «Communication, trasmigration and emergent systems». To be honest, I’m way behind schedule with the part of the research I should be doing, but here I...

One week. One long week. One beautiful week. One of the two major weeks of the year has passed since my previous post. Surely, we are in the middle of the two Major Weeks of the year, in the yearly schedule I have upheld for almost(!) ten years: DebConf+DebCamp. Yesterday, DebConf officially started. For the first time ever, we had a DebConf track targetted at the local (for a wide definition of local: All of the Central American countries) communities, which I chaired. We had the following talk lineup during this track:<ul><li>Empaquetando software para Debian (Gunnar Wolf)</li><li> Introduction to Debian...

Yesterday night, Regina and me arrived to Nicaragua. Ready to greet us, we found quite a good number of good friends. We had a nice pizza+beer dinner at Diana’s house, and some of the foreigners among us were distributed among the houses of several locals. This morning, we woke up –together with Víctor, Moray and Gaudenz– in Norman’s brother’s beautiful house. We had breakfast with the family, were picked up to go to the hotel that will have the ho(n rr)or to host us all for the following two weeks, and walked to the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) campus. Contrary to...

I will sound monothematic, but I have been devoting quite a bit of work to this topic lately: Trying to stop the advance of e-voting in Mexico, Latin America and the world. Why trying to stop it? Isn’t technology supposed to help us, to get trustable processes? Yes, it’s supposed to… but it just cannot achieve it, no matter how hard it is tried — I won’t get into explanations in this blog post, but there is plenty of information. Feel free to ask me for further details. Anyway — Yesterday (Sunday, 2012-06-17) was the fifth simulated voting that will...

Over and over, in different media we are told that all automatization means progress, and is surely a positive change. Many people expect us techies to be the first enthusiasts for all technifying changes — But sometimes, our task is to bring to the public’s attention the reasons as to why some processes should not be automatized. An example for this is voting. Democratic countries have as their maximum, refoundational act the periodic renovation of the ruling class through the free, secret and universal vote. There is, of course, a recognition to the importance that voting holds, as well as...