freedom bits

After figuring out how to use the Fellowship crypto card with a PCMCIA reader and then setting up SSH authentication with the card, I had a lot of fun with my card at the United Nations and elsewhere. And so did many other Fellows, it seems.

Andrea Borgia figured out simpler udev rules for his USB SmartCard reader, which I could not yet play with, but I still wanted to share with you for your own experiments:

-cut-
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", SYSFS{idVendor}=="04e6",
SYSFS{idProduct}=="e003", GROUP="scard", MODE="0660"
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb_device", SYSFS{idVendor}=="04e6",
SYSFS{idProduct}=="5115", GROUP="scard", MODE="0660"
-cut-

Jan Niehusmann caught a bit of debugging code that I accidentally left in the udev script for the PCMCIA smart card reader setup, which might be exploited for symlink attacks -- so I updated the package.

And finally Werner Koch, FSFE's crypto god in residence, fixed a few bugs in GnuPG and stabilised the PCMCIA support, so I created a couple of new packages and put them online:

• gnupg-agent_1.9.20svn4032-2_i386.deb
• gnupg2_1.9.20svn4032-2_i386.deb
• gpgsm_1.9.20svn4032-2_i386.deb

From the things I have seen so far, there is a lot more coming, too. So keep your eyes open and encourage others to experient with the Fellowship card, as well.

Thanks to snow chaos in Munich, I spent most of yesterday on planes and airports to finally get to the beautiful Spanish town Miraflores de la Sierra, home of FSFE's Spanish associate organisation, the Free Knowledge Foundation (FKF) who organised today's open meeting of the Spanish Team of the FSFE.

The meeting was organised and hosted by Pablo Machon, FSFE's Spanish coordinator, and there were around 24 people at the meeting from different parts of Spain, including Jose Marchesi and others of GNU Spain, Xavier Reina and many others.

After a couple of introductory words by Pablo, I explained a little bit about the Free Software Foundations, the global vision and structure, how Free Software Foundation Europe came into being, and what considerations went into its design. The focus was on giving an idea of the overall context of the Spanish Team and its activities, trying to give an idea of how FSFE functions and how to get involved.

Pablo and the rest of the Team then started to identify and classify obstacles to Free Software adoption and spreading in Spain, and discussing the setup of working groups to address them. A brief introduction of the Fellowship then ended the official part of the meeting.

A little more than half of the group that had participated in the meeting then went on to continue discussions over extensive lunch, after which I briefly enjoyed one of my personal favorites in terms of cultural achievements: Siesta.