Category: Free Software

All things Free Software, in this blog at least…

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First look at a Tizen dev phone

By parts… This first one will just reflect up until the unpacking.

So I got lucky to be offered the possibility of having a Tizen development phone.

I was quite excited as it will also be using Enlightenment as window manager, a project where I have done some modest collaboration, mostly because meanwhile my kid was born and what little free time I had got a lot more constrained.

Anyways, the excitement got only bigger as I get a call from FedEx to help them free a package from Customs by explaining what relation I had with Samsung.

After they cleared it, I went to their station to get the box…

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Yes, it was packed in a wooden box, all hammered in.

I thought it was a puzzle for opening, but I just decided to get the best puzzle tools ever for this kind of puzzle…

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So here it finally was… A small phone sized box inside a huge 6 kg wooden box.

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As I opened it, the contents where a phone… An immensely ugly phone (to be fair, it’s a generic development case and not a finished product which may even not have the same SoC), an USB/micro-USB cable, a battery, a US plug adapter and a very well hidden wall charger, and a nice business card from another developer with “Enjoy” written on it.

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So yeah, I got mocked about the wall charger  🙂

Before knowing what it was, it gave zero clues of what it was, external GPS perhaps? I tried to pull the white part but it seemed stuck so I didn’t force it. It’s not like I have any kind of warranty, right? So be careful…

When  I asked around, light mocking came up but also an admission that I wasn’t the first one wondering what it was.  🙂 After forcing it for the first time, the next attempts came out with ease.

So, to finish, a little visual comparison of my phones…

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NOTE: from left to right, my personal phone is the OpenMoko Neo Freerunner, my job’s phone is a Samsung Galaxy S (depicted in picture was my wife’s one as mine was taking the picture, both with Android ICS from Cyanogenmod 9) and at the right is the Tizen 1 dev phone. My SIM card was unloaded from Neo into the Tizen phone at the time of this picture, but after 4 years, Neo still makes and receives calls while Tizen 1 dev phone… doesn’t… support… calls… WTF? A story for another article…

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GTA04 Free Software Smartphone group buy

There is a successor for the Free Software phone that OpenMoko Freerunner was. While the Freerunner was officially called GTA02, this new successor is called GTA04 and there is a group buy effort going on.

I know the price isn’t very cheap, but we aren’t a big company able to order in bulk hundreds of thousands of devices, if not millions, so 449 € + shipping for the first batch if we get 400 buyers will help get this phone into the hands of some Free Software developers.

Some reasons to buy one of these (the tricky part is having a Freerunner case if you want to use it as a phone):

  1. you are a programmer, you have some money set aside and you want to help develop a Free Software anti-vendor stack like http://wiki.freesmartphone.org/index.php/Main_Page
  2. you are not a programmer, but you can contribute with other important stuff like testing, designing, and have the money to buy a device into which you’d be able to test your stuff
  3. you only want to use a Free Software phone, and as such will have a lot of tolerance towards the inevitable bugs of new emerging platforms that don’t have millions of Euros to hire full time programmers, designers, etc.
  4. you have some money and would like to give that phone as charity to one of the above
  5. you are an angel with a lot of money, and would like to offer the first batch to the amount of registered buyers (under 400)

I would fit somewhere between 1 and 2 except I can’t afford 449 € on this, so I’m kind of hoping for someone circa number 5…

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Twitter is wrong: should not drop httpS basic auth

As some of you might know, I write a µ-blogging tool called elmdentica. It is a client side application developed with Elementary, an EFL library oriented towards small touchscreen interfaces. I only recently learned that Twitter is dropping Basic Authentication support coming next June 30th. They claim it’s insecure because:

  1. with http credentials go in the clear (no problem here)
  2. with https, some people may think it’s too expensive (only complete idiots)
  3. applications have to store user credentials locally

As an alternative, they are making oauth mandatory for APIs that need authentication. While their reasoning may make sense in the context of massively concentrated web applications (think Twitpic and similars) this is absurd for client application like those running in your cell phones or computers.

Let’s take a look at the problem…

oauth gives you a consumer key and a consumer secret that authenticate your application. They don’t authenticate the user, they prove Twitter that you’re a legitimate and registered application.

If both key and secret became public, anyone could make an application pretending to be yours. While someone making a clone of your program isn’t a real problem, if someone writes a trojan horse… then there could be a problem, no?

Well, with oauth, both key and secret need to be known by the application during run time. So at any given moment, the computer running your application will have these two important assets. Either because they are embedded in your code, or because you download them live from a site. The fact remains: they are for all practical effects no longer secrets.

In web applications, no user accesses the only running copy of the software holding both key and secret, so oauth works there.

What about xauth?

I haven’t read much about xauth but after reading this page explaining what xauth is, I’m absolutely convinced the problem remains and wasn’t even tackled. The only issue that was solved, by requesting an user’s login and password only once, without need of local storage or visiting a web page, was an usability issue for client applications.

The real problem is still there, so Twitter is wrong and should not drop Basic Authentication from the https interface.

If they do, elmdentica will very likely not work on Twitter anymore. I don’t care much about that, but the users of elmdentica may care. That pisses me off.

What now?

Fortunately, there is a better alternative to Twitter if you value software freedom called identi.ca. More than just using, you can have your own “Twitter” by installing the Free Software that makes identi.ca, which is StatusNet.

At least they have no plans of dropping Basic Authentication. Hurra!

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Yes, it’s you. But only you…

I posted the following as a comment at some guy’s blog who claims he’s parting with the FSF because of their “hate speech”. I find it so ridiculous that I commented, but then later on thought I should actually make it a blog post. So here it is:

«If you want people to adapt your ideals or products you gotta show them why they are better than what they have been using: Tell them about the brilliant things they get when they use your stuff, tell them about new possibilities.»

They do just that. When you claim such a thing, I can only guess you never ever heard or read one of Richard Stallman’s speeches.

Campaigns like DefectiveByDesign or Windows7Sins are *very*small* things compared to the rest.

That you should choose your position over them rather than the whole, and totally demonstrate you missed the point of software freedom, is really revealing that you don’t give a damn about your community‘s software freedom.

You just want, like a spoiled child, to run all the software you want at your will, regardless of whether you’re infringing the law.

Want proof? Nothing easier… I’ll just take your own words:

«The FSF should focus on outlining what positive  things a new users gets from FLOSS: Tell people about VLC that allows them to play basically every type of media without hassle.»

Well, this is false. Many types of media supported by VLC are encumbered by software patents. In the USA, in particular, doing what you “preach” could become a very concrete and real legal liability: they could be accused of enticing people to break the law.

Is that what you think the FSF should be doing? Really? Or you just never sat and thought things through?

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OMNewRotate 0.5.8 is out!

I’ve just released omnewrotate 0.5.8 which integrates Tim Abell’s improvements to rotation sensitivity and I’ve added some code so it is smarter about detecting the paths for setting the brightness level while rotating which changed in more recent Linuxs (2.6.32 and beyond, I think).

As I’m running SHR-Unstable, your mileage may vary but it’s likely it will work 🙂

As usual, the download links are at the project’s Google Code site for omnewrotate (see the featured downloads section):

SHR-Unstable users should only need to upgrade (later today, or in a day or so).

Enjoy!

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OMNewRotate 0.5.7 is out!

After about 11 months since the previous release, I’ve just released omnewrotate 0.5.7 (after short lived 0.5.5 and 0.5.6 as I found out a dangling patch in SHR-Unstable’s recipe and did a mistake on the 0.5.6 release) which integrates Tim Abell’s init script change and the aforementioned patch.

As I’m running SHR-Unstable, your mileage may vary but it’s likely it will work 🙂

As usual, the download links are at the project’s Google Code site for omnewrotate (see the featured downloads section):

Enjoy!

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So elmdentica works with https!

It seems the problem with those weird libcurl errors when you enabled the secure option (basically https) is that the ca certificate bundle is missing in SHR’s OE build (perhaps it’s on all OE builds, don’t know).

There is, fortunately, an easy way to fix it (as mentioned in the openmoko communiy list).

All you need to do is copy your own ca certificate bundle (in Fedora it’s /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt ) into the proper place for OE’s path: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

So now you can enable secure, rather than faster 🙂

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FOSDEM 2010

As usual, the weekend at FOSDEM is awesome. It all started on the previous Wednesday as I flew from the day job towards Brussels. Still nobody I knew there, so I basically went straight to bed.

The adventure started at the capacity event conference organized by EDRi at the European Parliament. I enjoyed very much to finally meet some people I only knew online, some of them for quite a few years.

The theme was, of course, digital rights in Europe. ACTA is some scary shit, not so much about the undemocratic secrecy, but because of the few contents that have spilled out, like three strikes to take you off the Internet, criminal offences for copyright, trademark and patent infringement, etc. No wonder the European Comission representatives claim ACTA will not change european law, I mean… just add up the EUCD, IPRED1, Data Retention Directive, eventually IPRED2 and other Trade Agreements that are happening, by the time ACTA comes up all the scary military-state-like laws will already be in place.

So it’s true, it won’t change, because change is happening before ACTA comes to be. Fait accomplit!

More about this theme at a later posting, reflecting my summary of the event. Get ready for the real life pirates who are threatening our digital rights.

It was almost midnight when I learned that a good friend I was expecting to meet again was getting married the following morning, so I had to join @jwildeboer (who had just flown in) for one celebratory drink, which ended up with a few hours of a very interesting talk with @kanarip. He’s an amazingly interesting no-bull-shit guy, if you ever meet one. Respect!

Unfortunately I had to cut the event short and missed the last quarter, Friday afternoon, to join an OpenForum Europe meeting. At some point the warm fuzzy feeling of a family getting together was felt in the room 🙂

After that, dinner with more interesting people. Some came from the EDRi event, some from the OFE meeting, and one (@webmink, whom I felt very honoured to have personally met) was already waiting for us at Le Roi  before dinning, and let me tell you that before eating at the place Simon took us, the Roue D’Or at Rue des Chapeliers, I though there was no decent food in Brussels (even if you have to be a bit of a masochist with the service).

After that, realizing that the FOSDEM #googlebeer event at the Delirium was so packed it was impossible to stay there, Mark Taylor joined us as we moved to A La Morte Subite for a drink with some Java developers.

Next morning, FOSDEM. Met @stephwer and Jan for breakfast then came back for a couple of talks before meeting up with more people I haven’t seen for a while, like @zoobab who was kind enough to host me last year, and some of the great guys from Tux Brain, who buzz fixed my OpenMoko (and David Samblas posted a lot of pictures).

Then we left early, for #statuscheck, the Identi.ca meetup at A La Morte Subite. Finally meeting @evan, the founder of Status.Net (formerly Laconi.ca), the Free Software behind Identi.ca (it’s like Twitter but with the cool people), fellow OpenMoko user @pieterc, and some awesome guys like @rejon, @gbraad, @blizzard (whose beard is not at all nearly as black as his avatar’s) and all the others in the table:

#statuscheck meet up
#statuscheck meet up

@bugabundo (who could not go), asked me to send @evan a hug, here’s the evidence (thanks to @pieterc):

Hugging @evan
Hugging @evan

After #statuscheck, joined @webmink and some friend of his for dinner at Roue D’Or again (yum, yum), and then we joined a couple of Mozilla People, namely Patrick Flich, who together with @webmink and I stayed up until expelled from a bar which wanted to close down. Good excuse for going to bed 🙂

The day after I had to do some chocolate shopping before FOSDEM, so I missed half the OpenMoko talks at the devroom. Still… I arrived in time to meet heinervdm, mickeyl and GNUtoo.

Then I me @alxc from April, @floschi from LiMuX and attended @rejon’s and @vegyraupe‘s Ben Nanonote talk. A very interesting and promising device, I hope it’s successful enough to launch Qi Hardware into a bright future. Check it out! Now!

Then I had to get back straight to the hotel, as I was going to wake up at 4am in order to get back to Portugal, straight to my day job. It was like waking up from a dream.

I wish it was FOSDEM for all year long 🙂

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ElmDentica 0.8.0 is out!

Screenshot of account editor at the settings window.
Screenshot of account editor at the settings window.

Hi,

I’ve just release ElmDentica 0.8.0 with a bit more polished screens and exciting new features:

  • you can have more than one account, and if you have many accounts, only a few of them enabled or disabled quickly.
  • you have a messages and posts cache (albeit the last one is still incomplete)

So there you go, download if you’re too impatient to wait for SHR-unstable to update 🙂