Towards the end of helping Iranians get access to the Internet, I want to link to some resources, both specific and general.

Here are two ways to set up proxies (one for Windows, one for OS X):

1. How to setup a proxy for Iran citizens (for Windows!)
2. How To Set Up An Anonymous Proxy For Iranians Using Squid on Mac OS X

I would also suggest the easy option of setting up a Tor node. This adds to the overall goodness of the Tor network anyway.

Anonymous, strangely enough, seems to be interested in helping as well (http://iran.whyweprotest.net/). Their site has a nice forum with all sorts of information geared more towards the less skilled (which is really necessary), as well as helping people track what is going on. They are using Tor Hidden Services as well, which is a sort of parasitic Internet running within the Tor network.

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He said:

“I don’t know if Tor is the end-all-be-all, but the basic point would be: browser-based, quasi-auto-configuring anonymous darknets (that set up and tear down without a trace), and look something like other (e.g. HTTP) traffic would be a boon to free speech.

Until the government decided that it was aiding and abetting pedophilia, and banned it. Thankfully the first amendment does not apply there.”

On Twitter, Vinay Gupta, of Hexayurt fame, suggested:

“http://guptaoption.com/cheapid == identity backbone for dealing with things like distributed voting. You want timestamping and good, clear access to the HTTPS certificate chains to be able to encrypt messages to other users using client side certs.”

I had figured that I’d get more commentary than that on something that is very relevant to current news. I mean that this is blue sky territory, people. I know that there are more ideas on enabling openness and freedom through Firefox, Thunderbird, and in the platform than none at all. There have to be ideas out there on how to extend these to enable, for example, anonymous communication, routing around censorship, etc.

Meanwhile, I heard two stories while driving from work in the car on NPR yesterday relating to the use of Twitter, social networking, and the Internet in the current protests. I found the pieces immediately brought to mind the importance of the Internet and enabling openness as a core necessity.

Check out In Iran, A Struggle Over Cyberspace and The Challenges To Turning Off The Internet In Iran. The latter story even has the obligatory Jonathan Zittrain quote.

Update: Now Zittrain has posted in relation to this matter as well. I seem to be timely as this just went up: Why the PC matters.

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Watching the twitterstorm around the current situation with the Iranian elections has been fairly thought provoking. The Iranian protesters are completely shut out of the official media in the form of newspapers, radio, and television in Iran. These are under the thumb of the state at the service of a man that may (or may not) have stolen an election for himself. The only viable option is the use of the net and other direct media communication, such as SMS. Of course, the state can block access to net resources and has turned off the cell networks at various points. Like the situation in China at times, people have found ways around these blockages to continue to report and communicate with each other.

Going back to my day job here at the Mozilla Corporation, I wonder what role, if any, we, the Mozilla community, can play in enabling freedom and openness. We aren’t specifically political as a group in the sense that we have no vested interest in battling specific governments. In fact, it is often in our best interest to be and be seen as neutral in such things. That said, we are also interested in an open Internet and an open Internet, by its very nature, has a political component because it is the antithesis of the state controlled firewalls and mechanisms of control that various authoritarian regimes like to put into place.

To the end of promoting an open Internet, is there more that Mozilla could do with software to help enable that process? Opera Unite has gotten some press during the last few days for facilitating the direct sharing of information over the net, though it reminds me of the defunct AllPeers software that went away last year. I have friends that work on the Tor Project, which has the explicit goal of allowing anonymous communication between people. Tor actually targets itself to helping dissidents, bloggers, and others that need to route around state blocking and tracking.

What kind of tools could Mozilla incorporate into Firefox, for example, with its more than 100 million users, that could help people in the future? I’ve advocated for Mozilla to support the Tor Project before (which didn’t really get beyond getting more Firefox bugs fixed). I’d like to see us help create the next generation of tools or even support and build in the next generation for anonymous communication, networking, encryption and other mechanisms. I’ve pointed out before how painful it is to send and receive encrypted e-mail within Thunderbird (or through webmail services like gmail) even though it has become clear that governments routinely snoop on e-mail (even the American NSA) well beyond what people have suspected.

One of the reasons that I work at MoCo is that we aren’t driven by a profit motive, being owned by a non-profit, and have an idea of social good built into what we do. I’d like to see how that could be explicitly expanded. I’d love to hear suggestions as I have only the most basic of ideas (such as making encryption for communication easier or transparent or adding jabber support into the Mozilla platform) and I’m sure others have far better thought out ideas.

Of course, I could be out to lunch and most people don’t care about such things. I somehow doubt if this is true though.

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I encourage people to watch it. I’ve embedded it below but you can find it here as well. (The link at fora.tv is to a much higher quality streaming version.)

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I encourage people to go take a look at them if they are interested in this sort of thing.

You can see the Other Al doing his presentation on the use of Real Names below (unless you’re reading this through a Planet, which nukes embedded video…):

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Luckily, I found a great team to work on – I’ll be working in the Developer Division (a first for me), on the team that works on JavaScript but also has a broader charter to help make the open web platform great.

What does this mean? From the outside, some things will certainly change – I’m no longer an appropriate person, for example, to give talks on specifically about IE – but a lot of things won’t. I still expect to attend and participate in a fair number of web conferences, and still plan to speak at a number of them – but not just about IE. I still intend to continue as HTML WG chair, at least for the time being – in fact, as part of focusing more holistically on the web platform as a whole (and defocusing on IE product delivery), I expect I’ll start participating more in a couple of other groups.

I’m not sure what to make of this. I like Chris a lot. He’s a good guy and I’ve known him for about 13 years. Part of me wishes that he’d leave Microsoft but contribute to the open web somewhere else, unencumbered by Microsoft’s issues or agenda and visibly separate from IE and its history. It will be interesting to see what comes of this.

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Fennec has hit a nice milestone today. As Brad mentions on his blog, Alpha 1 is available for Windows Mobile now. This is a big step as we’ve only previously shipped versions for Nokia’s Maemo platform based on Linux. Given the installed based of Windows Mobile for cell phones, the amount of people able to try out Fennec has gone up by a couple of orders of magnitude. Brad gives instructions on his blog for installation but I wanted to include Madhava’s video below demonstrating Fennec on Windows Mobile. I’ve been quite pleased with our switch to a CSS-based user interface in the last two weeks. There is a lot of work ahead but this is a big step.

I also want to call out to Joel Maher and Clint Talbert for their excellent QA work on this Alpha. They’ve been working like crazy on this for a while.

Fennec – alpha 1 for Windows Mobile from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

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When I had a first generation phone, I admit that I jailbroke it, installed third party applications (including things like ssh) and generally had a good time with it. About two months ago, I bought the iPhone 3G (and my wife will be getting my old iPhone when her contract with T-Mobile is up in the next month). At that point, I started using applications from the app store. First the free ones but now I’ve paid for a few, like Colloquy, the IRC client. We use IRC as an essential part of our work at Mozilla and being able to get into a channel is very useful. I have Enso the meditation timer, Twitterific, Facebook, iGo the Go app, and others. I find myself using it all the time.

One thing that continues to bother me is the lack of a real keyboard. I used to have a Sprint Treo, which is what the iPhone replaced, and I loved many aspects of it. I didn’t appreciate the chiclet keyboard except that it was an actual keyboard of sorts, which made a huge difference for me. I typed out a multi-paragraph e-mail to a Mozilla higher-up this morning in a coffee shop on my iPhone and, let me tell you, the experience there blows chunks.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I realized when I was typing (and I’ve realized it before) that if I could use any one of a number of small, portable and foldable Bluetooth keyboards that are available, that I wouldn’t even need my laptop on many occassions. The iPhone screen is very nice, the connectivity is pretty good and can use wifi, 3G, or EVDO networks. What it really lacks for me is a an input method that doesn’t suck. Why is this the case? Well, Apple purposefully cripples the Bluetooth stack that comes with the iPhone in order to only work with Apple designated hardware or various headsets and nothing else. There is no real reason to do this. What damage would it do to let me use a stowaway keyboard with my iPhone so I could write real e-mail or, my word, blog posts? I’ve got a Wordpress app that will let me post to my blog here but I never use it? Why? Well, hunting and pecking for 30 minutes on a soft-keyboard to write a post that would take me five minutes on a laptop is a complete waste of time.

I know that there are people out there hacking the Apple Bluetooth stack in order to open it up but I really don’t want to go back to having to jailbreak my phone (and possibly bricking it on the next update) simply to use a freakin’ keyboard with it.

All right, Saturday anti-Apple rant (written on a new Macbook Pro) done. Enjoy your day! :-)

Update: As one commenter noted, I should have said “Edge” instead of “EVDO” since the iPhone doesn’t support the latter. My mistake.

Update II: I don’t care if it makes battery life worse (ha ha) on my iPhone or somehow degrades the “Apple experience.” I just want to be able to type on a freakin’ portable keyboard with real keys so I don’t have to lug a laptop around in order to write a freakin’ blog post or e-mail. Am I in crazytown here?

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Clint Talbert, who works in QA with me at Mozilla, tagged me for this in his post of seven things.

For the haters out there, you can feel free to scroll to another blog post.

The Rules

1. Link back to your original tagger and list the rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself.
3. Tag some (none? :) ) people by leaving names and links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

The Seven Things

1. I’m not really an engineer – While I work in software engineering (and have in more than a couple of roles), I’m not actually an engineer. The only engineer in my family is my grandfather, who was an electrical engineer at Boeing for over 30 years. He helped raise me and supported my computer interests but it isn’t genetic. My grandfather did give me my first computer, a Timex-Sinclair, and helped advise me when I build my first PC clone (a 10mhz XT box) around 1988. My actual degrees are a general two-year Associate of Arts, a Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology and an Master of Arts in Humanities (Philosophy). Originally, I was going to be an Anthropologist but that didn’t work out for graduate school and I wound up getting married and working instead. I worked my way up into the industry because I’d been a computer hobbyist running a UUCP node and a Fidonet BBS in the late 80’s and early 90’s. During the first Internet boom, I had already been on the Internet since 1989 so I managed to work my way up in the industry based on my hobbyist skills until I reached my current lofty position.
2. I enjoy fraternal orders – I’m not currently active in a fraternal order, hitting a wall with time and some motivation during this last year, but I’ve been a member of a number of them since I finished college for the first time. I went was a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows right after college, joining with a bunch of other younger men who were seeking to revitalize what seemed to be a dying organization in Seattle. I went through all of the degree work within the order and only dropped out when my daughter was born and I was feeling burned out. Later on, I also was a member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, attending one of the national conventions when it was in Portland, Oregon. It is in the OTO that I met my wife, as she was an active member as well. A few years ago, I joined the Freemasons, progressing through the standard degrees of the order’s blue lodge and being confirmed as a Master Mason. This was in Seattle and my move to California resulted in my going inactive, never having joined a lodge in California. A year after moving to California, I joined the Co-Masons, who were in the process of forming a lodge in San Francisco. The primary, obvious, difference between the Co-Masons and mainstream Freemasons is that the former has both men and women as members. I felt that this really changed the dymanic and that the Co-Masons were and are a forward thinking organization that is growing and expanding (whereas mainstream Freemasonry really is in decline and shrinking). I took leave of the San Francisco lodge this last Summer because I wasn’t really engaging with what we wanted to do and I was focusing more on my academic work. I’ve also been a member of a couple of small, single lodge, fraternal bodies that no longer exist. Another way of looking at all of this is to say that I’ve quit a number of fraternal orders but I tend to look at it as time well spent and that I definitely received something of value from my involvement. For the most part, if I paid my dues, I could return to any of them and all are active in California but I don’t know how likely that is to occur.
3. I’ve never been in the SCA but I know how they feel – I have a lot of friends who have done various things in the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA). I’ve never gotten into that, somehow, but I spent almost every Summer of my teenage years (and a couple before that) doing Black-powder recreation with my family. It is kind of like the SCA for people who like guns. The gist of it is that there was the fur trapper era in American history when individual “mountain men” used to trap beaver and other animals for their hides. These trappers would get together in “rendevous” during Summer months to trade, sell their furs, etc. The recreation movement emulates these summer gatherings by dressing in period clothing (pre-1830), learning period skills, living in period tents or tipis, and having a good old time away from people. This includes black-powder firearms (even cannons) for contests and crosses over into the black-powder hunting movement. I have no idea how pervasive any of this is anymore as this was 20 years and more ago. I wound up spending part of my summer dressed in a breechcloth, leggings, and a calico shirt learning to shoot black-powder, throw knives, and getting into mischief with other teenagers. Needless to say, our drinking of alcohol was tolerated and, in retrospect, it was quite the experience. There is even an amusing story involving a seven foot tall (literally) deputy Montana sheriff and me that I can tell if properly motivated. I quit doing this at all by the time I was 18 and quit returning in the Summer to visit my mother in Utah. If you replace the guns with swords and then add large-scale warfare, I think that the experience for teens in the SCA is probably similar.
4. I dropped out of high school – When I was 16, I was sick of my public high school (Roosevelt High in Seattle). I was bored out of my mind and had spent my Freshman year in a complete different school after moving in from another state so I didn’t even have much in the way of friends to distract me. I did have one friend who had been thrown out of his prep school, attended my school for a year, and then just quit and went to community college. I thought to myself, “If he can do that, so can I!” and somehow managed to convince my grandparents (with whom I lived) to support this idea. This was years before high school completion at community colleges became a common thing so there was no program for this at all. We officially told the counselors at my high school that I was leaving for the community college and somehow they bought off on it. So, instead of a senior year of high school spent staring at the ceiling in a doze, I started my freshman year at community college. After the two year degree and my application of transfer to the four year state university, it turned out that I needed to be a high school graduate for my application to be processed even though I was already guaranteed acceptance into the four year school. To fix that, I spent three or so hours at a testing center when I was 19 and passed a GED test. I’m probably numbered in some “high school dropouts” statistics for Seattle in the 1980s but I think it worked out well in the end.
5. Education is important to me – While I mention dropping out of high school above and attending college, I was a pretty crappy student for a long time. It took three years of goofing around to get my two year, Associate of Arts, degree. I made up for this by doing my last two years for my Bachelor of Arts in 18 months but I basically never learned to study well, getting by on some talent and intelligence. I finally hit my stride as a student when I decided in 2004 to get a Master’s degree. I received that through a California State University school by doing it part-time while working full-time through 2005 and 2006, doing my thesis during the first part of 2007, when I was finally awarded my degree. At that point, I took a break but during 2008, I took a graduate class at the Institute of Buddhist Studies (IBS) in Berkeley. Right now, I have an application into the Graduate Theological Union for their PhD program. If accepted, I will hopefully work on a PhD under the mentorship of one of the key scholars at IBS, focusing on aspects of Japanese Buddhism. Before my MA, I spent a year studying Ancient Greek and Latin at a private language school in Seattle. I’ve felt for quite a while now that if I did not continue to educate and improve myself, that I am wasting the opportunities of this life. It isn’t enough to simply work a job, even building a career, without continuing to expand my horizons.
6. I am a devout Buddhist – This feeds into my educational goals above as well. I was raised Roman Catholic by my mother, who converted to it. When I was a teenager (and I no longer was living with her), I went through confirmation but had no real belief, doing it to keep my family happy with me. My mother, with whom I wasn’t living, became a Witch around the same time (which she is to this day), after some involvement in lay Catholic orders. This was pretty influential on me, along with various late teen circumstances, and I wound up wandering over the spiritual landscape even though I’m not much of a “believer” in any classic sense. Early in this millennium, I took refuge vows at the Sakya Monastery in Seattle and began to practice as a Buddhist. I’ve been on several retreats around North America and currently practice largely in a Zen/Chan manner with a lot of influence, personally, from Tibetan Buddhism and the esoteric Buddhism of Japan. I’m currently studying for ordination in a Zen lineage from Korea and attending a seminary program in support of this. People who have known me for years can see the influence of Buddhism on me much more clearly but it has been a long road from my outlook and behavior in earlier years to where I am today.
7. My politics are largely Socialist by American standards – My politics have wandered a bit over my life. I’ve always been socially liberal but I’ve gone from lefty non-coercive Anarchist to middle of the road Democrat (of sorts) to Democratic Socialist. My sympathies are generally with the Anarchists and against the coercive and violent forces in society, especially those of the State. That being said, I’ve come to believe that (1) the state is probably necessary at some level and (2) that we have a responsibility as good citizens to support our fellow members of our community and the infrastructure (physical, legal, and otherwise) that supports them. I’ll happily pay more taxes if it means our infrastructure is maintained, there is universal healthcare and education, and that the playing field in society is leveled. I’ve never seen something quite as selfish as the self-declared “self-made man” who wants to pay no taxes because he earned his money and his career all by himself (but ignoring the fact that he went to a public high school, had order maintained by a legal system supported by taxes, maybe even had some food stamps as a kid). We have a debt to our society, which has created the place in which we function, for helping and supporting us where we are if we are successful. We also have a debt to the other members of our society to help them have the same chances that we might have had and to promote their welfare. The fact that this is seen as some kind of weird propaganda by huge swathes of America depresses me to no end.

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I’ve blogged before about Noisebridge, the hacker collective in San Francisco (or the Bay Area as a whole, really) of which I am a member. The group has been meeting once a week for coffee for most of a year now and has been looking for an affordable space for most of that time.

The vision of the group is:

“We want to provide infrastructure and collaboration opportunities for people interested in programming, hardware hacking, physics, chemistry, mathematics, photography, security, robotics, all kinds of art, and, of course, technology. Through talks, workshops, and projects we encourage knowledge exchange, learning, and mentoring.

As a space for artistic collaboration and experimentation, we are open to all types of art – with a special emphasis on the crossover of art and technology. From hardware labs to electronics, cooking, photography, and sound labs, anything that’s creative is welcome.

We intend to have many interesting things happening at all times. Sharing is essential to making this work. A logical followup to this is to find a space to display our creative projects. “

As of today, we finally have our own space, keys in hand and lease signed. It is just off of 16th and Mission in San Francisco (at 83C Wiese St between Mission and Valencia just off 16th). We signed papers today after collecting promised funds from people over the last week once it became clear that the space would work and that the will of the collective was that we should get it.

Right now, there is literally nothing in the space and it needs to be cleaned. We’re going to hold our first meeting in it tomorrow, Tuesday the 30th, at 8:00 PM. Jacob Appelbaum seems attached to calling the space, “Noisebridge Meadows.” It consists of a 20′ by 30′ room with a kitchen and bathroom, a small “board room” with doors, and a 15′ by 30′ loft area above overlooking the main room. You can see shots of it from the initial showing last week on endenizen’s flickr set for it. It doesn’t look like much yet but it is ours!

Priorities now will be to get it cleaned up, networking and wiring set up or improved, and connectivity added. We should be meeting in the space every Tuesday evening, at minimum, and probably doing some other events or classes there in the short term (my wife suggests a “cock fighting” night as a monthly rent party).

We’re still in the middle of the process of incorporating as a non-profit but this is almost done and will make fund raising and contributions a lot easier.

This has been a long time in coming, especially for some of the much earlier members than me. I’m really looking forward to watching the space and group develop.

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This anonymity also gave me the freedom to be a bit of a young prick but quite a few people that I met then, almost 20 years ago, are people that I still know and am friends with today. One of them is a co-blogger on the upcoming Buddhist group blog that I’m organizing. It also had a strong influence on my spiritual and intellectual development as I could speak to people without the worry that it would get back to my conservative family or to haunt me later. Many of my posts from that era are online, actually, but because we all used happy pirate nicknames, unless you know the variety of names or e-mail addresses that I used then, you would not be able to connect those with the upright citizen Al Billings of today. When I look at some of those old postings, I don’t think of that as a bad thing at times.

There is information circulating today that some people want to change this. There is an “IP Traceback” drafting group, named Q6/17, out there. This is associated with the United Nations but has strong ties to Chinese nationals involved in PRC state-run enterprises. Additionally, it looks like the United States’ National Security Agency is attending their meeting next week as well. Details on what they are up to are not clear as they are refusing to comment or release documents but, as the article discusses, there is pretty strong evidence (even in the proposal names) that they are trying to bring about the end of anonymity on the Internet.

Now, anonymity on the net is an odd thing. Since all packets have addresses and these go back to a source (unless you are spoofing for one way traffic), it is hard to be truly anonymous. Someone, somewhere, may have a log fail containing records of connections between machines. That being said, it is an ocean of data and there are anonymizing tools, such as Tor or remailers. As various scandals in China, Burma, Egypt, Iran, and other places have shown in the last few years, governments will often go to great lengths to track down their own citizens if they engage in unpopular or critical speech (especially when directed at the government). This and attacking the pirating of “intellectual property” would seem to be the most obvious application of IP Traceback technology. A leaked document from Q6/17 seems to support this with its justification of the uses of the technology:

1.5 Proxy “Safe harbor” A political opponent to a government publishes articles putting the government in an unfavorable light. The government, having a law against any opposition, tries to identify the source of the negative articles but the articles having been published via a proxy server, is unable to do so protecting the anonymity of the author.

On the group’s own site it says, “Anonymity was considered as an important problem on the Internet (may lead to criminality). Privacy is required but we should make sure that it is provided by pseudonymity rather than anonymity.”

All of this is a situation that should be monitored closely. Secretive proposals by self-appointed organizations with input from known repressive regimes and organizations (don’t forget the NSA’s role in the wiretapping of American citizens) should be seen with deep suspicion in regards to their intent.

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Feedly is a new kind of RSS start page which weaves Google Reader, Digg and Delicious into a more fun, magazine-like user experience. The integration with Twitter, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Friendfeed and Delicious makes sharing a breeze. You can get up to speed quickly by importing your existing Netvibes, Bloglines or MyYahoo accounts, your bookmarks or an OPML file.

What it does is act as a new way of viewing your feed content for those of us who read a lot of blogs (I scan at least 200, though some of those only update once a week). It uses Google Reader as its backend for accessing your feeds. For me, this is very convenient because I was already using Google Reader. This means that it reads my existing reader subscriptions, including folder organization, and presents views on it. When I mark items as read, save them for later, or share them, this is reflected on the Google Reader site. This makes it perfect for me and very easy for others to try if they are already playing with Google Reader.

Feedly offers various roll up views of top readers for blogs or other Google Reader information. It also allows you to use the “River of News” model for reading if you want to do so. One thing that I appreciated is that you can tweak a couple of different settings on how it presents feed contents to you. In the view below, I am using a short summary view with a small picture on a roll up page for one of my folders (personal-blogs). This gives me the first few sentences of each item and a picture. If I click on any item, it will expand in place to show me the full feed item. I can click on it again to collapse it or to choose options to save it, etc.

The only problem that I’ve run into so far is that it occasionally loses its synchronization with Google Reader so I see some of the same feeds or it offers me feed items that show as read in Reader if I go to it directly. This has only happened a few times but it is something that the software needs to work on. As a whole, I’ve found it to be a much friendlier way to use Google Reader and I plan to keep using it.

I’m not sure what the business model of the feedly.com site is for this but I expect that the search box at the top of each page may play a role. I haven’t noticed any ads or similar on pages yet. They do have a blog available and seem to be doing regular updates for the overall software.

This is for Firefox 3, only, of course. :-)

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You can see the entire comic at http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/ (if the server has come back up). I’ve also made a version of it available in a .cbz comic book file at http://www.mediafire.com/?sct1crovjdj. CBZ files are simply zip files containing images for use in reading comic books on computers. If you don’t have a computer comic book reader program, you can just unzip the file and look at the numbered images in order in the file.

This page details some of the promised features mentioned in the comic but you can read it for yourself. TechCrunch also has a post on this Google browser as well.

Not having seen this browser yet (no one outside Google has, I would guess), it is hard to give an opinion on it. Generally, as long as things are standards based so we don’t have to write some specialized version of web pages for a browser, I’m in the “the more, the merrier” camp, especially if it turns out to be entirely open source. Since they are using WebKit as the rendering engine for it, I expect that it will render pages as well (or as badly) as Safari does. Once I actually get a chance to play with it, I expect that I will have opinions about the specific Chrome features and whether they live up to their promises. I am kind of surprised that they used a web comic to explain the browser though. Most people would just write a simple web page or something. I’m not sure if this is a cool idea or just kind of a dumb one. Reactions will obviously vary. :-)

Update: Just as I posted this, the Google Blog put up a post on their new browser. They are launching a Windows-only beta for it on September 2 (tomorrow). The comic is now online at Google.

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You can see the schedule for Defcon at their site and a lot of talks will have their slides posted either their or in the forum. We did lose one talk, schedule for today, on subway card hacking in Boston for the MBTA. The presenters received an injunction to stop them (which came after we all received CDs with the slides from all presentations) on Friday. You can read about this here and here.

I’ve attended a bunch of talks on phishing, social network exploitation (including Livejournal for my friends there…), and man in the middle attacks. I particularly enjoyed Jay Beale’s talk on his tool, The Middler, which streamlines doing man in the middle attacks. For those unfamiliar, man in the middle attacks are attacks where an attacker is between two parties intercepting communications between them without their knowledge. In a common case (which Beale’s tool covers), the man in the middle can be software that is intercepting all web traffic (by pretending to be your wifi access point, for example), replacing SSL certificates for sites with its own or, more easily, just logging all of your cleartext traffic. Since a lot of sites use secure communications for logging in, it may be difficult to get someone’s password but, on most sites, communication after that is in the clear. So, I might not be able to log into your Gmail or Livejournal account as you but I can read over your shoulder as you do all of your private entries or e-mail…

I also attended a couple of sessions to do with Tor, which is one of the anonymity tools of which I am a proponent, both in general and in various ways at Mozilla. I got to see Mike Perry again, who works on the Torbutton Firefox extension, and to meet Roger Dingledine, who is one of the main forces behind Tor and their former project manager. I spent a bit of time talking to both of them outside of sessions and it was nice to get more of a chance to chat and to meet Roger in the flesh.

One area that I attended talks on that I hadn’t expected is on Cable Modems. Like many people, I have a cable modem at home (it’s Comtastic, which means it basically sucks). Even though I spend a lot of time in tech circles, with hackers, and on blogs, I had somehow missed the fact that people have been hacking cable modems for the last six or so years (and that there was a book published on it two years ago). I attended a talk on anonymous Internet access through cable modem hacking. This is basically using a cable modem with modified firmware to be able to do things like have anonymous net access or to control the upload and download speeds available to it. I also attended a talk on packet sniffing cable modem networks. I knew it was theoretically possible but hadn’t really investigated the idea. It turns out that everyone within a particular subnet on a cable network is basically sharing data and that while encryption is part of the standard for these communications, it is optional and weak. So, all of your cable modem data is either being transmitted to everyone else in your local subnode (which can have something like 200 other installations in homes) in the clear or it is being done with encryption that can be brute forced. The speaker, Guy Martin, used a cheap tv tuner card (with coax input) to pull data from a test cable network and to show how you could use a normal packet sniffer to look at the data. Not rocket science, by any means, but something that bears some thought if you use a cable modem at home, as I do.

This morning, I attended a talk by Peter Berghammer on Open Source Warfare (OSW), which I have been interested in for a few years. This is the application of open source techniques and information sharing by military groups, especially insurgents, over the last few years. Think of the evolution of IEDs in Iraq and how various decentralized groups pass information and technology (or techniques) to each other around the world. John Robb was the first person whose work I read much of on this and he maintains a blog that is pretty well known, as well as having a book out on the topic. Berghammer’s talk was fairly brief but he, I, and a few others spent most of the next hour in one of the Q&A rooms discussing OSW in more detail, which I found very informative.

For more posts about Defcon in blogs, try this search. You can also read the high quality posts on Defcon over at the Threat Level blog.

I have a couple of more talks to see and then I’ll be catching my plane back to Oakland. The last couple weeks of mostly travel have kind of wiped me out and I’m ready to be home until Burning Man in a few weeks.

Update: Mike Conner and I attended a last minute talk that showed how certain people with large amounts of net access could do a man in the middle attack on chosen portions of the Internet. They also happened to explain how Youtube was taken offline briefly back in February.

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I’ll be home for most of four days before going off to Las Vegas for the Black Hat and DEFCON security conferences.

I expect that the Mozilla Summit will be an event discussed for years to come with a certain amount of levity regarding some of the events. I found many of the sessions at the summit to be both interesting and thought provoking. I think that I’ll have more to say about that when I haven’t been awake for roughly 24 hours.

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From the news, I see that bus rides in Canada can be a dangerous experience. Luckily, no one went all “Highlander” on us and we arrived intact. I expect that Canada will end its attempts to kill us now.

Now I need coffee to go with the three or so hours of sleep.

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P.S. I did hear that when we lost all of our power, the room safes locked themselves. Unfortunately, many Mozilla people had placed their passports within them…

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To add insult to injury here at the Mozilla Summit, we now have no power.

I am told that a laundry truck hit the transformer for the hotel around 6:00 AM. (”They’re getting closer!” was said by someone.) We’re on battery power, which is good for ten hours or so. Luckily, they estimate that the power will be fixed in “five hours” but I’m not sure what that is in metric.

It was not seen if the driver of the truck was a Microsoft employee or a bear. I’m afraid to get on the gondola to go to the mountaintop for the big dinner tonight though.

Strangely enough, even though I have no power in my room, the wifi in the hotel still has power…

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Here at the Mozilla Summit this week, we may soon we reduced to cannibalism. (Perhaps this is an existing Canadian tradition, I’m not sure…) Apparently, last night a rock slide dropped on the road between Whistler and Vancouver, B.C. This is the road used by everyone coming into and out of the town for visits and it hugs a cliff face next to a river for most of its length.

Since some of the rocks are the size of trucks and, I hear, the pile is 10 meters high in places, they aren’t sure when the road will be cleared. It is said that dynamite will be involved. Almost all of us are scheduled to fly out of Vancouver on Friday, which may make it interesting since the low-end estimate is two days for road clearance. There is another route around in the other direction but it turns the two and a half hour trip into eight hour one. Additionally, it turns out that the busses to take us back are all sitting in Vancouver right now so they’d need to get here and then go back.

Luckily, Whistler seems well stocked with food, beer, and bears, so we should avoid lifeboat team building events.

Update: The B.C. government has announced that the road will be closed for five days or so. Apparently, we will all be making the long trek around in order to get to Vancouver. This means that for my 3:45 PM flight, I’m probably leaving Whistler around 4:00 AM (assuming four hours earlier than my previous time). Wheee!!

Update 2: I wasn’t far wrong. I’m taking a 3:00 AM bus for eight hours to get to Vancouver from here the long way around. (I then get to wait almost five hours at the airport for my flight…) Others are leaving at 6:00 PM tomorrow, Midnight, and then 2:00 AM and the late morning… A bug has been opened as well, in true open source fashion. More commentary is available through blogs on planet.mozilla.org.

Our route:

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I am currently preparing, in the most loose of senses, for going to Canada on Monday. Mozilla does a summit every couple of years, which brings in members of the overall Mozilla Community together. The event for 2008, now that Firefox 3 is out the door, is taking place next week at Whistler in British Columbia. Whistler is well known, especially in my hometown of Seattle, as a ski resort (which you don’t normally visit in July and August). (As an aside, it turns out that Americans need their passports to go to Canada now, which is awfully strange having grown up crossing the border all the time without them…)

All of us working for the Mozilla Corporation and the recent Mozilla Messaging company will be attending this event. We’re leaving to the event on Monday morning and coming back on Friday. You can see a proposed list of sessions online. I haven’t figured out which sessions I am going to yet but I expect to try to make the ones on the foundation, open source philosophy, and perhaps the ones on the Mozilla Labs projects, like Weave and Ubiquity.

While I’m at the summit, I’ll probably be less available online than my normal ubiquitousness but I expect that I’ll be blogging. After I come back, I’ll only be in town for the weekend and Monday before I fly out of town for Las Vegas. I’ll be attending the Black Hat and DEFCON security conferences there through the weekend. I’m hoping to see a few friendly faces at each of these.

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You can see it on their site in full size but I’ve added it below in a smaller size as well:

This cake has gotten far more press than I think anyone expected. I guess people like it when conflicts can proceed with a certain amount of grace. As has been suggested, when IE8 ships, we should send the IE team a cake as well but we’ll make sure to include the recipe with it so they can make more of them…

Oh, and I like the little “The cake is a lie!” nod in the tiny cake graphic beneath the cake. :-)

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Sean and I used to work together and I happened to be the one that saw him as he came in so he presented the cake to me and John Lilly and we then took it around to staff. I think people found it amusing and the “E” portion of the Firefox 2 cake, which is preserved in our freezer to this day, was pulled out for comparison. I must say, the new cake is much nicer (and much less brown) than the old one.

Here are a couple of photos from Rob:

Me with the Cake

Closeup of the Cake

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Here is one thing that Firefox does that IE7 and IE8 still cannot do at all:

Firefox 3 came out today, as people have been saying in their blogs. Firefox is still the cross-platform solution for those of us who work on the web, running on OS X, Linux, and Windows, going back to Windows 2000 for the latter. For the next generation web browsers, only Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 run on Windows 2000. This is too bad as you still see Win 2K in a large number of professional institutions, like banks and factory floors, where it is seen as a tried and true operating system.

I’m really glad that Firefox 3 is out the door. It has been a good run but I think we have all been ready to ship this.

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Today, June 14th, is the one year anniversary of my starting at the Mozilla Corporation. I transitioned from spending a year at MobiTV, a startup doing television on cell phones. I suppose that this makes it a time to reflect (or perhaps to checkpoint) on life at Mozilla.

This anniversary falls at a good time. As most people know, we’re releasing Firefox 3 in the next few days. This is something that has been a long time in coming but I’ve been pretty happy working on the alphas and betas of this over the last year. Most of my day to day life is centered on the ongoing security updates for Firefox and Thunderbird though. I’m currently running the QA efforts at MoCo for these releases, ably assisted by a cluster of malcontents within the QA organization. The next security update for Firefox 2 will be version 2.0.0.15, which we just began testing on Friday. Unfortunately, security is an ongoing process, as is bug discovery, so this will not be the last release. In the future, at least for a while, we’ll be updating both Firefox 2 and 3 at the same time, which ought to make things especially interesting.

On the security front, I’ll be going to DEFCON and Black Hat this year and will also be attending the 25th annual Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin during the holiday season at the end of the year. I’m hoping to get to chat more with those in the community that gives us notice of security issues, often in such creative ways.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with the year that I’ve spent at Mozilla. I’m looking forward to the work on GristMill getting to a beta level of quality as it has the potential to be a game changer for the day to day life of those of us in QA. GristMill is a tool being worked on largely by Clint Talbert and Mikeal Rogers that allows test automation to be built on the Mozilla platform in an easy manner. This is a tool written specifically for QA usage. Initially, this work is targeted to Firefox but it should be applicable to any product built on the platform and will also work on all supported operating systems. Finding a tool to do test automation that both tests Firefox and Thunderbird as a whole (including UI features) and which is cross platform is something that I’ve been making a lot of noise about within our QA team for the entire time that I’ve been here. I’m glad that we have superstar developers on the QA team that can make this tool a reality. This will move us in the direction of having better automation, which can be extended by the community, for software built on the Mozilla platform.

I’m not sure what the next year will hold. I hope that with the release of Firefox 3, we have a chance to sit back and evaluate how we want to do things, especially within the QA team, for the future releases. It is easy to get caught up in the day to day tactical issues for releases. I expect to play a role in all of this. Until then, I have Firefox and Thunderbird releases to get out the door in the next few weeks.

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From the Seattle Times article today:

The COFEE, which stands for Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, is a USB “thumb drive” that was quietly distributed to a handful of law-enforcement agencies last June. Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith described its use to the 350 law-enforcement experts attending a company conference Monday.

The device contains 150 commands that can dramatically cut the time it takes to gather digital evidence, which is becoming more important in real-world crime, as well as cybercrime. It can decrypt passwords and analyze a computer’s Internet activity, as well as data stored in the computer.

It also eliminates the need to seize a computer itself, which typically involves disconnecting from a network, turning off the power and potentially losing data. Instead, the investigator can scan for evidence on site.

More than 2,000 officers in 15 countries, including Poland, the Philippines, Germany, New Zealand and the United States, are using the device, which Microsoft provides free.

I wonder if Apple does something similar for OS X for police or maybe Mac users don’t commit crimes? If they do, they probably don’t tell everyone. :-) Another reason to use Linux, it seems.

On one hand, I understand the need for law enforcement to be able to gather evidence for criminal investigations. On the other hand, I find it extremely creepy that an operating system manufacturer (with a monopoly or near monopoly, effectively, as an operating system) is in bed with cops and developing tools internally for them. It isn’t like these could be abused by someone, right?

I also dislike this comment, especially, from Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith:

Smith compared the Internet of today to London and other Industrial Revolution cities in the early 1800s. As people flocked from small communities where everyone knew each other, an anonymity emerged in the cities and a rise in crime followed.

The social aspects of Web 2.0 are like “new digital cities,” Smith said. Publishers, interested in creating huge audiences to sell advertising, let people participate anonymously.

That’s allowing “criminals to infiltrate the community, become part of the conversation and persuade people to part with personal information,” Smith said.

The tying of anonymity on the net with criminality is hyperbole, as far as I’m concerned. I’m surprised he didn’t attempt to link it to “terrorists” either since that seems to be the method of making people more paranoid at the moment.

Sure, if you are anonymous, you can commit crimes and it is difficult to know who you are but the root of the problem is the criminal behavior, not the anonymity. I can be anonymous in my day to day life, walking around my city, and commit crimes. You don’t find people declaring that the problem is that the guy who mugged someone was anonymous but that he mugged someone. Otherwise, we’d all have our names emblazoned on our clothes or broadcast through RFID or somesuch.

The net has a long tradition of anonymity, which I think is actually essential to its well being and societal good. It has acted as a place where people can say things or think thoughts (or write thoughts, more importantly) without worry about the impact it will have on them by being associated with their name. Ask the Chinese bloggers if this is important…

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