FOSS.in 2007 Call for Participation

The Call for Participation of this years incarnation [it's in India, after all] of FOSS.in has just been released.

This is great news. I've cut down on all other events this year: I haven't visited at OLS, LinuxConf Europe, linux.conf.au, ... Only FOSS.in I really cannot miss ;)

I haven't yet decided on the exact title of the lecture that I'm interested to submit, but it seems like I'll have to decide soon. It will be OpenMoko related, that's for sure ;)

If you have worked on something exciting in the FOSS world, please don't hesitate and submit it to the FOSS.in/2007 CfP. It's a great event with a very technical audience. And an ideal opportunity to catch a glimpse of India :)

Overwhelming participation at Demonstration against Germany's new surveillance laws

On Saturday, I attended the Freiheit statt Angst demonstration in Berlin, which aimed at protesting against the various new laws and regulations increasing the surveillance of the German government on its citizens. I assumed it would be again one of those niche events like the demonstrations against software patents, with some 200 people. To the contrary! The organizers counted 15,000 demonstrators, and even the police's initial estimate at the beginning of the demonstration was 8,000.

This really is a big step forward. Apparently it's not only the "generation Internet" that is sick of the ever increasing cut down on civil liberties, data protection and privacy. That being said, 15,000 is still a too small number for a topic that effects everyone in this country. But even a demonstration of that size doesn't happen every day in Berlin, so it's not that easy to completely ignore either...

Don't miss the photos of the demonstration

netfilter developer workshop 2007 is over

The days of the netfilter workshop passed quite fast, and I'm finally back to my home in Berlin now. In case you're interested, here is a link to the group photo.

Among other things, we've had the following major decisions at the workshop:

• Patrick McHardy finally officially head of the coreteam
• ulogd2 will see an official release candidate soon
• we want to merge ipset soon
• we will try to shift future developments in the direction of libnl and slowly deprecate libnetfilter_*
• we will move the netfilter and netfilter-devel lists to vger.kernel.org since we don't have to care about spam filtering there. Other, lower-traffic lists remain on lists.netfilter.org
• we will switch to git even for userspace code, at least for the iptables source code

Finally, I'd like to use this opportunity to thank all our Workshop sponsors, particularly Astaro for their continuous and generous support of netfilter/iptables throughout the last five years.

Enjoying the netfilter workshop 2007

I've returned to Germany in order to attend the 5th netfilter development workshop in Karlsruhe. It's sponsored by Astaro, whose continuing support of netfilter/iptables is really outstanding. Even after I took my "leave" to work on OpenMoko, they continue their funding by paying for Patricks maintenance of the netfilter/iptables codebase, and things like hosting the netfilter workshop.

It's really great to meet with the old colleagues with whom I've co-worked for a number of years on netfilter/iptables. I really miss those days, basically spending most of my day working together and communicating with cool people hacking on similar problems. Quite a bit different from what I'm doing right now.

So while I'm here, I'm actually trying to spend most of my time related to netfilter/iptables, which is really refreshing.

I now own two motorbikes

Besides my BMW F650ST in Berlin, I now (since 10 days ago) own a Yamaha TW200 in Taipei. To me, this is sort of a joke of a motorbike. A toy bike. 200cc feels like a bicycle with ancillary motor. No acceleration, no torque...

But then, Taiwan is an incredible strange country when it comes to motorbikes. And that TW is definitely better than one of those 2-stroke plastics scooters (I had one when I was 16: 3 jammed pistons in two years, plastics above the exhaust completely melted up to a point where I had to add custom-made aluminum pieces for it not to loose its structural integrity).

So it somehow fits the overall Taiwan experience: A never-ending compromise....

Two days of intense u-boot hacking

After finishing most of the basic device support for GTA02v2 in both kernel and u-boot during the last week, I've finally turned back to implementing one of the longest standing issues in u-boot: GSM passthrough.

GSM passthrough allows you to basically ignore the smartphone part of the device and connect the GSM modem more or less directly to a host PC. The feature has been long known by various smartphone hacker projects such as e.g. OpenEZX (which as a side note has made quite some progress recently, much appreciated by me as retired project founder).

So GSM passthrough is mainly useful for rapid development (developing gsmd more efficiently by running it on the developers workstation, without cross-compiling and ipkg installs), but also if you want to use some legacy application that was written at a time where a phone really only was a phone (e.g. sim card managers, ...)

Now the GSM passthrough was always pushed back on the TODO list, since our usbtty code in u-boot was never very reliable and caused lots of data corruption such as bogus and/or missing characters. Quite useful for the human operator, but definitely not acceptable for getting a program with AT command parser to work. So that had to be fixed first (and it is now fixed).

As I pointed out in my announcement, the generic way of implementing this feature has actually quite interesting but much more obscure use cases such as dialling from a landline via GSM (CSD call) into your Neo, manually accepting the incoming call and then attaching the u-boot command line to it. That's sort of the feature you have on hosted/colocated servers, when you use a boot-loader with serial console support and attach a modem or terminal server to it.

So does this mean the Neo1973 is now ready for the enterprise? Not quite. Even though it has a built-in UPS (called battery), and GTA02 will even allow you to change the battery without shutting down the device, resulting in higher availability ;)

But then, the expectations / requirements for mobile communications devices are quite a bit different from that world. But the hackers community likes those kind of strange features. Have you ever heard of another smartphone with that capability?

Oh, and before I get any complaints about the security: This "feature" has to be explicitly enabled and every call manually accepted by typing a sequence of commands into the u-boot command line. So unless the attack involves tons of social engineering (getting the device owner to do all those things) there's not that much of a big deal. But maybe we should start to think of some kind of user authentication for u-boot now *rotfl*.