Free Download of UFO: Enemy Unknown

The best computer game ever, bar none, “UFO: Enemy Unknown” (known as “XCOM: UFO Defense” in the USA) is currently available for free for the next day or so from the Humble Bundle website. And once you have a legit copy of the data files, you can play it (on OSes other than Windows, as well!) using the OpenXCOM reimplementation of the game engine. Launch Interceptors!

Speaking at FOSDEM on the Mozilla Root Program

Like every year for the past ten or more (except for a couple of years when my wife was due to have a baby), I’ll be going to FOSDEM, the premier European grass-roots FLOSS conference. This year, I’m speaking on the Policy and Legal Issues track, with the title “Reflections on Adjusting Trust: Tales of running an open and transparent Certificate Authority Program“. The talk is on Sunday at 12.40pm in the Legal and Policy Issues devroom (H.1301), and I’ll be talking about how we use the Mozilla root program to improve the state of security and encryption on the Internet, and the various CA misdemeanours we have found along the way. Hope to see you there :-)

Note that the Legal and Policy Issues devroom is usually scarily popular; arrive early if you want to get inside.

Security Audit Finds Nothing: News At 11

Secure Open Source is a project, stewarded by Mozilla, which provides manual source code audits for key pieces of open source software. Recently, we had a trusted firm of auditors, Cure53, examine the dovecot IMAP server software, which runs something like two thirds of all IMAP servers worldwide. (IMAP is the preferred modern protocol for accessing an email store.)

The big news is that they found… nothing. Well, nearly nothing. They managed to scrape up 3 “vulnerabilities” of Low severity.

Cure53 write:

Despite much effort and thoroughly all-encompassing approach, the Cure53 testers only managed to assert the excellent security-standing of Dovecot. More specifically, only three minor security issues have been found in the codebase, thus translating to an exceptionally good outcome for Dovecot, and a true testament to the fact that keeping security promises is at the core of the Dovecot development and operations.

Now, if we didn’t trust our auditors and they came back empty handed, we might suspect them of napping on the job. But we do, and so this sort of result, while seemingly a “failure” or a “waste of money”, is the sort of thing we’d like to see more of! We will know Secure Open Source, and other programs to improve the security of FLOSS code, are having an impact when more and more security audits come back with this sort of result. So well done to the dovecot maintainers; may they be the first of many.

Modern Communications

I just sent something very like the following to someone buying a house from me:

This text is to tell you that I just emailed you a PDF copy of the fax my solicitor just sent your solicitor, containing the email he originally sent last week which your solicitor claimed he didn’t get, plus the confirmation that the fax was received.

Support the Software Freedom Conservancy

The Software Freedom Conservancy is an organization which provides two useful services.

Firstly, they provide “fiscal sponsor” services for free software projects which wish to benefit from being a non-profit but which do not have the resources to set up their own Foundation. They have over 35 member projects which they support. If you use WINE, Samba, Mercurial, Inkscape, Git or any of the others, you can thank and support those projects by supporting SFC.

Secondly, if you believe that copyleft has a role (and it doesn’t even have to be an exclusive role) to play in the free software licensing ecosystem, you have an interest in making sure that copyleft licenses do not de facto become the same as permissive ones. That requires working with companies to help them understand their quid pro quo obligations to share and, rarely, taking them to court when flagrant violations are not corrected after significant time. The SFC is basically the only organization which does this valuable work, and that fact makes companies (sadly) less likely to support it.

This means that SFC greatly relies on support from individuals. I have just re-committed as a supporter for 2017 and I hope many of my readers will do the same.