[Tails-project] 31C3 report

Delete this message

Reply to this message
Author: intrigeri
Date:  
To: tails-project
Subject: [Tails-project] 31C3 report
Hi,

here's a report from 31C3. I hope other Tails folks will complement it
with their own bits :)

Big picture
===========

Tails is now hype. Very. Crazy. It felt good to meet so many
interested people, users, and potential contributors. It was a bit
scary to see how much responsibility we, as a project, now have.

One concern I have with this hype, though, is that many people seem to
be under the mistaken impression that Tails is meant to be a "secure
OS". And then, if they're mere users, they have a mislead impression
of security; and if they're security folks, when they realize that
Tails is not much more hardened than any Debian system, they freak out
and wait in a row to tell us how much hardening Tails lacks, one after
the other. I think we should write a blog post to clarify this for
these two audiences: current status of the project, our goals for
2015, the minimal hardening improvements we've made, the fact we won't
have time to seriously work on deep security-related changes before
next year, "how to help" ideas, the usual usability/security balance
we strive to find, etc.

Training
========

While having a chat with a sponsors of ours, we came up with two ideas:

* Create a web directory of Tails training material?
https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/8585

* Create a directory of organizations doing Tails training?
https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/8586

Academia / cryptographers
=========================

A few academics and/or cryptographers have proposed help:

* Point friendly academic people to research projects that would help Tails
https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/8578

* Point friendly cryptographers at tasks that would help Tails
https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/8572

Anyone interested in gathering ideas in these areas?

My talks
========

I gave basically the same talks as I did at the Tails hackfest last
year:

* Contributing to Tails by working on Debian (15-20 attendees)
* Improving the infrastructure behind Tails (20-25 attendees)

My slides are online: https://tails.boum.org/promote/slides/

We had interesting discussions there. As a result, we've received our
first patch against our Puppet modules ever
(https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/7125), and the Debian
reproducible builds tracking page now has a section about the packages
we're using at ISO build time:
https://reproducible.debian.net/index_pkg_sets.html#tails

Misc.
=====

* Some plans to hopefully replace Pidgin some day have been discussed
and drawn: https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/8573 and subtasks

Cheers,
--
intrigeri