Akademy 2018

Nov 11, 2018 kde akademy kontact

You have probably read a lot about Akademy 2018 recently, and how great it was. For me it was a great experience too and this year I met a lot of KDE people, both old and new. This is always nice. I arrived on Thursday so I had one day to set everything up and had a little bit of time to get to know the city. On Friday evening I enjoyed the "Welcoming evening", but I was very surprised when Volker told me that I would be on stage the next day, talking about privacy. He told me that someone should have informed me several days before. The scheduled speaker, Sebastian, couldn't make it to Akademy.

That was really a pity. If I had known earlier, I would have prepared a proper presentation, as I think I have a lot to say on the topic. I care a lot about good encryption support in KDE PIM and I have also been busy with Tails, a distribution strongly focused on privacy and anonymity.

So the next day I rambled a bit about encrypting mail headers (also known as Memory Hole), but it wasn't a great talk. It was also very stressful, as we started with a lot of delay: Setting up the audio took much longer than expected so all talks started late. As I was in such a hurry. I forgot a lot of what I wanted to say and failed to draft a greater picture for the privacy goal.

To compensate, let me say it here. Privacy starts with encrypting everything, starting with the content of the connection. This is mostly done via TLS. Here KDE is lacking some bits, as we cannot display the encryption methods, so we are sometimes forced to downgrade to old and insecure encryption methods without user visual feedback. But at least we support TLS everywhere! Unfortunately metadata is often enough to track where people are. To hide this information, we need TOR/VPN support within the applications. For most applications you can use the TOR network by running

torsocks <cmd>

but this is not really user-friendly. It also has the disadvantage that you can't see if DNS requests are transmitted via the TOR tunnel. And then there's deamons, which you don't normally run from the command line. Furthermore, e.g. GnuPG has an option to enable TOR support and does not like to run using torsocks.

We need more control over the used TLS certificates and a way to display the TLS parameters, like accepted ciphers, protocol versions etc. Because at the moment KDE just asks you about unknown certificates, but you can't view/ control the other important details of a TLS connection to harden your system. Sure a default user can't decide whether something is good or not and a user may need to access some rotten company side. But we can provide a rating like ssllabs to show that the TLS connection is not good.

Another topic is to have a good support for TOR/VPN for applications and KDE in total in a user friendly way. And be sure that everything within these applications really uses the tunnel. I think at usecases like: I want TOR for everything except this application. After we have good solutions for those, we can focus on all the different applications. I haven't a good overview what each application should do in regards to the Privacy goal additionally. As I'm busy within KDE PIM I see some things there:

Encrypting headers of mails to give less metadata to surveillance T742.
Make it possible to search in encrypted mails. Until now, the encrypted data are a binary blob to the search. The search is important to find mails again and is often a reason, why users do not use encrypted messages. T8447.
Protect Akregator webviewer against ad trackers T7528.
Add GnuPG TOFU (Trust On First Use) trust model support for KMail. With TOFU you will get more security without exchanging the gpg fingerprints. To make it clear, exchanging fingerprints gives more security than is achieved with TOFU, but it is exhausting. Only a small number of users exchange fingerprints. So many users will profit from having extra security by the TOFU security model being supported by KMail.

To move forward in reaching the privacy goal, I volunteered to organize a Sprint together with Louise Galathea. It will hopefully take place next Spring.

But back to the Akademy - two days of many talks which was pretty overwhelming, in a good way. I really enjoyed the mix of non technical talks and technical talks. My highlight was a talk about Kontact from Markus Feilner. It is interessting to see how users master issues around Kontact and what solutions they find. The talk would have benefited from Markus talking to KDE PIM before, as some of his suggestions weren't correct. But it was nice to see that there are happy users who love all bells and whistles from Kontact. The days after the talk I encountered another user who gave Kontact a try after years, because of that talk.

The BOF session started on Monday. I started the Mondey joining the Promo BoF to get some insights into how Promo works and how KDE PIM can have better promotion to attract new contributors. Together we created a rough plan to focus first on the new website and then create several blog posts to promote KDE PIM. Internaly we started to create several junior jobs and are discussing who can mentor new people when they come along. This is still ongoing and hopefully new people will join the new spirit of KDE PIM and aren't overwhelmed by the big amount of repositories.

After the AGM I joined the Distros BoF and was impressed by how many Distros have a KDE focus. We started to talk about issues regarding KDE and downstream. Especially if distros are time based, they need a lot of manpower to validate if bugs have already been fixed upstream, or if it is a downstream bug. The fast release cycle of different KDE bundels (Plasma, Frameworks & Applications) makes it even more difficult to follow. Maybe this BoF helps the distros to talk more about their issues in the distributions@kde.org mailinglist directly and solutions can be found for common issues.

The next day I attend KConfig BOF and talked about issues reagarding config migration and how to store config. Also a very common issue is that you need to get updates of config values in your application. KDE PIM has some examples of bad decisions reagarding config handeling, as you can configure a lot of stuff and everything is seperated into several files. But the seperation is not well formed from the beginning - an issue that's grown with the years. It is also written down as task to do cleanups and make the configs easier to consume. Because a clearer seperation also helps users who want to move their KDE PIM from one computer to another.

In the afternoon, the KDE PIM BoF took place, where we followed up on what has been going on since the last Akademy and what new things we want to do. We discussed a lot of how we can improve the onbording for KDE PIM. As we want to make it easier for other applications to use PIM related data, we have a long standing goal to move single parts of KDE PIM to Frameworks. For the next KDE Application 18.12 we want to push syndication into Frameworks release. If we would have more manpower, we would move those things faster to Frameworks. If you are interested, or currently using some parts of KDE PIM within your application, it is a good idea to help us getting things cleaned up and moved to Frameworks. A bigger audience can consume PIM data more easily.

In the evening I joined the LGBT & Queer Dinner and it was nice to cook together and chat.

The next days I mostly sat down and tried to get some smaller things fixed, like the issue with the suspend icon within the logout Applet. It is very good to sit next to Kai-Uwe so he could see and propose workarounds directly. Finally he found the hard coded color in the theme and the issue is solved in the next release.

Since there were many open discussions I did not managed to write a line of code within these days - I was busy talking. Additionally I wanted to see the newest KDE PIM within Debian, so this also took some time.

On Friday I took a train back to Germany. As Volker is always interested about live data from delays for improving KItinerary, he wished me some delays. And I had a lot of delay - I arrived in Berlin 12h later than expected. I had to sleep in Dresden, as the last train from Prag leaves at 18:07 towards Berlin. And since I missed that one, I had to take a local train to Dresden and there was no train anymore to Berlin. And it wasn't really late - just midnight. I never thought about that Dresden is that badly connected to rest of Germany... But it was nice as I stayed at a friends place, who I wouldn't have met otherwise. From the improving KItinerary it was not a success, as I only got one update from Deutsche Bahn at 23:25 - telling me that the train from Leipzig to Berlin would use another track. The more useful information, that I never would reach that train would be more useful.