Today I gave a talk at LibrePlanet 2023 on what's new in and about Jami since my Jami and how it empowers users talk for LibrePlanet 2021.
Here is the abstract for my talk, also available on the LibrePlanet 2023's speakers page:
Jami is free/libre software for universal communication that respects the freedoms and privacy of its users. An official GNU package, Jami is an end-to-end encrypted secure and distributed communication tool for calling, conferencing, messaging, and file transfer. Jami has end-user applications across multiple operating systems and platforms, as well as multiple APIs and a plugin system for building upon and extending Jami as a framework for secure and private communication.
This talk gives an update on what's new in and about Jami since bandali's "Jami and how it empowers users" talk at LibrePlanet 2021.
Presentation slides:
pdf
(with notes,
only notes) |
bib
LaTeX sources:
tar.gz |
zip
Video:
webm
I will add the
presentation video once the conference recordings have been
processed and published by the Free Software Foundation.
You can watch the presentation video below:
]]>LibrePlanet is a conference about software freedom, happening on March 19-20, 2023. The event is hosted by the Free Software Foundation, and brings together software developers, law and policy experts, activists, students, and computer users to learn skills, celebrate free software accomplishments, and face upcoming challenges. Newcomers are always welcome, and LibrePlanet 2023 will feature programming for all ages and experience levels.
Also published on the Free Software Foundation's
community blog:
Amin
Bandali: Why it's fun to participate in
LibrePlanet
I'm Amin Bandali, a free/libre software activist by passion, and a software developer/engineer and computing scientist by profession. I am a former intern and current volunteer with the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and a member of the GNU Project. One of the ways I volunteer with the FSF is through LibrePlanet. I've helped with various aspects of the conference's organization, currently mainly helping as a member of the LibrePlanet committee, which reviews all session proposals. In this blog post I'd like to give a quick background on how and why I got involved with LibrePlanet and how I contribute to it today. I will also share how you, too, could start helping with the organization of the conference in a number of different ways, if you're interested!
I first got involved with LibrePlanet as a volunteer a few years back. By that point, I'd enjoyed participating in the conference via IRC and watching the talks online for a few years, and I was looking for ways to get involved. As I couldn't make it to Boston to attend LibrePlanet in person, I volunteered online, with tasks such as helping watch over the conference IRC channels and answering questions as best as I could. I seemed to have done a decent job, since the FSF folks later asked if I could do the same for a few non-LibrePlanet online FSF events too, which I gladly accepted.
Having enjoyed participating and volunteering for LibrePlanet, I thought it would be great if I could give a talk of my own, too. This only became possible for me after 2020 with the possibility of doing remote presentations. Since I sadly cannot attend the event in person currently, this was a welcome side-effect of the conference temporarily switching to an online-only format. So, I submitted a proposal to talk about "Jami and how it empowers users" for LibrePlanet 2021, which was accepted and became my first LibrePlanet talk. Even though presenting, or even just submitting a talk at a large conference like LibrePlanet, may sometimes seem like an intimidating task, I had a great time presenting mine, thanks in no small part to the FSF staff and other volunteer organizers, as well as the audience members.
The FSF staff were supportive and encouraging throughout the entire process of preparing and presenting my talk, and the audience gave positive and/or constructive feedback after my presentation. Plus, I greatly enjoyed discussing various free software topics with them, which was not really surprising because the folks attending LibrePlanet tend to be free software enthusiasts or activists like myself who are often just as eager to watch and chat with others about free software. And, as my good GNU friend Jason Self puts it, LibrePlanet is a wonderful place for such enthusiasts to "recharge their free software batteries each year".
Back in 2020, I was invited to join the LibrePlanet committee, a diverse team of volunteers from different backgrounds and areas of expertise that review all sessions submitted, helping select session proposals in a way that provides an exciting lineup of talks for people of differing areas and levels of experience and interest. I humbly and happily accepted the invitation to join the committee, and I help with the reviews to date. (I of course don't review my own session proposals, nor the ones I recognize to be from people I know). If you are also interested in joining the LibrePlanet committee and helping review the wonderful session proposals the team receives for each conference, you can come by the #libreplanet or #fsf channels on the Libera.Chat IRC network and reach out to the FSF staff there, or send an email to campaigns@fsf.org.
Besides being part of the LibrePlanet committee and helping review session proposals, there are a number of other ways to contribute to the organization of the conference as well. Technical tasks include helping with the setup and/or the maintenance of some pieces of infrastructure for the conference, for example helping maintain the conference's self-hosted installation of LibreAdventure, which is the conference's online event space where people can have their avatars "bump" into each other to have a real-time video-conferencing chat, and they can explore sessions, the FSF office (digitized), virtual sponsor booths, and more. Non-technical tasks include helping with the moderation of the conference's IRC channels on the event days, and volunteering to introduce, caption, or transcribe talks. There are also other logistical tasks that need doing now that LibrePlanet is switching to a hybrid format with both online and in-person events (in Boston). If you are interested in getting involved and helping with any of these (or other) tasks, please email to resources@fsf.org.
The theme for LibrePlanet 2023 is "Charting the Course", which I find particularly apt and important. The free software movement has come a long way and thanks to the tireless efforts of people from projects and communities of varying sizes, today we can carry out a very wide range of computing tasks in total freedom. It is also crucially important to continue recognizing and making progress in the areas of digital life where avoiding nonfree software may not be currently possible or feasible. One such notorious area is online payments, where the GNU Taler folks have been hard at work making freedom-respecting, privacy-friendly online transactions possible. At LibrePlanet 2023, I hope to see talks on such areas of digital life. I look forward to talks presenting the state of available free software in a certain field and clarify to what extent we can participate in them in freedom, along with a wishlist for improvements and a roadmap for moving closer towards freedom in this specific field so that we will ultimately, hopefully, reach full digital freedom.
These, along with other factors — such as the FSF staff striving for LibrePlanet to be inclusive and accessible, as well as making it possible to participate online for those of us not able to attend the event in person — make LibrePlanet a free software event I'm most excited about and look forward to each year. I hope and expect that LibrePlanet 2023 will be a conference with a lineup of interesting, fun, educational, and thought-provoking user freedom themed talks and sessions, along with a chance to catch up and socialize with fellow free software hackers, activists, and/or enthusiasts from all over the world, just like it always has been — especially this time with its ever more relevant theme of "Charting the Course" to not only reflect and celebrate the path we've come so far, but to also look towards the future and chart the course to software user freedom for coming generations.
Take care, and I hope to see you around for LibrePlanet 2023!
Amin Bandali
LibrePlanet Committee Member and assistant GNUisance
Copyright (c) 2022 Amin Bandali
Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright notice and this notice are preserved. This file is offered as-is, without any warranty.
]]>In this talk I go over the old web (of 1990s and early 2000s) and how websites looked back then, fast-forwarding to the present day and the sad current state of the web, and some possibilities on where we could go from here if we would like to have a better net/web in the future for user freedom, privacy, and control.
Here is the abstract for my talk, also available on the LibrePlanet 2022's speakers page:
The modern web is filled to the brim with complexity, no shortage of nonfree software, and malware. Many, many people have written and spoken at length on these issues and their implications and negative effects on users' freedom, privacy, and digital autonomy. With the advent of technologies like WebAssembly, the modern day web browser has effectively become an operating system of its own, along with all the issues and complexities of operating systems and then some. Opening arbitrary websites with a typical web browser amounts to downloading an executing [mostly nonfree] software on your machine. But is all of this complexity really necessary? Is all of this needed to achieve the web's original purpose, an information system for relaying documents (and now media)? What if there was a way to do away with all of these complexities and go back to the basics?
In this talk we will examine the Internet beyond the modern web, some possibilities of what that might look like with concrete examples from protocols like Gopher from time immemorial, and more recent experiments and reimaginations of it in today's world, such as Gemini and Spartan. The talk will give a brief tour of these protocols and their histories, what they have to offer, and why one might want to use them in the 21st century.
Presentation slides:
txt |
pdf |
bib
Speaker notes:
txt
Video:
webm
I will add the
presentation video once the conference recordings have been
processed and published by the Free Software Foundation.
You can watch the presentation video below:
]]>LibrePlanet is a conference about software freedom, happening on March 19-20, 2022. The event is hosted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and brings together software developers, law and policy experts, activists, students, and computer users to learn skills, celebrate free software accomplishments, and face upcoming challenges. Newcomers are always welcome, and LibrePlanet 2022 will feature programming for all ages and experience levels.
Here is the abstract for my talk, also available on the LibrePlanet 2021's speakers page:
Jami is free software for universal communication that respects the freedoms and privacy of its users. Jami is an official GNU package with a main goal of providing a framework for virtual communications, along with a series of end-user applications for audio/video calling and conferencing, text messaging, and file transfer.
With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home has become the norm for many workers around the world. More and more people are using videoconferencing tools to work or communicate with their loved ones. The emergence of these tools has been followed by many questions and scandals concerning the privacy and freedom of users.
This talk gives an introduction to Jami, a free/libre, truly distributed, and peer-to-peer solution, and explains why and how it differs from all other existing solutions and how it empowers users.
I have been an attendee of LibrePlanet for some years, and am very excited to be giving my first ever talk at LibrePlanet 2021 this year! You can watch my talk and other speakers' talks live this weekend, from the LibrePlanet 2021 - Live page. Attendance is gratis (no cost), and you can register at https://u.fsf.org/lp21-sp.
Presentation slides:
pdf
(with notes) |
bib
LaTeX sources:
tar.gz |
zip
Video:
webm
You can watch the presentation video below:
I hope to see you around this year's all-online LibrePlanet conference this weekend!
]]>LibrePlanet is a conference about software freedom, happening March 20 through 21, 2021. The event is hosted by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and brings together software developers, law and policy experts, activists, students, and computer users to learn skills, celebrate free software accomplishments, and face upcoming challenges. Newcomers are always welcome, and LibrePlanet 2021 will feature programming for all ages and experience levels.
Originally published on the Free Software Foundation's
sysadmin blog:
My
internship with the FSF tech team and beyond
Hello! I'm Amin Bandali, and this is my second blog post on the FSF sysadmin blog, concluding my internship with the FSF tech team this year.
Throughout my internship with the tech team, I have worked mainly on sysadmin tasks related to setting up and/or managing FSF's GNU/Linux servers. Perhaps most significantly, I set up an instance of the Sourcehut forge software to help evaluate it as a candidate for the upcoming FSF forge. I documented the installation and setup process of Sourcehut's various components in the form of a literate GNU Emacs Org-mode file, where source blocks are interspersed with comments and prose explaining them. One can then progressively evaluate and execute the source blocks, and optionally have their results stored back in the Org file itself to help with documentation/demonstration.
I have also been slowly working on various improvements for the server running www.gnu.org, and will continue doing work on it as a volunteer after the end of my internship. This will hopefully be beneficial to the FSF sysadmins running the server, the GNU webmasters who do webmastering work on gnu.org, and the general public browsing and using gnu.org's pages. Notably, changes included upgrading the server to the latest release of Trisquel GNU/Linux, and revamping and improving the search mechanism for gnu.org's pages. Additionally, there are several other projects that I would like to tackle with the tech team in the near future.
During my internship with the FSF tech team, I picked up a variety of new skills and learned more about a diverse set of topics and tools. This included building and installing a complex piece of software like Sourcehut and debugging issues encountered along the way, using Ansible for managing and deploying infrastructure, as well as learning more about the Exim mail transfer agent used to run FSF and GNU's array of mail servers.
In conclusion to my internship and the year 2020, it's safe to say that this year has been an eventful year for many people, including myself. I started my internship with the tech team back in May, and as a graduate student at the time, I was expecting a reasonable and balanced workload for my work on my thesis over the coming months. However, early on (less than two weeks) into my internship I learned that due to a number of reasons, I needed to complete my master's studies on a two-month deadline. I told the tech team about the issue, asking whether I could take a hiatus to complete my studies without affecting my internship. I am beyond thankful to the tech team and the FSF as whole for being accommodating, and for their flexibility in allowing me to take a leave to focus on writing my thesis and wrapping up my master's studies. I managed to successfully wrap up my studies in that short timeline, and focus on my internship afterwards.
However, all good things must come to an end, and this internship is no exception. I am incredibly grateful to the members of the FSF tech team — Ian, Andrew, Ruben, and Michael — for welcoming me to the team as an intern and mentoring me, answering my many questions, and helping me learn more. It has been an honour and a wonderful experience for me all around working with you all and seeing the energy and passion with which you take on the work and responsibilities that come with being an FSF sysadmin and Web developer. While most of my interactions were with the tech team, I also got to interact with FSF staffers from several other teams during my internship, and I'm thankful for our conversations and the chance to get to know and appreciate the important work you do.
This internship has come to an end, but I will carry with me all of the good memories and the lessons I learned along the way, and will happily to continue working with you as a volunteer. The things I learned have been invaluable and greatly helpful to me, as I transitioned into my new full-time job at Savoir-faire Linux as a Free Software Consultant, where I get to work on various parts and aspects of Jami, a GNU package for universal communication which respects the freedoms and privacy of its users.
I would like to thank the FSF for providing me this excellent opportunity to work alongside the tech team as an intern, and take away so many valuable lessons and great memories.
]]>Interested in interning for the Free Software Foundation? The application period for spring 2021 internships is currently open. Please see https://www.fsf.org/volunteer/internships for more details and information on how to apply!
Originally published on the Free Software Foundation's
sysadmin blog:
Introducing
Amin Bandali, intern with the FSF tech team
Hi there, I'm Amin Bandali, often just bandali
on the
interwebs. I wear a few different hats around GNU as a maintainer,
webmaster, and Savannah hacker, and I'm very excited to be extending
that to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as an intern with the FSF
tech team for spring 2020.
Growing up around parents with backgrounds in computer engineering and programming, it did not take long for me to find an interest in tinkering and playing with computers as a kid, and I first came into contact with GNU/Linux in my teenage years. My first introduction to the world of free software came a few years later, when a friend kindly pointed out to me that what I had vaguely known and referred to as "open source" software is more properly referred to as free software, and helped me see why "open source" misses the point of free software. After learning about and absorbing the ideas and ideals of free software, I have since become a free/libre software activist. As a computer scientist who enjoys studying and hacking on various programs and sometimes writing my own, I have made a point of releasing all I can under strong copyleft licenses, particularly the GNU AGPL license.
My involvement with the GNU Project started in 2016, first as a volunteer webmaster, and later as one of the maintainers of GNUzilla and IceCat late last year. Also around the same time, I led a group of volunteers in organizing and holding EmacsConf 2019 as a completely online conference, using only free software tools, much like the excellent LibrePlanet 2020. I love GNU Emacs, and use it more than any other program. GNU Emacs helps me do a wide variety of tasks such as programming, reading and composing emails, and chatting via IRC.
More closely related to my internship with the FSF tech team, I have been familiarizing myself with various pieces of the GNU Savannah infrastructure with help from veteran Savannah hacker Bob Proulx, gradually learning and picking up tasks helping with the administration and maintenance of Savannah. I am also a member of the Systems Committee of my university's computer science club, overseeing and maintaining a large fleet of GNU/Linux servers for our club members.
For my internship with the Free Software Foundation, I will be working with the FSF tech team on a number of tasks, including helping with the free software forge project, as well as various improvements for gnu.org. I look forward to learning many new things and picking up valuable skills through my internship with the FSF's exceptional tech team, who do so much for the GNU project and the wider free software community.
]]>inspired by the computing page of rms
My librebooted ThinkPad X200 computer is the machine I use the most and where I do most of my computing. I also have the privilege of having access to a fleet of servers through my alma mater's Computer Science Club that I use for some more computationally intensive tasks every now and again.
I have used a wide variety of distros over the years, but I've since found Trisquel to be my favourite and it's put my distro-hopping days behind me. For the kernel, I usually use GNU Linux-libre from jxself's APT repository.
I spend most of my time in GNU Emacs.
TODO: elaborate
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