Notices by Stéphane Bortzmeyer (bortzmeyer@mastodon.gougere.fr)

Now, a #UX talk about the history of hand controls for computers (trackballs, mice, etc) like the old "rollkugel" of 1966.

And how to plug them in modern computers.

#FOSDEM

A lot of nice mouses pictures in this talk at #fosdem
https://mouses.info/

#mousesAreCuterThanCats

Good morning, Brussels! Second day of #FOSDEM https://fosdem.org/2025/

Today, retrocomputing for me.

Very interesting chat with the people of QubesOS. (I was not aware of what happened with this project after Joanna Rutkowska left).
I like the fact they emphasizes "reasonable security" ("perfect security is when the computer is turned off"), security which still allows people to do stuff with computers.
And they also pay a lot of attention to #UX (a security product without concern for UX won'be used).

#FOSDEM

And we agreed to rant against NIS 2 and its bureaucratic approach to security.

#FOSDEM

Another interesting project: Genode. I was not even aware of it, despite its age. (The great thing about #FOSDEM is that you discover that you know nothing, #JohnSnow.)

Genode is a kernel written from scratch, which can run Linux drivers in headspace (to support a lot of hardware) and run unmodified applications with limited privileges (for instance a Firefox without write access to storage).

In a very retrocomputing style, we start with a talk about breaking passwords typed in a japanese script in an old video game.

(With Rust)

#FOSDEM

"This [decoding] program is very important if you want to play Dragon Quest in japanese."

#FOSDEM

"Bildschirmtext - Reeenacting an ancient communication system using Javascript and Common Lisp" by Hans Hübner
(for the French people: Bildschirmtext ~= MInitel)

#FOSDEM

Bildschirmtext was invented the same year as the DNS :-)

It as not a complete terminal, it required a TV screen. Network capacity was asymmetrical (you were a consumer, not a producer)

Content creators needed to use a special keyboard.

Software was not free and seems lost.

The speaker started with a XML description of the keyboard.("If you don't know XML, it's a bit like JSON")

#FOSDEM

SVG picture of the keyboard produced from the XML description through a XSLT program…

Font created by taking screenshots of the screen… (ChatGPT gave a good way to do that)

#FOSDEM

"I wanted to bring the official specification of Bildschirmtext to show you but I couldn't, it's too heavy."

#FOSDEM

CommonLisp was used for the server part of the reconstruction.

https://btx.vaxbusters.org/
(home page of the CCC in 1987)

#FOSDEM

Many thanks to @hanshuebner

#FOSDEM

"The Growing Body of Proprietary Infrastructure for FOSS Development: Repeating Bad History" Karen Sandler and Benver Gingerich (Bradley M. Kuhn is sick, which is trendy)

Survey of the room ("but we still love you if you rise your hand"): who uses Github? Teams? Slack? Confluence? Jira? All these proprietary tools are massively used to develop free software.

#FOSDEM

Remembrance of the Sourceforge debacle.

#FOSDEM

"Github is free. Free as in free cocaine."

#FOSDEM

Cours #SPF / #DKIM / #DMARC. Je leur raconte quoi de joli ?

@aral @noybeu Isn't it a bad advice? If you delete your account, a bad guy could register an account with the same identifier, and use (and waste) your reputation.

Next, you learn that routers are subterranean ("routeurs souterrains" in french).

#BGP