So, apparently, I've been a little lazy with respect to my blog. It's not as though I haven't been busy though. Anyway, I'm about to go on a little vacation so I thought I'd bundle up a little news...

1) The Koumbit project is really picking up steam now even if the current website still really sucks. A whole series of contracts have come through and we have half a dozen geeks working near-fulltime at the moment. We are working on a new site too. It'll be a multilingual Drupal site using the internationalisation (i18n) module. It had been a long time since I had tried the i18n module... things are coming together nicely... except that it still requires patches to the core files. WTF!? I don't get why the Drupal community hasn't rallied around this module. In my circles, the innaquate management of multilingual content is the most prominently recognised limitation remaining with Drupal. Anyway, Koumbit is going strong and the contrats are pilling up. It is just a matter of time before we upgrade our infrastructure from a one-server to a four-server configuration and get in touch with the other principal players in the Drupal sphere to figure out how we can all collaborate more effectively.

2) We have started work on a voting module for Drupal that will enable groups to take decisions via the web and evaluate the representativity/validity of these decisions. I have been talking about this idea for years now and it is finally getting underway. While we are still at a very preliminary stage, i.e. we have almost no code to speak of, the idea has matured through a series of discussions and planning exercises. You can find out (a little) more about this project at voting.gnuvernment.org. The coolest thing is that Koumbit now has some $$ to reinvest into R&D and this project is likely to get a piece of the pie.

3) And finally I'll mention that I have been working on tons of Drupal sites even if I haven't yet listed any of the recent ones in the "websites section" of my blog. Probably the proudest moment recently was successfully upgrading a site from Drupal 4.2 to 4.6. This is pretty key as a whole bunch of my/our older clients are going to be needing this very soon... especially with the recent security holes found in Drupal and the fact that the older versions are no longer being supported.

Anyway, that's all for now... not because I don't have more news to share... I just need to get some real work done before I leave. :-)

The Tactical Technology Collective's aim is to advance the use of new technologies as a tactical tool for civil-society in developing and transition countries. We are a not-for-profit stichting (foundation) based in Amsterdam.

Drupal 4.6 was released yesterday and anybody interested in "podcasting" will be happy to note that one of the new features that it provides is native support for RSS 2.0. In other words, the first file that is attached to nodes will be referenced in enclosures included in any/all relevant RSS feeds that are generated.

Another interesting development for the podcasting community is that there has also been a "CreativeCommons" module developed for Drupal recently. While this is still in the CVS tree, I have tried it out and it totally rocks.

Lastly, I'll mention that a new "media" module makes it easy to setup websites that allow users to build and then stream playlists based on uploaded content.

I can't help imagine some of the alternative broadcasting platforms that are made possible by these improvements alone, not to mention all of the other great community-building modules that already exist for Drupal.

Two of the original top three items on my "Drupal Wishlist" have already been tackled by the Drupal community. I can't believe it. Wow!

This time the big news is the release of a Creative Commons module for Drupal. Sure, there may be a few small issues to iron out but I love it! From the module page...

The Creative Commons module allows users to select and assign a Creative Commons license to a node and any attached content. Additionally, the site admin can select a license to assign to the entire site.


This module uses the Creative Commons api (api.creativecommons.org) and can update when new Creative Commons licenses are available (for example, the more recent sampling licenses). Admins can restrict the licenses available to users, as well as require specific metadata be included.

Thanks go out to digibike and whoever else may have helped with this.

Monday, February 21st, 2005 from 7:00 P.M. to 8:30 P.M.

What is Free Software? Open Source? It’s email, internet, word processing, spreadsheets, website design, graphic manipulation, presentations, audio, video, operating systems…you can get Free Software for all of these applications. Why don’t you try it? This interactive seminar will introduce the hows and whys, and give a brief overview of some of the most popular free software available for your computer. Presented jointly by FACIL-pour l'appropriation collective de l'information libre, and Atwater Library and Computer Centre.

(First, if you don't know anything about Koumbit, you should read this and then check out the Koumbit wiki.)

So the question is... Do you think there is a big need in the non-profit/community sector for affordable and decentralised accounting infrastructure? Do you know people or organisation that could benefit from this?

Some people at Koumbit are thinking of providing just that by installing SQL-Ledger and providing access to server-based accounting infrastructure for small distributed organisations.

It's essentially like encrypted Hotmail. From their site...

"Hushmail is a Web-based e-mail service that lets you send and receive email in total security. Hushmail messages, and their attachments, are encrypted using Open PGP standard algorithms. These algorithms, combined with Hushmail's unique key management system, offer users unrivalled levels of security. Hushmail's security is end-to-end; messages are encrypted before leaving the sender's computer and remain encrypted until after they arrive on the recipient's machine, where the contents are automatically decrypted.
Hushmail's encryption works automatically, transparently and seamlessly, requiring no specialized computer skills or knowledge.

From their site....

CryptoMail.org devotes its energy to promote the freedom of private communications. By developing and distributing an end-to-end secure Email system under the GNU General Public License, we hope to inspire the most talented programmers around the world to help create a secure environment for people to exchange information over the Internet.

Objectives

The main objective of CryptoMail.org is to provide a community where programmers who share our vision, give the most accessible, reliable, and secure communications tools to people. We will focus on developing, distributing, maintaining and serving the most secure end-to-end Email system for the Internet community. We want everyone to access secure Email services, thus we develop an Email system that allows people to use or host the system on almost any computer and platform. We provide this secure Email system by ensuring two key security features:

Security at the Transport Level

All communications between the user and the server are done by a way of an encrypted session. This discourages eavesdroppers at the network layer.

End-to-End Message Security

Exchange of messages within our Email system employs a message layer encryption using a hybrid symmetric and public/private key scheme. This effectively prevents anyone from reading the contents of the message except the intended recipient.

Here's an annoucement worthy of being included in my blog.

EFF Joins Forces with Tor Software Project -

Civil Liberties Group to Support Development of Anonymous Internet Communications System

A quote from Slashdot:

"[Tor] also allows you to install Tor-aware apps, such as an HTTP proxy (for private browsing), or maybe private P2P? Unlike Freenet, it doesn't use massive encryption (as far as I can tell) and relies more on something called onion routing to randomly bounce requests between other Tor proxies, thus obfuscating the IP of the original client. So it allows you to browse regular Internet sites! Maybe it should be considered more of an 'open-source' Anonymizer?"


Tor sounds neat to me, and I'm a big fan of the EFF, so I couldn't help but installing it.

However, I'd love to get some feedback from a few security specialists. Is Tor the right direction for EFF to take or is it "just another tool"? What is the most distinguishing feature of Tor?

Boot-from-CD linux distributions and USB memory sticks ("thumbdrives") are a powerful combination. They have already made possible a whole range of applications that could only be imagined before. The next step is for all the software on the CDs to be incorporated into bootable thumbdrives and for these devices to be preconfigured to interface with a series of secure web-based services.