Open Source

Fourteen new GNU releases in the last month (as of September 30, 2024):

Back in 2010, Ciaran
Gultnieks created F-Droid to bring free software to Android. It has since
grown to have many contributors from around the world, millions of users,
and its own legal entity with an esteemed Board of
Directors. F-Droid has
become its own thing bigger than any one of the contributors. We have just
taken of the last key steps to cementing that: the f-droid.org and related
domain names have been migrated to processes that are community-controlled
with oversight from the Board of Directors. We thank CiaranG for all his
work maintaining the domains over the years.

This also eliminates a bottleneck of configuration changes. We have a
Systems Adminstration
Team
for secure and shared maintenance of our key infrastructure. Thanks to
funding from Open Tech Fund (OTF), the Systems
Adminstration Team set to work making the official F-Droid domains be as
secure as possible. We have moved our DNS servers for our official domain
f-droid.org. This change helps improve our “bus
factor”, which means we are less
dependent on a single person to keep the project running smoothly.

We’ve used this opporunity to roll out additional DNS secuity
measures. Since the jabber.ru
incident happened, it seems to
us that both migrating to more trustworthy hosting providers and increasing
DNS security is more important than ever.

We started by adding a Certification Authority
Authorization
DNS record. A CAA record is a way for website owners to specify which
companies may issue security certificates for their website. This should
help us to detect network attacks like the one against
jabber.ru. Additionally we have started monitoring certificates of our
domain names in
certificate transparency
logs. This will
hopefully help us detect if someone tries to issue a malicious certificate
in our name. These measures should significantly, raise the bar for
man-in-the-middle attacks on our transport encryption.

Over the years, we have received many requests to enable
DNSSEC
for improved security. Rightfully so. Now that we have a new DNS provider,
we have successfully rolled it out.

We’ve also recently finished moving our email server, a task that was long
overdue. F-Droids new email provider now implements all the technical nitty
gritties like SPF, DKIM, DMARC, which are ever more important since big
E-Mail providers started blocking mails from E-Mail servers without those
features.

The Open Source AI Definition first Release Candidate has been published and collaboration continues online. Read what changes have been made, what to do next and how to get involved.

In 1999, some members from the MMC Association decided to split and create SD Association. But nobody seems to exactly know why. ↫ sdomi’s webpage I don’t even know how to summarise any of this research, because it’s not only a lot of information, it’s also deeply bureaucratic and boring – it takes a certain kind of person to enjoy this sort of stuff, and I happen to fit the bill. This is a great read.