Re: Concrete ideas for the December-March OPW?

[Tobias Mueller <muelli cryptobitch de>]

Hi.

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 06:17:21PM -0600, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> The Outreach Program for Women is looking for project proposals for its
> next round of participation:
>
> https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram/2014/DecemberMarch
Hm.
https://wiki.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen writes:
"The upcoming round will have an application deadline on October 22, 2014."

However, we have some money and we could fund interns.
Alternatively, I'd like to sponsor a hackfest for people to come together and to 
work on actionable items.
So having a list of small, self contained projects is a good start to kick 
off the organisation of such a hackfest.

> This would be a good time to think of self-contained projects for the
> Privacy campaign.
There are a few ideas here: https://wiki.gnome.org/Foundation/PrivacyCampaign2013

One of mine is to implement something that disables the USB ports.
Sounds like a silly idea, but USB creates a large attack surface and we
have seen many malicious devices.  And, FWIW, I have investigated USB security 
myself¹ and think it's worthwhile to limit its availability ;-)

Anyway, we might only want to disable USB while the lockscreen is on
and re-enable when the lockscreen has been unlocked.
A first step towards this goal might be to write a tiny program that does
nothing else but disable USB while it's running and re-enable when it is 
exiting. Then, one could write an application with a toggle button that
toggles the availabilty of the USB. Finally, one can think of integrating that 
with the lockscreen.



Other ideas I have, as I have posted on 
<https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeWomen/OutreachProgram/2014/DecemberMarch>, 
revolve around making OpenPGP keysigning work much better than it does today.  
There is already a prototypical implementation thanks to the ingenious Andrei 
who was a GSoC student in the last round.  I am preparing an initial release 
but I think I need some help as I've never done a release.

Cheers,
  Tobi

1: http://blogs.gnome.org/muelli/2010/07/practicum-status-update-week-7/