It’s now been 2000 days since I wrote my first blog post. Wow. That also means Karianne and I have been together for about the same time. Time sure flies when you are having a good time.
Right now, I am in Brazil again, visiting Globo.com. On my trip here, I first went to Porto Alegre, for FISL. There, unsurprisingly, I met a bunch of people I already know, like Bdale Garbee, Elizabeth Garbee, Gustavo Noronha, Knut Yrvin, Otavio Salvador and a bunch more. I also met some people I had no idea would be there, like Dan Bernstein, who was presenting his work on DNSCurve.
DNSCurve is a quite interesting approach to DNS security. It uses elliptic curve crypto, which is faster than the more traditional RSA based public key encryption. It is a bit of a shame it probably won’t ever make it through the IETF process. The reason is it abuses the name field of the name server to encode a public key.
Other interesting people I met was Jacob Applebaum (whose talk I fell asleep in, since I had been up for far too long the night before, my apologies) and a lot of the Globo.com crowd.
FISL isn’t just a big free software event, it’s turning into a big event in general. The Brazilian president was there, big banks (Caixa and Banco do Brasil) and media companies (Globo) are exhibiting and it looks like free software is becoming mainstream. Yay.