ParTecs Weblog

Don’t miss this very interesting Telematics Discussion on TFF’s blog (telematics Freedom Foundation). It really worths a reading.

It is not enough for citizens to be told to have certain rights as users of a given telematic service, under a license (such as FLOSS), or a legislations (such a national and global privacy protection regulations) or under a contract with the service provider (such as Terms of Use)
To actually control a telematic service, or a web service, a user needs reasonable practical means to verify the software AND the hardware of all servers which run at and beyond the point of decryption of my communications with such service (or “end servers”).
If such “end servers” interact with other external network services, I will know, by having access to their code of the “end servers”, which services, and all the details and conditions of such interaction.
It is not necessary to control servers and networks in between the client device and the “end servers”, as we can reasonably rely on the power of the latest encryption to totally secure from all software, hardware and cables in between. In fact, the communication could be intercepted in between, but the content could not be read. It could be stopped or deviated in between, but there is free software that, installed on both client and server can prevent that, or at least verify that it did happens.
This is not new. Democracies, for centuries now, have always provided citizens with reasonable means to verify that key constitutional rights were not widely abused. When I go to vote, I do not simply have the right that my vote be secret and fairly counted, but I rely on a good number of other citizens, randomly selected or with conflicting interests, which prevent the bad guys to put in place large scale abuses of such rights. There are also a number of process regulations, such as recounts, that further prevent such frauds.
In fact, in order to provide such concrete control over telematics, server rooms (or “cages”) hosting a such “free” telematic service could be physically managed applying those same (or enhanced) physical security provisions that are currently applied to ballot boxes during an election. In practice, physical access to such servers would be enabled only while a few randomly selected or elected users (or citizens) are physically present. For a more detail explanation on how that may be accomplished, see our proposed hosting requirements for such service
According to this model of telematic service provisioning, anyone could deploy a “free” telematic services, by developing new software or freely installing or extending any publicly available FLOSS software, and running those according to such hosting requirements.
Anyone can do this, without breaching any FLOSS license, by requiring the signing of a copyright assignment, or similar statement, whenever users, or anyone, wants to access the software source code.

For more info on how set up such “free” telematics service, see our draft Service Access Policies at Plonegroups.org

Rufo Guerreschi

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We had Alec Mitchell in the office today, to give us a ZOPE 3 Architecture overview, and to look at some architectural aspects for our upcoming Open Source product, PloneGroups (blog here), which will be probably based on almost-shipping Plone 3. We’ll also be present at the Sorrento Plone Sprint 2007, to follow closely all potential of this new release.

The sprint will be held at the Hotel Mediterraneo Sorrento 4*, organized by Abstract.it.

I am happy to announce that our major GPL Plone Widgets will be now maintained and released on SourceForge.net.

• PloneSkype [download] [stats] [join the devel mailing list]
• PloneInvite [download] [stats] [join the devel mailing list]
• PloneCaptcha [download] [stats] [join the devel mailing list]

We thank everybody helping on these projects. Our other widgets are still available from our website and if interest grows we’ll be happy to maintain another sf.net project page.

We invite all developers willing to help making PloneSkype, PloneInvite and PloneCaptcha really useful products for the community to join efforts. So, if you have the will, don’t hesitate in joining the mailing lists linked above and start getting your hands dirty with python.

We got a new release, with community contributed code 🙂 Thanks indyone, Tristan and Doc Walker.

• Prevent your site from getting spammed;
• Change captcha.net username and password from the ZMI;
• Listen to the captcha code with the audio link…
• more on the way…

We now have a SourceForge Project Page and a Mailing List.

Download and Join us today.

Note: A portuguese (brazil) release is here: www.softwarelivre.org

This is a bug fix version that addresses some problems related to persistence. This tool itself has been well tested from the automated acceptance test suite of our soon to be released PloneConsensus.

Get the latest version here

Let us say that you have an application that includes an e-mail notification system. Essentially when certain application specific events happen, certain users are automatically notified by e-mail about these events. We have such an application and wanted to include the e-mail verification as part of the accepance test-suite.

TestableEmailer is a product that grew out of this need. It is a thin wrapper around MailHost that allows for a “test mode”. When this mode is turned on, rather than sending the mail through the Mail Host the product stores all the information in the email. This can be retrieved later and assertions made against what is expected from that e-mail.

TestableEmailer has been built using Five interfaces and views. It has been tested on Zope 2.8.6.

Get the product here.

We are happy to announce that the PloneSkype-1.0.2 version is released. This is a bug fix version where it doesn’t crash the site if anonymous user creates document(page)( if site allows anonymous users to create the document.)

Download now!.

Ever wanted to allow users to upload more than one file as an attachment to a document, akin to Gmail’s web interface?
The new Multifile Widget will allow you to do that. The picture below should illustrate how the widget works.

The Add file and Remove funtions use AJAX. This makes the widget appear very snappy.

You can download the latest version – here

Bug Description :
If the document is cretaed by anonymous user(If annonymous users have permissions to add document), then it crashes the site as plone doesn’t create member data for anonymous users.

How to patch:

1. Click here to Get the patch file .
2. Just un tar it and put PloneSkypeTool.py into PloneSkype folder.

Thanks to Tomasz for submitting the bug.