Saturday, 17 August was a day that saw groundbreaking new work revealed at DebConf13 and may have been a watershed moment in the emergence of WebRTC for the free software community.
Fabian Gr nbichler, Daniel Pocock, Catalin Constantin Usurelu, Emil Ivov, Yana Stamcheva Advancing the use of One Time Passwords with free software Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student Fabian Gr nbichler has spent the summer enhancing oath-toolkit and dynalogin to support a more diverse range of One Time Password schemes. dynalogin's original 1.0 release supports vanilla HOTP and TOTP authentication schemes. Fabian's work has extended the framework to support the more generic and powerful OCRA approach. To find out about all the benefits this brings, I would strongly encourage you to review his slides and video presentation, with a demo where it is explained thoroughly. While there are existing hardware tokens that support HOTP and TOTP using this open algorithm (Gooze has been kind enough to donate some which were on display), the mutual challenge-response schemes are yet to be widely supported in hardware and this means that Fabian's work is now at the cutting edge of development in this area. WebRTC: premium voice/video chat in modern browsers, no plugin required Another member of Debian's GSoC program, Catalin Constantin Usurelu helped organise and run one of the must-see sessions of DebConf13 (video available). In a demonstration that had all the hallmarks of a magic show, Catalin and I took random members of the audience and invited them to wave a magic wand over their web browsers and effortlessly turn them into Skype-busting softphones. As the grand finale, we took Wookey's blog and showed him how to add a WebRTC "call-me" page in less than 20 seconds, less time than it takes to hand over all your private data to the registration process of those rather uncomfortable alternatives. Anybody else seeking to duplicate this effort is encourage to review options like Drucall for Drupal or just directly use JsSIP Jitsi and the Jitsi Video-bridge The grand-finale of the DebConf13 real-time communications track was our guest speaker, Emil Ivov, founder of the Jitsi softphone project. Jitsi itself has recently been accepted into Debian and is easier than ever before to install and use. Emil's talk (video and slides available) went into some detail about the cutting edge development activities of his team, particularly the new Jitsi Video bridge Subsequent to the talk, we had some out-of-bands discussion about ways to potentially integrate Jitsi Video bridge with the open source dvswitch system used to produce streams and recordings from free software events such as DebConf and FOSDEM. It is hoped that this will provide an additional option for remote participation at free software events of all sizes. Upcoming events Emil and I have been invited to participate in the WebRTC Conference Paris 2013 in December. This will be an excellent opportunity to have further discussion about progress with WebRTC and do more to raise the compelling case for premium quality free software to meet the demanding needs of modern business communications. There are a series of talks for both technical and business-oriented audiences.

I've been lucky enough to be involved in a team mentoring two students contributing to Debian under the Google Summer of Code program this year. Both students have demonstrated a lot of enthusiasm and talent and have just passed their mid-term evaluations. Students often provide a fresh insight to projects. Their potential is not to be underestimated: one diligent student, Thomas Herndon from UMass Amherst recently came to fame exposing fundamental spreadsheet errors in calculations used to back the IMF case for austerity. Herndon was lucky to receive a copy of the spreadsheet (the source was not published openly as in free software): that is one problem that GSoC students don't have to wrestle with. Both of our GSoC students have exposed previously unknown issues in the code they are working on: Fabian discovered API differences in GnuTLS caused problems for dynalogin, while Catalin helped discover that some headers from reSIProcate are susceptible to ABI-breaking behavior dependending on the combination of CPPFLAGS. DebConf this month Both students are going to discuss some of their work on 17 August at DebConf - they are particularly keen to meet with other members of the Debian community throughout the week and find out how their work can best be leveraged by the community and Debian's wider userbase (and derivatives). Fabian Gr nbichler : one time passwords Fabian's project has been working on oath-toolkit and dynalogin. These are excellent projects, helping us realise new opportunities to use tokens for various types of authentication exchanges, such as login. Part of his project involves implementing the recently formalized IETF RFC 6287 for OCRA in a practical way that developers can use. Catalin Usurelu : real-time communications Catalin's project involves working with a variety of open source communications applications to make them work well together on a Debian system. One piece of work he is just completing provides a turn-key SIP conferencing solution that could replace Mumble (which attracted quite some controversy in the previous Debian release cycle) Community development These are all community projects and any feedback from users and other developers is always very welcome. For example, if you have time to test or provide suggestions, please feel free to jump in on the mailing lists we use for these projects.