tags/googlezack's home pagehttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/tags/google/zack's home pageikiwiki2010-01-15T09:49:50ZPreserving privacy with Google Docshttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2010/01/Preserving_privacy_with_Google_Docs/2010-01-15T09:49:50Z2010-01-15T09:43:58Z
<h1>Eclectic paper: SEcure GOogle DOCumentS</h1>
<p>Two days from an <a href=
"http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html">
important Google announcement</a>, <strong>privacy
awareness</strong> is steadily increasing in the media. The old
mantra that "despotic governments might use your data in unexpected
way" sounds more real than last week, and <a href=
"http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405094/">recent movies</a> ring
different bells in our heads.</p>
<p>That event has prodded me to (finally!) blog about <a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2009/11/Enforcing_type-safe_linking_using_package_dependencies/">
yet another eclectic paper</a> of <a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/research/publications/">mine</a>, co-authored with my old
friend <a href=
"http://www.cs.unibo.it/~gdangelo/index-eng.html">Gabriele
D'Angelo</a>, and which I'm going to present at <a href=
"http://www.acm.org/conferences/sac/sac2010/">the forthcoming ACM
SAC conference</a>. The paper is titled <a href=
"http://upsilon.cc/~zack/research/publications/sac10-coclo.pdf"><strong>Content
Cloaking: Preserving Privacy with Google Docs and other Web
Applications</strong></a> and poses (again) a rather simple
question: why should you trust Google to faithfully store your
<strong><a href="http://docs.google.com">Google Docs</a>
data</strong>? What if roles in the recent Google-vs-China issue
were inverted?</p>
<p>The proposed solution (Content Cloaking) then simply implements
<strong>transparent encryption and decryption</strong> in the
payload which is sent back and forth between your browser and the
Docs backend. Trying to access your Docs data without a decryption
layer and the needed key will then just show garbage, for both
humans and Google harvesters. Of course you lose something, like
full text search which is performed server-side by Google, but at
least you're back in charge again: it is you who decides to which
extent trading-off your privacy with offered services.</p>
<p>A <strong>proof-of-concept implementation</strong> is provided
(and of course is free software!) as an extension for the Firefox
browser, but is now out of date wrt Firefox mainline and was not
really production ready anyhow (let's say it was
master-thesis-implementation-quality ...). Still we, the authors,
stand behind the idea even if we don't have the energy to maintain
a production-quality implementation.</p>
<p>So, <strong>Dear LazyWeb</strong>, If you are interested in the
topic and you've development cycles to spare, please <a href=
"mailto:zack@upsilon.cc">drop me a mail</a> and I'll be happy to
point you to all needed details to resurrect the implementation (or
create one from scratch, which should be pretty easy and quick if
you're familiar with extension development).</p>
adsense powered ikiwikihttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2008/01/adsense_powered_ikiwiki/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2008-01-28T16:57:29Z
<h1>AdSense patch for ikiwiki's embed pluging</h1>
<p>Today I've started playing with <a href=
"https://www.google.com/adsense/">AdSense</a>, mainly to check
whether a typical homepage+blog web site (read: mine) can survive
its hosting costs by the means of this kind of revenue or not.</p>
<p>However I don't want the ads to be visible on all pages, but
only in some of them, mainly the main blog page (which scores high
in search engine results and is also not prone to the risk of
bothering usual readers, thanks to---$DEITY bless them---RSS/Atom
feeds) and some selected pet software project homepages. With
<a href="http://ikiwiki.info">ikiwiki</a> implementing this
appeared trickier than I expected. The main difficulty is of course
the wiki-wide <a href=
"http://ikiwiki.info/plugins/htmlscrubber/">htmlscrubber</a> plugin
which I do not want to switch off because of discussion pages and a
part of my website which is actually used as a world-editable
wiki.</p>
<p>Googling around it seems that there is an
<code>adsense.pm</code> plugin for ikiwiki, but it is not
registered in the ikiwiki <a href=
"http://ikiwiki.info/plugins/">plugins page</a>; as such I was not
particularly envy to try it out. Besides, the right place to add
such a feature to me seems the <a href=
"http://ikiwiki.info/plugins/embed/">embed plugin</a>.</p>
<p>... so I've minimally patched it: see <a href=
"http://bugs.debian.org/462970">Debian bug #462970</a>. If you're
willing to use AdSense with ikiwiki please try out the patch: since
I'm an AdSense newbie it might well be I've underestimated the
possible <code>script</code> snippets it can generate. Post
comments to <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/462970">Debian bug
#462970</a>.</p>
debian in gsochttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2007/03/debian_in_gsoc/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2007-03-15T08:57:59Z
<h1>Google Summer of Code: Debian has been accepted</h1>
<p>Verbatim quote:</p>
<pre><code>Congratulations!
Your organization "Debian" has been accepted in to the Google Summer of
Code(tm) 2007, and you have been marked as a potential Administrator. To
accept this request please visit
http://code.google.com/soc/mentor_step1.html and sign up using your Google
Account.
Thanks
- The Google Open Source Office
</code></pre>
<p>Keep on filling the <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2007">proposal page</a>!</p>
<p>/me going to accept the above request ...</p>
gsoc cfphttp://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2007/03/gsoc_cfp/2009-11-28T12:00:16Z2007-03-10T11:20:15Z
<h1>Google Summer of Code 2007: Call for Proposals</h1>
<p>Yesterday I took some time to reorganize the <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2007">wiki page with Debian
proposals for this year Google Summer of Code</a>. The more
relevant change is that we wont consider <em>for free</em> last
year proposals as this year proposals. The rationale for that is to
avoid proposals staying there just for inertia.</p>
<p>So please take some time to <em>promote</em> last year proposals
to this year proposals (just moving them up in the wiki page) if
you're still interested in them. Eventually we will remove
last-year non-promoted proposals.</p>
<p>Now we also have a <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2007/ProposalTemplate">template
for describing proposals in more details</a> to be used for
avoiding cluttering the main wiki page. You would be very kind with
us if, when promoting last year proposals, you will also take the
time to create and fill the corresponding templates :-).</p>
<p><strong>If you're interested in proposing something for the GSoC
go and add your proposal to the <a href=
"http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2007">wiki page</a>, now it's
the time!</strong></p>
<p><em>PS</em> no, you're right, in this post there isn't much more
than <a href=
"http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/03/msg00008.html">
what I just posted to d-d-a</a>, it's only to augment the SPAM
level...</p>