With my summer internship coming to a close and new days on the horizon, I'd like to share about my experiences as a systems administration intern at the FSF. Over the last twelve weeks, I've been immersed in a professional environment where I've had the opportunity to face the challenges of communication and cooperation across teams, concentrations and organizations. I've worked with a unique group of people in a close-knit office environment, and I've been exposed first-hand to enterprise technologies. Finally, I've been given an incredible opportunity to take part in a long-term project and see the result of nearly 18 months of research and development.

The Free Software Foundation, as an organization founded on activism, fosters and empowers an activist culture of across all domains. In this open atmosphere of free thought, the FSF creates a comfortable environment for its employees and attracts insightful, forward thinkers. It was a pleasure working with such a welcoming and passionate group of individuals.

I came into my internship with the broad focus of cyber-security. Since this is a "focus" that treads across nearly every aspect of technology, though, it was soon narrowed down to two primary goals, the encryption schema of the GNU server cluster and an audit of existing infrastructure. As a member of the systems administration team, I was exposed to a variety of new technologies, including a performant libvirt virtualization stack backed by a solid-state Ceph distributed storage cluster; a partially oxymoronic transparent and air-tight security model; and free software from the BIOS to the user interface. I am lucky to have been involved in the challenge that is building one of the first systems of such high-scale performance and security demands from entirely free software.

Having set ambitious timeline goals early on, I was soon faced with the reality of seemingly unending technical and logistical challenges to overcome: one of the surprises I faced in my internship was how easily time can slip away, whether through unforeseen difficulties or through sunk-cost expenditure. While struggling to make progress is frustrating, this has taught me an important lesson in project planning and management, and I am privileged to have seen the project's finale in deployment.

During my time here, I helped in the design of the GNU server stack's encryption schema, and I wrote tools to benchmark the performance of this system. I also contributed to free software security projects, and then used these tools to conduct an audit of deployed FSF services.

I would like to give a special thanks to Ruben, Ian, and Andrew for having taken their time over the past three months to act as mentors for no benefit but my own; their technical expertise and dedication to the FSF is thoroughly appreciated.

Going forward, I will be in Boston studying computer science and cyber-operations at Northeastern University. If you want to contact me, you can find me on freenode as acabey, or if you prefer email I can be reached at acabey@gnu.org with GPG key fingerprint A320 41B2 D62F 34DB 505F 84DF A843 2CD3 6C24 E504.

QupZilla, currently at version 2.1.2, is a free software Web browser using the new and very fast QtWebEngine browser. It aims to be a lightweight Web browser available through all major platforms. This project was originally started only for educational purposes by a lone developer, David Rosca, and since then, QupZilla has grown into a feature-rich browser. QupZilla has all of the standard functions you expect from a Web browser. It includes bookmarks, history (including a sidebar view), and tabs. Above that, it has ad-blocking enabled by default with a built-in plugin. Over time, this one-man project has grown to include numerous contributors.

What was the educational purpose that QupZilla was started for?

When I started working on QupZilla (before it actually had a name), I had no prior experience with programming desktop applications. In fact, my only experience with programming involved simple websites written in PHP. I decided to learn how to write desktop apps, and with that, I needed some project to work on. At that time, I had some performance issues with GNU/Linux Web browsers, so I decided to try creating my own browser.

I didn't have much hopes for it to take off, so I didn't even think much about its name. Users sometimes wonder what does the QupZilla name mean, and if it has some association with Mozilla. The truth is, my imagination for these things is not great, so I just made a bizarre combination of Qt (qute) and zilla. Maybe it would be better if I had come up with different name, but it's too late now.

How are people using QupZilla?

Even though QupZilla uses a modern rendering engine and displays most of the pages correctly, there are of course compatibility issues, whether it's incompatibility with the specific site (changing User-Agent may help in this case) or a problem on the QupZilla side. While there are users that use QupZilla as their primary browser, I myself see its potential as a secondary browser due to its speed. But I can't really tell how people are using it, because there is no tracking/telemetry or anything like that in QupZilla. I don't like any form of spying on users, and I'm sure QupZilla's users feel the same about it. Since the beginning, some GNU/Linux distributions decided to ship QupZilla as their default Web browser. Chances are, there are users reading this article from QupZilla without actually knowing about it.

What features do you think really sets QupZilla apart from other browsers?

One thing that makes QupZilla appealing for GNU/Linux users is that it is based on Qt framework and thus integrates very well in Qt desktops, unlike other "big" browsers that all are based on GTK. Another feature, which is now being discussed by other big browsers but wasn't the case in the last few years, is an advertisement blocker included and enabled by default. This makes the Web pages clean, but most importantly speeds up loading noticeably. With regards to the ability to customize the browser to each user's tastes, it provides a lot of options in preferences. I won't be naming them here, but users should discover them for themselves. It also supports extensions, although it doesn't have compatibility with extensions from other browsers. Despite that, there are very useful extensions available, including the AutoScroll plugin, a TabManager plugin allowing you to effectively move tabs to the side, and also the very popular GreaseMonkey plugin for userscripts.

Why did you choose the GPLv3 as QupZilla's license?

Well, I'm not really experienced in legal stuff. I simply chose GPLv3 because of its popularity, and it perfectly suiting my needs. It is important for me that it enforces copyleft, by giving all users the freedom to redistribute and change the software.

How can users (technical or otherwise) help contribute to QupZilla?

The first thing is, naturally, by contributing code, but of course the majority of QupZilla users are non-technical. As with other projects, users can help by reporting bugs and cooperate in the bug reports. Some bugs are not easily reproduced, so being able to communicate with the reporter is required to resolve them. With reporting bugs comes hand-in-hand also requesting new features or proposing new ideas. Another thing is contributing to the graphical side of the browser, be it icons, themes or even a completely new concept of some UI part. There was a contest for the new QupZilla logo some time ago, where quite a lot of users proposed their ideas, and the final logo came out really great. But that was just a logo, there are other parts that could be improved, including internal pages like speed dial. On the documentation side, it's not great either, and translations are always appreciated. There is a wiki with some info scattered around, some of it being outdated. So there is always much to do even for users who can't contribute code. And finally, users can also donate money.

What's the next big thing for QupZilla?

The next big thing is definitely a recently-announced move under the KDE project. QupZilla will become part if the KDE project and replace Konqueror as a web browser there. I already mentioned that a better name would help the project, and this transition is a perfect opportunity to change it. Search for a new name is currently ongoing, and I hope this time we will pick a great one. Feature-wise, I wouldn't say there is going to be something really big, unless something radically changes in the near future.

I plan to continuously work on QupZilla and move it forward, but instead of having some big milestone, I'll rather call it an evolution. Of course there will be new features, for example upcoming version 2.3 to be released in following months will have a session manager, an often-requested feature from users.

Enjoy this interview? Check out our previous entry in this series, featuring Jonathan Thomas of the OpenShot Video Editor.

QupZilla logo and Maintainer images are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

Every week free software activists from around the world come together in #fsf on irc.freenode.org to help improve the Free Software Directory. This blog recaps the work we accomplished at the Friday, August 11th, 2017 meeting.

This week we improved tens of packages, with some chosen based on the theme of encryption software, and others chosen because they had simply been waiting long enough. It wasn't all work, though, and there were wide ranging topics of conversation. adfeno discussed a limitation of federation, specifically that in order work for it to work, you need many servers with consistent uptime. We also had some first time attendees to the Directory meeting, Elon_Satoshi and kembrek, who we hope to see back next week.

Elon_Satoshi told us about their efforts to free game software. They were able to convince the developer to switch to a license that required the sharing of source code, but they weren't able to get the developer to use a free software license. The Directory meetings are always a great place to come to share insights, strategies, and programs for advancing free software.

If you would like to help update the Directory, meet with us every Friday in #fsf on irc.freenode.org from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC).

As an intern, you work closely with FSF staff members in your area of interest, such as campaigns and community organizing, systems and network administration, GNU Project support, or Web development.

We're seeking interns for two teams at the FSF:

• Tech team: Common tech team intern projects include writing free software, security auditing, interacting with one or more of our servers, and researching new technology that the FSF is interested in using. Past interns created HUBAngl, which we use for easy video streaming of our conferences, made progress in porting LibreJS to WebExtensions, pen-tested our network, and researched the Ceph distributed object storage system, which we are now rolling out as our latest infrastructure upgrade. However, we're also eager to hear what you would like to work on, because that can give us new ideas and open new doors. This position may work in our Boston office or remotely.

• Campaigns team: This round, we'd love to find an intern who is adept at design and/or illustration to redo key handouts and guides. These items will make a great addition to your portfolio, and will be a huge help in our efforts to publicize our campaigns. This position is in our Boston office.

You can read more about our requirements for interns here, and see past intern projects here.

How to apply

Send a letter of interest and resume with two references by email to hiring@fsf.org. Make sure that your materials are in free software friendly formats (PDF and plain text work well), and include "Internship" in your subject line. If you can, please include links to sites you've made (personal blogs are okay!), designs or code you've done, and relevant writing. Please include these as URLs, though email attachments in free formats are acceptable, too.

Please direct any questions about the program to hiring@fsf.org.

(as of July 25, 2017):

• acct-6.6.4
• auctex-11.91
• binutils-2.29
• cgicc-3.2.19
• freeipmi-1.5.6
• gama-1.19
• gcc-6.4.0
• gnucash-2.6.17
• gnuhealth-3.2.1
• gnutls-3.5.14
• grep-3.1
• guile-cv-0.1.5
• libgcrypt-1.8.0
• libidn2-2.0.3
• linux-libre-4.12.3-gnu
• moe-1.9
• nano-2.8.6
• parallel-20170722
• screen-4.6.1
• tramp-2.3.2
• unifont-10.0.05

For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu.

To download: nearly all GNU software is available from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors from https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. You can use the URL https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

This month, we welcome Assaf Gordon as the new maintainer of GNU Time.

A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance: please see https://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html.

If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

As always, please feel free to write to us at maintainers@gnu.org with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.