New traceability features planned

Posted on Friday 1 April 2011, at 00:56 UTC

After a mere month, our donation campaign has been successful: our target of 4000 EUR has been reached.

It's time for us to use the money. Considering the new laws discussed during the fundraiser, we have decided to use it to upgrade our architecture to fit the requirements of the LOPPSI 2 French law (Loi d'orientation et de programmation pour la performance de la sécurité intérieure).

According to our usual transparency policy, here is a selection of the most useful information about this project.

In order to ensure a better traceability of exchanges between our servers and the rest of the world, we will setup a Single Sign-on solution. Both users and visitors shall now identify themselves before they reach hosted content and services.

Thus, when a visitor wants to reach http://www.vhffs.org/, he will be immediately redirected to an authentication portal, allowing him to login or subscribe if needed. He will then be redirected back to http://www.vhffs.org/ and will be able to keep surfing on all websites hosted by TuxFamily as if nothing had happened. This way, we'll have all the required information on our side to know who made what and when, thus helping to make the Internet a safer and saner place.

Similar systems will be set up gradually on other services: download repositories, Subversion/Git/Mercurial, IRC/Jabber, POP/IMAP/Webmail.

As we know that learning yet another complicated password is tiresome and should not be part of a 21th century I.T., your login will be associated to a simple four digits PIN code, much easier to learn and type (e.g.: you can use your birth date).

Other benefit: even if you forget your PIN code, our authentication portal will include a recovery feature that will send the precious back to you through the mean of your choice without having to create and learn a new PIN code. From a technical point of view, the internal storage will be made as plain text.

This system will later be used to provide more detailed statistics about your websites. We will of course make elements used to constitute those detailed statistics available to court services as needed.

As usual, the implementation will be based on existing solutions. In this particular case, we have been seduced by the software proposal of a society based in Armonk, New York. While the cost of these solutions takes an important part of the amount dedicated to this operation, we have been seduced by our negotiators' honesty and by the relevancy of their solutions.

Note that other internal projects are being considered to match the quite rousing objective of "catching in real time data as they are displayed on the computer screen or as they are input during a characters entry" that can be found in the LOPPSI law text.

However, for the moment, we must work to set up all this, and we do not exclude that the initial amount may be insufficient. Thus, keep sending money to support us in this phase of change, essential for us to remain an independant AND modern hoster.

Edit: Of course it was our yearly April fool joke ;-)