OPW Application Template

Name: Ulrike U

Email Address: u [AT] 451f [DOT] org

IRC Nick: MoC

Location: France

Education completed or in progress (i.e., university, major/concentration, degree level, and graduation year): completed a postgraduate degree (DEA) in Arts at Université Paris 8 in 2005. Accomplished Python Interactive Programming course of Rice University Houston/Texas through Coursera in 2014.

How did you hear about this program?: Debian-women mailinglist (during the previous round in february 2014. That is when i decided that i wanted to particpate in the next OPW round if Debian participates.)

Please describe your experience with Debian as a user and as a contributor (Please include the information about the required contribution you made to the project you are interested in here): I use Debian since 2004 and have always been a power user. However, it took me 10 years to make my first contribution to Debian by backporting pidgin-otr. Since then, I worked on several other packages (mainly as contributions to Tails and co-founded the Debian Anonymity Tools Packaging Team. I am not a DM and still have a lot to learn. I made my first bug report to Debian this year and also contributed to the Debian security tracker website.

As a required contribution more closely related to AppArmor, i tried to understand and to find a solution to #702030.

Also see contributors.debian.org.

Please describe your experience with any other FOSS projects as a user and as a contributor: I use FOSS on a daily basis. Presently I contribute to the Tails project, mainly through Debian packaging as well as through translating. Before this, my main focus with FOSS was to provide translations (mostly for anonymity and privacy software). As a result of my work as a freelancer, I published several official Wordpress plugins under GNU/GPL.

Please describe any relevant projects that you have worked on previously and what knowledge you gained from working on them:

What project(s) are you interested in (these can be in the same or different organizations)?: Debian (AppArmor)

Who is a possible mentor for the project you are most interested in?: Holger Levsen, intrigeri

Please describe the details and the timeline of the work you plan to accomplish on the project you are most interested in (discuss these first with the mentor of the project): At first will need to get familiar with the inner workings of AppArmor. Thus, I'll need a testing environment in which I can run AppArmor and read logfiles as well as documentation. If necessary, I could report bugs concerning these profiles. Then i will be able to write documentation on best practices how to ship an AppArmor profile and how to get in contact with the AppArmor Debian Team. I shall work on the Debian BTS in order to add relevant tags to bugs. Package maintainers who ship AppArmor profiles need to have access to these ressources and need to know where to ask questions. This should help that AppArmor could be automatically or more easily activated in Debian in the future, in order to provide a more secure environment to users who are not familiar with the command line.

Then I'd try to fix #702030 in order to make it easier for a simple user to use an LSM.

At a later point during the 3 months, i shall concentrate on making AppArmor profiles of widely used desktop applications work (for example Icedove, Iceweasel). These provide a large attack surface. These profiles and modifications to existing profiles should get integrated upstream.

Will you have any other time commitments, such as school work, another job, planned vacation, etc., between December 10, 2014 and March 10, 2015?: I work as a freelancer in web development. If my application for OPW gets accepted i will not accept any new projects and merely continue to maintain my clients' servers and websites. That should take up maximum 8 hours a week, which shall be worked on on weekends only. Other than that, I am available full time for OPW.

Background: something about yourself: technical skills, experience, etc. Who are you?: I studied Photography, then switched to 3D programming, because I wanted to get more involved with code. That's how i got basic C programming lessons for a year. But most of my technical skills are self taught or picked up in workshops and at conferences. That is also why i have always felt a little bit like an impostor, with no shiny degree even remotely related to computers at hand.

I've been working as a frontend web developer since 2005. For my work i mostly use templating languages such as Smarty and Django templates, as well as PHP and Javascript.

I have gained command line, bash scripting and server administration skills mostly through reading documentation and through workshops in hacklabs. I run my own web, mail, jabber and other servers as well as a small Tor relay.

Participating in the Tails project has been equally empowering and rewarding, as it is a very well documented Debian derivative, with a community which is very welcoming.

Why Debian? Why are you choosing Debian? What attracts you about Debian? : I have been using Debian for many years, after trying other distributions. What i like about Debian is that it is non-commercial, stable and slow but open to improvements. It is easy to use, fairly secure out-of-the-box and well documented. There is simply no other distribution which is comparable to it. I'd be happy to contribute more and OPW would help me free enough time to dive deeper into contributing to Debian and to make these contributions strong and permanent.

Are you applying for other projects in OPW? Note that letting us know about this does not impact your chances of acceptance or rejection with us; we ask this because it helps us to resolve deduplications wherein an applicant is accepted for multiple projects.: No, I am not applying for other projects.