Triggered

Somebody pointed me to a research article about how many app developers fail to comply with the GDPR and data requests in general.

The sender suggested that I could use it in marketing for Nextcloud.

I appreciate such help, obviously, and often such articles are interesting. This one - I read it for a while but honestly, while I think it is good this is researched and attention is paid for it, I neither find the results very surprising NOR that horrible.

What, a privacy advocate NOT deeply upset at bad privacy practices?

Sir, yes, sir. You see, while the letter of the law is important, I think that intentions also are extremely important. Let me explain.

Not all GDPR violations are made equal

If you or your small business develops an app or runs a website to sell a product and you simply and honestly try to do a decent job while being a decent person, the GDPR is a big burden. Yes, the GDPR is good, giving people important rights. But if you run a mailing list on your local pottery sales website, with no intention other than to inform your prospective customers and followers of what you're up to, it can be a burden to have people send you GDPR takedown and 'delete me' requests instead of just having them, you know - unsubscribe via the link under your newsletter!

The goal of the GDPR, and of my personal privacy concerns, isn't at all related to such a business. If anything, their additional hardship (and we at Nextcloud have this issue too) is at best a by product of the goal. That byproduct isn't all bad - we all make mistakes, and being more aware of privacy is good, even for small businesses. The GDPR has forced many small businesses to re-think how they deal with private data, and that isn't a bad thing at all. But it isn't the main benefit or goal of the GDPR in my eyes. There are big businesses who totally COULD do better but never bothered, and now the GDPR forces them to get their act together. While that's a real good thing, even THAT is not, in my opinion, what the GDPR is about.

Privacy violation as a business

You see, there are businesses who don't violate privacy of people by accident. Or even because it is convenient. There are businesses who do it as their core business model. You know who I'm talking about - Facebook, Google. To a lesser but still serious degree - Microsoft and yes, even Apple, though you can argue they are perhaps in the "side hustle" rather than "it's their primary revenue stream" category.

For these organizations, gathering your private data is their life blood. They exploit it in many ways - some sell it, which is in my opinion definitely among the most egregious 'options'. Others, like Google and Facebook, hoard but also aggressively protect your data - they don't want to leak it too much, they want to monetize it themselves! Of course, in the process of that, they often leak it anyway - think Cambridge Analytica - that was in no way an incident, hundreds of apps get your private data via Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. But by and large, they want to keep that data to themselves so they can use it to offer services - targeted ads. Which in turn, of course, get abused sometimes too.

My issue with this business model, even without the outright sale of data, is two-fold.

Ads work better than you think

First, in principle - while people might feel ads don't effect them, there is a reason companies pay for them. They DO effect your behavior. Maybe not as much or in the way marketing departments think or hope, but the effect exists.

How bad is that? Depends, I guess. To some degree, it is of course entirely legitimate that companies have a way to present their product to people. But modern targeting does more, including allowing companies to charge specific people different prices, and of course a wide arrange of sometimes nasty psychological tricks is used. The example Facebook once gave to potential advertisers, of targeting an insecure youth "at their most vulnerable" with an ad is... rather disgusting.

This gets worse when we're not just talking about product ads but political ads, either from political countries or, of course, from foreign non-democratic adversaries trying to influence our freedoms in a rather direct and dangerous way. And again - this is more effective than most people realize or are willing to admit and has swayed elections already, making is all less free.

Centralization is bad

Second, there is simply a HUGE issue with all-our-eggs in one basket. Especial when that basket is in a foreign country and not protected by privacy and security laws compatible with those in your own country. Having a single point of failure, how well protected - is just not smart. Things WILL fail, always. Better have slightly more breaches that each are just a single provider, than one breach of all private data of everyone in a country...

And that's not even talking about the fact that this data helps these companies get incredibly huge and then allows them to suppress or kill competition (or just buy it) - think Amazon, Microsoft. These tech molochs are just plain bad because of many reasons. They are anti-competitive, which raises prices, decreases choice, and the much lower innovation-per-dollar they produce is of course a worse deal for society too. They are too easy to control by law enforcement and censorship, impacting our freedoms - even when they're not 'foreign' to you. Yes, it is harder to censor 50000 private servers than one Google server farm!

Triggered

 So, as you notice, this question triggered me. Not all privacy violations are equal. Intentions matter. As does market power. And the GDPR is not a golden bullet. It has downsides - compliance is often easier for big companies than small ones, a serious issue.

Luckily, our judicial system tends to look at the intentions behind law, and I would expect a judge to fine an organization heavier for truly bad business models than for honest mistakes. I hope I'm not too optimistic here.

From my side, I don't want to bang on people's head for mistakes. I want to attack and challenge bad business models and bad intentions. A local, small app maker who fails to respond quickly enough to GDPR requests - not my target. Facebook - yes.

And by the way. Maybe it doesn't need to be said to most of you, dear readers, but of course - our open source world is, I still believe, a huge part of solving this problem. KDE, openSUSE and other Linuxes and desktops - and of course Nextcloud, Mastodon, Matrix and other decentralized and distributed and self-hosted platforms. We have ways to go, but we're making progress!

As I concluded to the person who triggered me - I know, this is far too long a reply to what they said

But it triggered me ;-)

Best reply over twitter, (twitter.com/jospoortvliet) or so, this awful Google platform makes commenting nearly impossible. And I know, the irony, replying on twitter, and I still have not moved away from blogger.com... Some day, some day. When I find time.

Collabora vs ONLYOFFICE

Since the Nextcloud Hub release switched from ONLYOFFICE to Collabora Online as default, lots of people have asked why. Is one better than the other? Let's talk about this.

History

Let me first say - the decision wasn't pure technical. As always, relations and other reasons play a role. I'll try to cover both aspects, but there is always more. With that out of the way, let's first look at how ONLYOFFICE got into Nextcloud.

Frank, myself and others in the Nextcloud community have wanted to integrate office in our collaboration platform for most of the past decade. Previously, we* had invested quite a bit in getting a collaborative document editor into our private cloud. The Documents app was a from-the-ground-up developed ODF editor with a unique and very clever design, built by KO GmbH (now sadly defunct). We together put resources in integration and further development and we hoped other (open source) businesses would invest and contribute too, so the solution would grow in time. Also, we had hoped some customers would be willing to pay for it. Both of these did not really come true, and KO sadly didn't survive.

* Note that I use 'we' here loosely as I wasn't really involved back then, so think 'the core team', as a slowly-changing team of people, including Frank, Jan, Arthur and others.

Fast forward to our launch on June 2 2016 (happy birthday!), and a few months later we announced Collabora Online integration. We had worked with Collabora to make this available not just to enterprise customers, as before, but to all users thanks to the 'CODE' docker image. As you know, we care deeply about community/private home users and this was of course a great step forward.

But running docker, setting up a reverse proxy on a second domain with proper certificates - it isn't easy and does not work for everyone. So we had to keep maintaining the Documents app a little, as some users still could only use that.

ONLYOFFICE vs Collabora

Meanwhile, a new open source online office solution came around, ONLYOFFICE. Let's talk for a sec how they compare Collabora, as the two could not be more technically and non-technically different!

Technical: how they work

The way Collabora Online works is:
An embedded version of Libreoffice runs on the server. It reads the document, then 'streams' the rendered document as image tiles to the browser client, which shows it to the user. The browser client does some of the menu's and lots of smart things like showing the cursor, other users, text selection etc, but many other components like pop-up menu's and sidebars are also streamed from the back-end, giving relatively good feature parity with LibreOffice. This strategy is responsible for giving LibreOffice, for example, desktop-level table style editing, better than any other online office solution.

The way ONLYOFFICE works is:
The document is converted on the server to a JSON file which is streamed to the browser client. The browser client is the full office suite, editing the document. Once done, it sends back the JSON and the server merges and exports it back to a file. A fully html5 canvas based front-end means a relatively pretty user interface and any javascript dev can go hacking.

So what does this mean?

• LibreOffice is much heavier on the server and network connection, but uses a bit less client resources which tends to help mobile devices with battery life during editing
• You get the full Libreoffice file type support. Decades worth of obscure file formats, it is all there.
• ONLYOFFICE has a more modern UI, writing it all in Javascript so it is far easier to be mobile-friendly. You can imagine how useless those old LibreOffice paragraph settings dialogs are on a mobile phone screen!
• In theory ONLYOFFICE would be much easier to integrate in web apps in general. Most app frameworks can consume a javascript or json component, a simply streamed, tiled image is far less flexible...

Compatibility

On document support, three things.

First, with regard to the Microsoft file compatibility - this is ALWAYS hit and miss. I can't objectively claim either is better or worse, you will always find a file that works well in one but not the other. But you will also find lots of MS Office files that won't work in Office 365, or break the desktop version between Mac and Windows or even just from older versions, because Microsoft screwed up their own compatibility.

Second, one thing I can say: if you migrate from Collabora Online to ONLYOFFICE and most of your files are ODF files because that's what Collabora uses by default, you're in for a bad experience. The ODF support in ONLYOFFICE is quite basic. But with MS Office files they feel on-par to me and that's what probably matters for most people. (sadly, yes)

Third, if you need any other file types - Collabora can handle a LOT, due to its long legacy. Word Perfect anyone?

For other technical capabilities - I probably be best off simply pointing to the comparisons both made themselves:

• From Collabora
• From ONLYOFFICE

Social/historical differences

Let's talk about the second big difference between Collabora and ONLYOFFICE: their roots. Collabora builds on and is part of the LibreOffice community, a decades-old project, and consists of long time open source believers. Development is open and accessible and there are lots of individuals and companies that work on and can provide services for its code base. ONLYOFFICE on the other hand, is quite new to open source and only a bit over a dozen people have contributed to the code base. Their open core model if of course less than favorite in the open source world, though it is still miles better than proprietary - some people seem to lose sight of that sometimes, if you ask me. For an end user, the development model makes little difference, in either case.

let me emphasize two things.
First, it is awesome that we have TWO open source office suits. Building one is an amazing accomplishment - we have had others in the past but most are no longer really viable due to the massive amount of resources required to keep up.
Second, I think it is great that ONLYOFFICE decided to open source their product. I believe most people really under estimate what it takes to turn around your business model so radically. And if you're unhappy with decisions made, in either case - contribute, get involved. That is how you change things in open source.

Getting Office in Nextcloud

So, as I said in the History section, by 2017 we had three office solutions integrated in Nextcloud. One was easy to install but unmaintained and quickly deteriorating. The other two were harder to install but much more complete.

You know we're ambitious people, so indeed we have thought about and discussed this situation forever. And at some point, Robin started to really investigate what would be possible. After looking deeply at both, he finally managed to create a proof of concept with ONLYOFFICE. What he did was:

1. Separate the 'converter' part from ONLYOFFICE, the javascript front-end and the 'rest'
2. Made a separate binary of the converter, package the javascript and rewrite all the glue that lets them interact in PHP
3. Make this thing install-able as one big blob, acting as alternative 'server' with a proxy component that ties it all together

This was a LOT of work, but after polishing it, we had something we could show to the ONLYOFFICE people. They were initially not huge fans of what we did - no surprise, as it was an ugly solution. We discussed this for a fair bit and in the end, we agreed on an approach.

The result was what we made available last January with the first release of Nextcloud hub. We saw it as a first step towards deeper integration. Watch the video below to get an idea of what it looked like!

📺 view video on YouTube

And then...

After release, two things happened.
First, ONLYOFFICE has sadly been unable to focus much on the integration with Nextcloud. There was a long wish list we had - there is a lot you can do to make the experience nicer, from removing/disabling/hiding duplicated features like the build in chat and file handling to making file collaboration work in other apps like Talk, or adding certain features that connect even deeper like @mentioning users for example. Unfortunately, this didn't happen. No blame, there is a lot happening in the world right now!
Second, Collabora was inspired by the work and while we didn't think we could make it install-able with such ease, they obviously know their own technology better. And indeed, they did make it happen! Besides that, we worked with them to improve the already pretty good integration further, allowing you to edit documents while in a video call or chat in Talk.

As our focus continues to be on providing the best experience possible, we simply looked at that: what gives, right now, the best experience. And thus our latest video shows Collabora instead...

📺 view video on YouTube

Note that this doesn't mean we don't like ONLYOFFICE. 😍 This just changed the default you get on installation. Both solutions are very good and continue to be available for users! And perhaps things will change for the next release. Given the large differences at every level between the two, I consider it a benefit to have both approaches available for Nextcloud users!

So is Collabora better?

I will let Captain Marvel answer that.

Principles

We recently did a post about the Nextcloud Mission and Principles we discussed at the previous Contributor Week. I guess it is mostly the easy-to-agree on stuff, so let me ruin the conversation a bit with the harder stuff. Warning: black and white don't exist beyond this point.

Open Source

In an internal conversation about some community pushback on something we did, I linked to islinuxaboutchoice.com - people often think that 'just' because a product is open source, it can't advertise to them, it has to be chock full of options, it has to be made by volunteers, it can't cost money and so on...

But if you want to build a successful product and change the world, you have to be different. You have to keep an eye on usability. You have to promote what you do - nobody sees the great work that isn't talked about. You have to try and build a business so you can pay people for their work and speed up development. Or at least make sure that people can build businesses around your project to push it forward.

I personally think this is a major difference between KDE and GNOME, with the former being far less friendly to 'business' and thus most entrepreneurial folks and the resources they bring go into GNOME. And I've had beers with people discussing SUSE's business and its relationship with openSUSE - just like Fedora folks must think about how they work with Red Hat, all the time. I think the openSUSE foundation is a good idea (I've pushed for it when I was community manager), but going forward I think the board should have a keen eye on how they can enable and support commercial efforts around openSUSE. In my humble opinion the KDE board has been far to little focused on that (I've ran for the board on this platform) and you also see the LibreOffice's Document Foundation having trouble in this area. To help the projects be successful, the boards on these organizations need to have people on them who understand business and its needs, just like they need to have community members who understand the needs of open source contributors.

But companies bring lots of complications to open source. When they compete (as in the LibreOffice ecosystem), when they advertise, when they push for changes in release cycles... Remember Mark Shuttleworth arguing KDE should adopt a 6-month release cycle? In hindsight, I think we should have!

Principles

So, going back to the list of Nextcloud's Mission and Principles, I say they are the easy stuff, because they are. They show we want to do the right thing, they show what our core motivation was behind starting this company: building a project that helps people regain control over their privacy. But, in day to day, I see myself focus almost exclusively on the needs of business. And you know what, businesses don't need privacy... That isn't why we do this.

Oh, I'm very proud we put in significant effort in home users when we can - our Simple Signup program has cost us a lot of effort and won't ever make us a dime. The Nextcloud Box was, similarly, purely associated with our goals, not a commercial project. Though you can argue both had marketing benefits - in the end, a bigger Nextcloud ecosystem helps us find customers.

I guess that's what keeps me motivated - customers help us improve Nextcloud, more Nextcloud users help us find more customers and so both benefit.

Pragmatism and the real hard questions

Personally, I'd add an item about 'pragmatism' to the list, though you can say it is inferred from our rather large ambitions. We want to make a difference, a real difference. That means you have to keep focused on the goal, put in the work and be pragmatic.

An example is the conversation about github. Would we prefer a more decentralized solution? Absolutely. Are we going to compromise our goals by moving away from the largest open source collaboration network to a platform which will result in less contributions? No.... As long as github isn't making our work actively harder, does not act unethically and its network provides the biggest benefits to our community by helping us reach our goals, we will stay...

More questions and the rabbit hole

Would you buy a list of email addresses to send them information about Nextcloud? No, because it harms those users' privacy and probably isn't even really legal. Would you work with a large network to reach its members, even if you don't like that network and its practices? Yes - that is why we're on Facebook and Twitter, even though we're not fans of either.

Let's make it even harder. How about the choice of who you sell to. Should we not sell to Company X even if that deal would allow us to hire 10 great developers on making Nextcloud better for the whole world and further our goals? Would you work with a company that builds rockets and bombs to earn money for Nextcloud development? We've decided 'nope' a few times already, we don't want that money. But what about their suppliers? And suppliers of suppliers? A company that makes screws might occasionally sell to Boeing which also makes money from army fighters... Hard choices, right?

And do you work with countries that are less than entirely awesome? Some would argue that would include Russia and China, others would say the USA should be on a black list, too... What about Brazil under its current president? The UK? You can't stop anyone from using an open source product anyway, of course... It gets political quick, we've decided to stick to EU export regulations but it's a tough set of questions. Mother Teresa took money from dictators. Should she have? No?

It might seem easy to say, in a very principled way, no to all the above questions, but then your project won't be successful. And your project wants to make the world better, does it not?

Conclusion?

We discuss these things internally and try to be both principled and pragmatic. That is difficult and I would absolutely appreciate thoughts, feedback, maybe links to how other organizations make these choices. Please, post them here, or in the comments section of the original blog. I can totally imagine you'd rather not comment here as this blog is hosted by blogger.com - yes, a Google company. For pragmatic reasons... I haven't had time to set up something else!

There's lots of grey areas in this, it isn't always easy, and sometimes you do something that makes a few people upset. As the Dutch say - **Waar gehakt wordt vallen spaanders**.



PS and if you, despite all the hard questions, still would want to work at a company that tries to make the world better, we're hiring! Personally, I need somebody in marketing to help me organize events like the Nextcloud Conference, design flyers and slide decks for sales and so on... Want to work with me? Shoot me an email!

Working at Nextcloud

I've been around in communities like KDE, openSUSE, Mandrake/Mandriva and others... and various open source and closed companies. Seen some do a good job. Seen others be mismanaged. This one: the most fun. Serious.

Working at Nextcloud is special. For one, we're a distributed company. Is it hard? Well, yes and no. Working from home is great with such a motivated team with very little management overhead and good communication. Our company is entirely built on it, that is why it works.

As an example, while our head of sales lives in Hannover, the rest of the sales people is spread over Berlin, Switzerland, Stuttgart... Engineers can be found in Germany, Netherlands, Spain, even Croatia and as far as Cape Verde. I'm sure I forgot some countries. Our biggest office in Stuttgart has less people than we have in Berlin!

But we connect in person: roughly every second month, at a company-wide meeting in a single place, usually Stuttgart, for a full week of coding and having a great time. And once a year we go to Berlin for our conference, happening the last week of August! All those meetings are open, with often lots of community members participating in the whole process of designing and deciding around our software.

And yes, the sales people join there, too. I have NEVER worked in a company where the sales people, the marketing team and the engineers were so good with each other. Respect between these three departments is extremely rare, as I'm sure every one of my readers knows from experience.

Me handing the mic to the guys that started it all back in 2010

What else is crazy about Nextcloud? Here's another one: where lots of companies struggle to find good engineers, that is literally the LEAST of our problems. We drown in amazingly good CV's and have a big pool of enthusiastic, qualified engineers who contribute to Nextcloud and already know the code. I wish we could hire them all but growing more than 50-80% per year isn't really health for a company culture...

Also special: other companies struggle to get sales leads and pay lots of (advertising) money for them. We, we drown in leads... Even without marketing automation. Our biggest challenge, instead, is answering all the requests from companies that want to buy our product - we need more sales people!

Yes, we're a pretty unique company in how we approach open source business and we're successfully taking on much bigger companies. Yes, it works! Just check how we're doing on Google Trends. Love that!

If you want to work for us, especially in sales, or know somebody who should, tell me ;-)

Or first learn about us by meeting us - you're welcome at our conference! Or at one of our meetups, there's a monthly one in Berlin for example.

Berlin #nextcloud meetup had to spread out as we didn't fit at one table... https://t.co/hx9h1OMGKd pic.twitter.com/4TXoS89a87

— Jos Poortvliet (@jospoortvliet) June 20, 2018

Client-side, server-side and zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption in Nextcloud

Android encryption in action

Yesterday, Nextcloud published plans, designs and code for end-to-end encryption in the clients. A recent report from Forrester named data encryption as one of the top global Cybersecurity trends for 2017, so this is a big deal! I thought it'd be good to go over the differences between client-side, server-side and end-to-end encryption and position what we developed.

End-to-End Encryption

End-to-end encryption is usually associated with communication channels, think chat or video calls. Signal, Telegram and lately WhatsApp employ end-to-end encryption. So what does it mean?

The main property of end-to-end encryption is that the data is encrypted on the one end and decrypted on the other end, so only the sender and receiver can read it.

As an example, take the Nextcloud Video Calls app. When you share a link for a call and the other person joins, the Nextcloud Server essentially gives the other user the address of your computer and helps you connect to each other. It will also send signals when others join the call, when you mute and so on. But the actual call takes place between your system and that of your conversational partner, directly. And before it is sent out, your browser will encrypt the data for the other side to decrypt. This way, nobody in between, like your internet provider, can listen in!

The main downside of the term is that the definition of that 'end' can vary: you can say that normal https encryption is 'end-to-end', defining one end as the browser and the other end as the server. So this brings us to the difference between server-side and client-side encryption.

Server-side encryption

Server-side encryption serves to protect data on or going through a server: as soon as the data arrives, the server encrypts it. When you use a cloud storage like Amazon S3 or a Dropbox account or a FTP at another office with Nextcloud, our Server-side Encryption encrypts the data before it gets sent to the other storage and decrypt it only after it has been retrieved. Server-side encryption thus protects your data from access by a third party storage solution.

Note that encryption in the browser is essentially server-side encryption: the code that does the work comes from the server and thus the server controls what is going on. If a server is compromised, the attacker (or evil system administrator or government agency) can simply make a minor modification to that code so it gives them access to your private key!

When the data is on the server itself, however, the server admin has access to it as the keys are managed by the server. In case of Nextcloud, we encrypt that key with your login, making it impossible for the server to decrypt the files unless you are logged. That is called "protection of data at rest", but, of course, you log in all the time if you have the client running.

So the limitation of server-side encryption lies in what it does not protect you from: the server being compromised.

Client-side encryption

This is why server-side encryption is often contrasted with client-side encryption, which is what is employed by the end-to-end encryption Nextcloud introduced today. Where server-side encryption happens after transmission to the server, we encrypt the data on the Android, iOS or desktop client already. Then, only at the receiving end, it is decrypted again. That receiving end can be another device owned by the same user or a device owned by another user who has been given access to the data. But not anyone in between or otherwise not authorized! This is sometimes also called a zero-knowledge privacy: at no point in time can the server have any knowledge of the data.

The process of creating keys

A little bit about keys

Usually, public and private keys are used for the encryption and decryption. How does that work?

Everybody has a set of closely related keys, a 'public' and a 'private' key. They work a bit like a mail box works: anyone can throw a letter in the box, but only the mailman (or woman) can open and empty it. The public key is, as the name implies, public. Anyone can use it to encrypt something. But to decrypt the result, the private key is needed!

Nextcloud generates a public and private key pair the first time a user enables end-to-end encryption in their client. The public key gets signed by the server with 'certificate' to verify the user identity (our Cryptographic Identity Protection feature) and stored there for other users to encrypt files to that they wish to share. The private key gets encrypted with a locally, app-generated very secure and very long (12 word!) passcode which is displayed to the user and then the key gets stored on the server as well.

Another device owned by the user can download the private key, the user can enter the 12 word passcode to decrypt it, and this device will then also be able to encrypt and decrypt files. That is how you add your phone and desktop after you enabled end-to-end encryption on your laptop.

You can learn much more about exactly how the encryption and decryption work on the end-to-end encryption web page we made as well as the whitepaper you can download there.

Enterprise challenges

While consumers use end-to-end encryption for chat for years, larger organizations like companies and governments have struggled to find solutions that protect their sensitive data without disrupting productivity and legal requirements for audit logs.

Indeed, many solutions create a new layer over existing solutions like Box and Dropbox or have poor key management, making sharing cumbersome and less secure. A real enterprise solution needs to take the burden of complexity away from users and, if it needs to be anywhere, put it on the shoulders of the system administrators. Nextcloud has done exactly that, not even allowing users to create their own, potentially insecure password and making adding devices easy. The 12-word passcode can be recovered from any of the devices an user owns and it is possible to enable a system wide recovery key. If enabled, users will get warned of this and the system administrator gets to see and note down the key once and only once. After that, the code is destroyed and no attacker would be able to steal it, provided the server administrator puts it in a safe location: we'd recommend an actual safe.

Another important feature for enterprises is support for a Hardware Security Module which could be used to generate user certificates. Without it, our design does not allow users to switch identities (as this could be abused by an attacker with control over the server) but this restriction can be relaxed if a secure HSM is in the mix.

You can learn more on our webpage about end-to-end encryption!

Privacy, self-hosting, surveillance, security and open source in Berlin

August 22-29 we're organizing a conference to discuss and work on privacy, self-hosting, security and open source in Berlin: the Nextcloud Conference. We expect some 150-200 people to participate during a week of discussing and coding and, especially on the weekend, presenting and workshopping. So I thought I should blog about why should you be there and what can you expect?

If you care about protecting people from the all-pervasive surveillance, re-gain privacy and security of data and believe in self hosting and open source as solution for these issues, this is the place to be. Our event is special for two reasons:

The team that started ownCloud

We're doing it. And most of us have been, for a decade or more, in KDE, GNOME, SUSE, Ubuntu, phpBB and other earlier projects. The code we wrote has influenced millions of users already and we will go further and wider! Expect to meet people with a can-do attitude.

Second, Nextcloud has got a huge momentum, name recognition and has become one of the largest ecosystems in the open source privacy/self hosting area. It isn't just about us! Large companies, small startups and innovative individuals and small communities all over are building on and around Nextcloud. A few examples:

• Our keynote speaker is former Mozilla president Tristan Nitot, who is currently CTO of Cozycloud, another private, open source self-hosted cloud solution.
• We're working with the GNOME community on deeper Linux desktop integration (we hope we can bring those also to KDE's Plasma!) and lots of projects built on our technology, like the super cool Mail-in-a-box
• Many third party apps like the buttercup password manager, DAVdroid android app, PrivacyIdea 2FA and Gluu SSO, Collabora Online and the innovative open source Blockchain storage SIA provide Nextcloud integration. And more are coming, expect announcements at the Nextcloud conference!
• We have well over 70 different providers like CiviHosting
• You can find over 80 apps on our app store offering all kinds of additional capabilities and integrations, from Kanban or time planning apps to the mentioned authentication and external storages to music players to drawing apps to full text search to...
• One organization after another implements or moves to Nextcloud, with the TU Berlin  (where our conference takes place, like last year) and the capital of Albania merely the last in the long list.

We are doers

So the Nextcloud conference is where you can find a wide range of individuals with interest, skills and ideas in the area of privacy and freedom activism, and they are doers! There is a reason we say "bring your laptop" on our conference page, though with that we don't mean we only want coders there!

Designers, activists and advocates are just as welcome. That is because Nextcloud is about more than technology. Frank is somebody who sometimes asks the hard questions and obviously it his vision is a strong diver, but we're all long time open source and/or privacy activists and deeply and personally motivated. Our entire community is built on drive, passion and a will to take on the challenges our society offers in the area of privacy, self determination, freedom.

That is the why you should be there. To help make a difference.

Now the what.

Getting Stuff Done

Our goal is to get work done; and facilitate communication and collaboration in our community. During the week, we simply provide space to talk and code (with wired and wireless network, Club Mate & other drinks, and free lunch). In the weekend, we have a program with talks & workshops. The setup is simple:

In the morning, everybody is in one room. First, we all hear from long time privacy activist and former Mozilla president Tristan Nitot. After that, community members working on a wide variety of interesting things around privacy/self hosting/open source and of course Nextcloud talk, shortly, about what they do. Just 3-8 minutes to give the audience an idea of their project, their plan, their idea, how to get involved, a call for action. Now again, everybody is in the room, so in the break, everybody has heard the same talks and has the same things to discuss! If you have something to add, be it about TOR, protests, encryption or anything else that is related: SUBMIT A TALK!

Collaboration & sharing ideas

Last year we announced the Nextcloud Box.
This year - be there and find out!

People can look up the speakers, join the meetings proposed and so on, in the afternoon. Because after lunch we have 2 (or more, not sure yet) tracks of workshops as well as hacking, coding and meetings in the coding rooms. Unconference style, so to say.

We now have several dozen talks and workshops already submitted and well over 100 people have registered but we are looking for more input in all areas so consider to be a part of this event!

It is free and open, supported by the TU Berlin which offers us a free location; and Nextcloud GmbH which sponsors drinks & practical stuff; and SUSE Linux which sponsors the Saturday evening party!

Learn more and register!

Happy Birthday ownCloud

Seven years ago at Camp KDE in San Diego, Frank announced a project to help people protect their privacy, building an alternative to Dropbox: ownCloud.

I was there, sharing a room with Frank at the infamous Banana Bungalow. Epic times, I can tell you that - there was lots of rum, lots of rain and loads of good conversations and making new friends.





Since then, a lot has changed. But the people who started building a self-hosted, privacy protecting alternative in 2010 and 2011 are still on it! In 2011, a first meetup was held, and the 5 participants at that meetup recently got on stage at the Nextcloud conference to recall some good memories:



Of course, today we continue the work at Nextcloud, that just yesterday published its latest bugfix- and security update. It is great to see so many people have stuck with us for all these years - just this month, the KDE sysadmins migrated their ownCloud instance to Nextcloud!

We'll keep up the good work and you're welcome to join, either if you're looking for a job or just want to code. In both cases I can promise you: working with such a motivated, dedicated, professional team is just plain amazing.

I also published a blog on our Nextcloud blog about this milestone.

EDIT: By the way - there's a meetup tonight in C-Base, B'lin, 19:00 - would be fun to drink a beer on ownCloud's birthday and talk about the future! Join! It will be at least until 10 or so, so if you can't be there before then - still come! ;-)

Wednesday: Release Party in Berlin!

On wednesday is our Nextcloud meetup and - Nextcloud 11 will be released, so let's make it a release party! Bring some snacks if you like, let's drink a beer or two, get our servers upgraded perhaps.

See and RSVP here:

https://www.meetup.com/nextcloud-berlin/events/235596178/

When: Wednesday, December 14, 2016 7:00 PM

Where: C-Base, Rungestraße 20, 10179 Berlin

We're in the main room. C-Base is at the river, all the way to the end from the street. You're there if you get geeky tingles from the murals :D

I look forward to seeing you there, everyone's invited! That includes KDE friends, by the way, would be fun to see the bunch of you! You can RSVP in the comments here or on meetup.com...

CU there!

3 alternative reasons why you should test Nextcloud 11 Beta

On the Nextcloud blog I just published about the beta for Nextcloud 11. The release will deliver many improvements and is worth checking out in itself, plus I put a nice clickbait-style title and gave three reasons to test it.

But I actually have some more reasons to test. You see, Nextcloud is one of the tools we need to keep our democracy working. As Frank notes on his home page:

"Privacy is the foundation of democracy"

And he is completely right. So, here are three different reasons why you should test (and help improve) Nextcloud:

1. The USA is making a massive swing towards even more spying

Obama has done nothing to curb the growth of the NSA and the scope of its operations. Secret laws spiked under his watch. Many of the folks about to be put in power by President-elect Trump favor more spying, including on US citizens, expansion of the NSA, a crackdown on whistleblowers and more. Trump's pick for CIA director calls for Snowden's execution. For what I can only guess must be giving proof of illegal government spying to dangerous terrorists like the Washington Post and the Guardian, who proceeded to win a Pulitzer prize by disclosing this information irresponsibly to the US public.

In general, as somebody who changes his stance on hugely important and complicated issues like torture in under an hour, it is impossible to predict what Trump will do with the most powerful spying agency in the world under his control, but his appreciation for dictatorial figures like Kim Jong Il and Putin gives plenty cause for concern.

2. Britain isn't doing much better

I wrote about the Snoopers' charter just some days ago - this piece of legislation goes further than any earlier piece of spying law. It allows not only passive spying but also actively hacking devices from citizens.

3. Nor is Europe

The UK is not alone. Since Snowden, Europe has complained a bit about the NSA but seems to simply follow suit, rather than doing anything about it. Germany is even introducing a bill that will allow spying on foreign journalists.

Help out!

So, how can you help? Well, test Nextcloud 11 Beta, obviously. Help others to use it, get them involved. But it goes beyond Nextcloud - promote the use of and help improve tools like Tor, Signal and others, or democracy is screwed.

Edit: updated the blog 

Brittain’s Snoopers charter threatens your privacy

pic from the ZDNet article

The United Kingdom this week passed the so called Snoopers Charter, a law which forces UK internet providers to store the browsing history of UK citizens for a full year. You, your family, visitors or any devices in your household which have been hacked (the government is now allowed to do that, by the way) better not visit anything bad as the government can get their hands on this data quite easily. What does this mean and what can you do?

An attack on privacy

There is a global siege on privacy. Governments all over the world have introduced legislation (sometimes secret) which forces email, internet or data storage providers to track what you do and make that data available to their governments. This, of course, also means third parties who gain access to the storage systems can see and abuse it. And because so many of us have put so much of our data at just a few providers, we're at great risk as events like last week's shutdown of hundreds of Google accounts did show.

While Google, Dropbox and others lure customers in with 'free' data storage and great online services, governments benefit from centralized data storages as it makes it easy for them to hack in or demand data from these companies.

Why this surveillance?

While governments usually claim they need access to this data to find terrorists or child pornography, experts point out that it will not be helpful at all. As multiple experts (even internally) put it, growing the haystack makes it harder to find the needle. Intelligence agencies are swamped with data and nearly every terrorist attack in western states over the last decade took place despite the agencies having all information they would have needed to prevent it. The Paris attackers, for example, coordinated their attack using plain SMS messages. The Guardian thus rightly points out that:

"Paris is being used to justify agendas that had nothing to do with the attack"

which has become a familiar refrain after nearly every terrorist attack.

Indeed, we all know the argument But you have nothing to hide, do you? and indeed, we probably don't. But some people do, so they'll try to avoid being seen. That being illegal won't change their behavior...

And as Phill Zimmermann, the inventor of the PGP encryption pointed out:

"When privacy is outlawed, only outlaws will have privacy"

So not terrorists. Then what?

Experts agree that the vast majority of these surveillance and anti-privacy laws have little or no effect on real criminals. The crime syndicates, corrupt politicians and large corporations evading taxes and anti-trust/health/environmental laws, they DO have something to hide, and thus they would use encryption or avoid surveilled communication methods even if it were outlawed.

However, ordinary citizens, including grass-roots local activists, charitable organizations, journalists and others, who DO have nothing to hide, would be surveilled closely. And with that information, the real criminals mentioned earlier - crime syndicates, corporations or corrupt politicians - would have weapons in hand to keep these citizens from bothering them. Whistle blowers can be found out and killed (like in Mexico), journalists can be harassed and charged for trivial transgressions (like was recently done at the US pipeline protest) and charities can be extorted.

What can we do?

Luckily, there are initiatives like the Stanford Law Schools' Crypto Policy Project which aim to train, for example, journalists in the use of encryption. Tools and initiatives like Signal, PGP email encryption, Let's Encrypt and Nextcloud provide the ability for users to protect themselves and their loved ones from surveillance. More importantly, these at the same time making it harder and more costly to conduct mass surveillance.

There is nothing wrong with governments targeting criminals with surveillance but just vacuuming up all data of all citizens that might, some day, be used is a massive risk for our democracy. We all have a responsibility to decentralize and use tools to protect our privacy so those who need it (press, activists and others) have a place to hide.

Get started with Nextcloud App development in 6 easy steps!

The brand new app scaffolding tool in our app store

Last night, Bernhard Posselt finished the app scaffold tool in the app store, making it easy to get up and running with app development. I was asked on twitter to blog about setting up a development environment, so... here goes.

What's simpler than downloading a zip file, extracting it and running a command in the resulting folder to get an Nextcloud server up on localhost for hacking?

Yes, it can be that simple, though it might require a few minor tweaks and you have to make sure to have all Nextcloud dependencies installed.

Note that this is useful if you want to develop an Nextcloud app. If you want to develop on the Nextcloud core, a git checkout is the way to go and you'll need some extra steps to get the dependencies in place, get started here. Feedback on this process is highly appreciated, especially if it comes with a pull request for our documentation of course ;-)

Step 1 and Two: Dependencies

• Install PHP and the modules mentioned here
  Your distro should make the installation easy. Try these:
  
  • openSUSE: zypper in php5 php5-ctype php5-curl php5-dom php5-fileinfo php5-gd php5-iconv php5-json php5-ldap php5-mbstring php5-openssl php5-pdo php5-pear php5-posix php5-sqlite php5-tokenizer php5-xmlreader php5-xmlwriter php5-zip php5-zlib
  • Debian: apt-get install php5 php5-json php5-gd php5-sqlite curl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev php5-curl php5-common php-xml-parser php5-ldap bzip2
• Make Nextcloud session management work under your own user account.
  Either change the path of php session files or chmod 777 the folder they are in, usually something like /var/lib/php (debian/SUSE) or /var/lib/php/session (Red Hat).

The Final Four Steps

• Download the latest Nextcloud zip file.
• Extract it in a folder where you want to get going.
• Enter the folder and execute: php -S localhost:5000
• Visit http://localhost:5000 in your browser

Nextcloud should present you with its installation steps! Give your username and password and you're up and running with SQLite.

Start with the app

Now you create a subfolder in the nextcloud/apps with the name of your app and put in a skeleton. You can generate an app skeleton really easy: use the scaffolding tool, part of our new app store for Nextcloud 11!

It's probably wise to now get going with the app development tutorial here. This isn't updated for the scaffolding tool yet, so you'll have a head start here. Be sure to check out the changelog, we try to make sure the latest changes are noted there so even if we didn't manage to fully update the tutorial, you can find out what will and won't work in the changelog. Also, be sure to update the links to get the latest dev doc - this all links to 11, once that is out it is probably better to directly target 12 and so on.

Help and feedback

Your input is very much welcome! If you run through these steps and get stuck somewhere, let me know and I'll update the documentation. Or, of course better still, do a pull request on the documentation right in github. You don't even have to do a full checkout, smaller fixes can easily be done in the web interface on github.

Last but not least, ask questions on our forums in the app dev channel or on IRC. Here is the Nextloud development IRC chat channel on freenode.net, also accessible via webchat.

Thanks, good luck, and have fun building Nextcloud apps!

Kickstarting conversations with lightning talks.

A lot of people are coming to the Nextcloud conference to discuss ideas they have with others and I've been telling them to submit a lightning talk. As that is the idea of the lightning track on Saturday and Sunday: present yourself and the project you (want to) work on, inspire, share ideas. That way, others can then find you and talk to you afterward!

Last year I wrote a longer article about that on opensource.com, but this is the gist of it: it is a conversation kickstarter! Our event is very hands-on (bring your laptop, we say!) and the program is mostly there to facilitate the natural flow of ideas and code.

So we have three kinds of sessions:

• Keynote = inspiration. Everyone joints to listen to a fascinating story! Our keynote speakers are Karen and Jane.
• Lightning talks = sharing. Everyone in one room listens to what others are thinking about, working on or inspired by. Then, after, you look each other up and start talking and doing! Think 'unconference'.
• Workshops = learning and collaborating. They're coding, interactive, either teaching/learning or more "let's work on X for an hour together".

The event starts in two weeks at the TU Berlin: September 16-23 so it is time to book your trip. If you care about open source, privacy-protecting cloud services it is a great place to find like-minded folks!

What's coming?

Besides the keynotes by Karen Sandler (Managing DIrector at SFC) and Jane Silber (CEO of Canonical) We have some 30 sessions already submitted, just a selection:

• Nextcloud Security by Lukas Reschke
• Enterprise grade two factor authentication with Nextcloud by Cornelius Kölbel
• Upcoming features of Android Nextcloud by Tobias Kaminsky
• Nextcloud Scalability with a concept design for 10.000 users by Dennis Pennings (Friday program!)
• Installing NextCloud with SSL/TLS in less than 5 minutes on UBOS by Johannes Ernst
• MySQL Database Scalability by Oli Sennhauser (Friday program!)
• Next generation of federation by Björn Schießle (Friday program!)
• Theming your Nextcloud by Julius Haertl
• Collabora Online by Michael Meeks
• Performance Testing at Nextcloud by Morris Jobke

More still coming, I know Cornelius Schumacher wanted to talk about the importance of privacy-protecting cloud services (if his family can miss him for the weekend...) and I still have some other talks to approve in the queue.
The gist of it is that we'll have a lot of technical people, the folks who wrote Nextcloud as well as many others who contributed and have been using it, from home users to enterprise and educational or government agencies - all together to discuss and work on where our technology is going.

Oh, and we have a surprise on Friday afternoon. ;-)

Check it out and see you there!

Latest attacks on privacy...

With the EU (in this case France and Germany) gearing up for another attack on privacy I'm quite happy and proud to have been part of the release of Nextcloud 10!

Privacy

It is the usual story: we should disallow companies from using perfect end to end encryption and force them to insert backdoors against terrorists.

Not that it would help - that's been discussed extensively already but in short:

• If you have nothing to hide, you'll use a backdoored app and you're vulnerable to foreign (and your own) governments, terrorists (!), criminals and others who can abuse your data in more ways than you can imagine.
• If you have something to hide, you can use 1000 different tools to do so and there is nothing government can do about that so you won't use a backdoored app.
• And note that government has failed to even use fully unencrypted information to stop terrorist attacks so perhaps we should first see if they can actually get their act together there.

Now yes, backdooring all commonly used encryption apps will help a BIT, essentially only with the low level, common crime. So you might catch the dude who broke into your house and bragged about it to his friends over Whatsapp. You won't catch the terrorists plotting with Al Qaida (or whatever the terrorist organization du-jour) to blow up a train because they can simply get one of the many solutions out there to protect themselves.

Nor will you catch corrupt politicians or big companies doing nasty stuff, though I am quite certain the laws will be written in such a way that you can use them to go after people who actually try to expose such politicians or companies.

And I'm also quite certain companies will use this as an excuse to not implement proper protection in their products so you can continue to stop pacemakers remotely or disable the brakes in cars over the internet.

Generally, laws targeting encryption and terrorism do more to harm whistleblowing than terrorism and are thus promoting corruption and bad, unsecure products.

These laws will literally cost lives. Not save any.

And it is exactly why Frank started ownCloud and why we continue to develop that vision at Nextcloud. And keep developing new features, like the File Access Control app which can provide an extra protective layer around your data. I for one certainly can use that app and exactly in the way described in that blog! So much for 'enterprise only features'.


Get it and migrate today. You and your data deserve it!

Migrating to Nextcloud 9

Now that Nextcloud 9 is out, many users are already interested in migration so I'd like to address the why and how in this blog post.

Edit: Nextcloud 10 is out with loads of unique features. We now also have a client! You can find out about client account migration here.

Why migrate

Let's start with the why. First, you don't have to migrate yet. This release as well as at least the upcoming releases of own- and Nextcloud will be compatible so you'll be able to migrate between them in the future. We don't want to break compatibility if we can avoid it!

Of course, right now Nextcloud 9 has some extra features and fixes and future releases will introduce other capabilities. With regards to security, we have Lukas Reschke working for us. However, we promise that for the foreseeable future we will continue to report all security issues we find to upstream in advance of any release we do. That means well ahead of our usual public disclosure policy, so security doesn't have to be a reason for people to move.

Edit: Nextcloud 10 comes with far more features on top of this. For Nextcloud 11 we have a ambitious road map already but we'll still enable migration from ownCloud 9.1 to Nextcloud 11 so you can migrate at your leisure!

Migration overview

If you've decided to migrate there are a number of steps to go through:

• Make sure you have everything set up properly and do a backup
• Move the old ownCloud install, preserving data and config
• Extract Nextcloud, correct permissions and put back data and config
• Switch data and config
• Trigger the update via command line or the web UI

Note that we don't offer packages. This has been just too problematic in the past and while we might offer some for enterprise distributions, we hope to work together with distributions to create packages for Nextcloud 9 and newer releases. Once that is done we will of course link to those on our installation page.

There are other great resources besides this blog, especially this awesome post on our forums which gives a great and even more detailed overview of a migration with an Ubuntu/NGINX/PHP7/MariaDB setup.

Edit: With regard to packages, there are now packages for CentOS and Fedora and other distributions will likely follow soon. See our packages repository if you want to help!

Preparation

First, let's check if you're set up properly. Make sure:

• You are on ownCloud 8.2.3 or later
• Make sure you have all dependencies
• Your favorite apps are compatible (with ownCloud 9), you can check this by visiting the app store at apps.owncloud.com
• You made a backup

Once that's all done, time to move to the next step: cleaning out the old files.

Removing old files

In this step, we'll move the existing installation preserving the data and configuration.

• Put your server in maintenance mode. Go to the folder ownCloud is installed in and execute sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --on (www-data has to be your HTTP user). You can also edit your config.php file and changing 'maintenance' => false, to 'maintenance' => true,.
• Now move the data and config folder out of the way. Best to go to your webserver folder (something like /var/www/htdocs/ and do a mv owncloud owncloud-backup

Deploying Nextcloud

Now, we will put Nextcloud in place.

• Grab Nextcloud from our download page or use wget: wget https://download.nextcloud.com/server/releases/nextcloud-9.0.50.zip
• Optional: you can verify if the download went correct using our MD5 code, see this page. Run md5sum nextcloud-9.0.50.zip. The output has to match this value: 5ae47c800d1f9889bd5f0075b6dbb3ba
• Now extract Nextcloud: unzip nextcloud-9.0.50.zip or tar -xvf nextcloud-9.0.50.tar.bz2
• Put the config.php file in the right spot: cp owncloud-backup/config/config.php nextcloud/config/config.php
• Now change the ownership of the files to that of your webserver, for example chown wwwrun:www * -R or chown www-data *
• If you keep your data/ directory in your owncloud/ directory, copy it to your new nextcloud/ [*]. If you keep it outside of owncloud/ then you don't need to do anything as its location is in config.php.

* Note that if you have been upgrading your server from before ownCloud 6.0 there is a risk that moving the data directory causes issues. It is best to keep the folder with Nextcloud named 'owncloud'. This also avoids having to change all kinds of settings on the server, so it might be a wise choice in any case: rename the nextcloud folder to owncloud.

Now upgrade!

Next up is restarting the webserver and upgrading.

• Restart your webserver. How depends on your distribution. For example, rcapache2 restart on openSUSE, service restart apache2 on Ubuntu.
• You can now trigger the update either via OCC or via web. Command line is the most reliable solution. Run it as sudo -u apache php occ upgrade from the nextcloud folder. This has to run as the user of your webserver and thus can also be www-data or www for example.
• Then, finally, turn of maintenance mode: sudo -u www-data php occ maintenance:mode --off
  

That's it!

At this point, you'll see the fresh blue of a Nextcloud server! If you encounter any issues with upgrading, discuss them on our forums.

On Open Source, forking and collaboration: Nextcloud 9 is here!

The nature of Open Source is, in a sense, dualistic. It encourages collaboration through the threat of not collaborating--a fork. When I was approached by Struktur AG to join them to work on ownCloud and Spreed, I loved the idea. I always wanted an ecosystem around ownCloud, which is why I pushed things forward like our collaboration with Western Digital Labs and Collabora, matters of no business interest to the company I worked for. I believe a stronger ecosystem benefits everybody.

Ecosystems and confidence

A major point which makes open source so beneficial for businesses is that it puts pressure on suppliers to offer great service and support. If they don't, another can enter the market and out-service them. Tight control over the community tough things like CLA and trademark makes it hard to grow such an ecosystem and negates some of the benefits of open source for customers.

Luckily, in the end, the AGPL license protects the future of a project, even if its steward clings to power. From conversations with Niels early on, it was clear to me that he has a very different and very confident view on his ability to run a real open source company. His history at Red Hat results in frequent comparisons. And indeed, Red Hat runs things the right way, even supporting a project like CentOS which many other companies would consider an existential threat to their business model. Just as their investment in opensource.com shows: they aim to grow the pie, not grab a bigger slice.

former 'enterprise feature' done right (and open)

I'm super proud and happy that we could announce today, with our first release, that Nextcloud will not be doing proprietary code. No closed apps means no inherent conflict between sales and community management/developers within the company, but a full alignment in one simple direction: servicing the customer.

And if you wonder about the collaboration with Collabora/LibreOffice Online and with Western Digital: yes, of course, we'll go full steam ahead and will facilitate where we can! No, we're not afraid that either would 'compete' with us: both will complement and strengthen the ecosystem. So we will work together.

Why? Because the core contributors and founder shared an ambitious goal for Nextcloud: be THE solution for privacy and security.

BBQ and forking

Last night we had our first Nextcloud BBQ! Despite some rain it's a good start of something that should be a tradition. ;-)

It was great to have conversations with the contributors who visited us as well as some downtime with the team. It's been a busy time since we announced our new endeavor. And it continues to be awesome to get so many supportive comments and feedback on what we're up to! People are excited about our open strategy and appreciate the fact that there is a solid company behind it. The flood of incoming requests for information and support from customers presents a good problem. So let me point out, again, that we're hiring!