FISL10 began, as usual, with lots of people from lots of places packing PUCRS’ event center in Porto Alegre. This is indeed a special edition! The official numbers are not yet computed; as I write the counter reached 7168 attendees… But since the database has been running locally yesterday on, people that registered at PUCRS are not yet counted… Registration team will merge the databases eventually, but that’s not their top priority right now.

So, this year I am not helping TVSL, which is being taken care of by Luis Felipe instead. He’s been doing a good work and there could be nobody else better than him. My quality of life increased dramatically by letting TVSL in Felipe’s hands… Maybe this year I manage to actually attend to some sessions, and to hang out with Debian guys.

This year I will partially take care of the Programming Arena. The challenge was revealed today and 11 “heroes” are, right now, trying to respond to it. It has been requested that they implement DNSCurve. They could have no better coach at this than D. J. Bernstein, who has been helping them both at the Arena and through the Arena private mailing-list.

Earlier, DJB also were in DNSCurve x DNSSEC panel, one of the most interesting technical sessions so far (bias warning: I was moderator for it). DJB and Frederico Neves (from NIC.br) exchanged arguments exposing interesting details of both secure DNS alternatives.

Also, today we got the confirmation from Brazilian Presidency that the President will attend our event. It will be on Friday, and I am too excited to hear what he has to say about free software government policies. (Apparently, apart from Linus, we managed to get everybody to show up in FISL ;) ).

I am also taking care of the Key Signing Party. This has been a rather good experience, since it requires almost nothing from me (except preparing the keylist and showing up at the scheduled time and place) :-).

See you tomorrow, at FISL!