[Wolves] Bringing advanced Free (as in Freedom) technology to Windows platforms

[Shane M. Coughlan]

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If people ask me what's the nicest Operating System I point them at
Ubuntu.  It's clean, fast, highly functional and has a neat update
system.  Personally I love it.  However, as good as Ubuntu is, it's not
the leading OS.  Windows is on a massive amount of machines.  A
terrific, mind-boggling amount of desktops, laptops and servers.  There
are two ways to look at this: one is to find it really depressing and
the other is to see it as an opportunity to introduce people to Free
Software.

Applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org really work.  They are
(relatively) stable, fast and feature rich.  They also appear to be more
secure than their 'normal' Windows alternatives.  I think these
applications do a great deal to win people over to our way of doing things.

I have been keen to contribute to the 'Free Software on Windows' trend
from a communication perspective and have spent some months working with
various people from security backgrounds in making the Mobility Email
client.  It's a mobile version of the Mozilla Mail code (quite like
Portable Thunderbird [1]).  It's not really an application so much as
several different applications that can work together if needed.  These
include a customised Mozilla Mail client (1.5.0.4 code), a customised
GnuPG, the command line version of Eraser and several Mozilla extensions
(Enigmail, Contact Sidebar and Webmail).

At this juncture everything is released under either the MPL or GPL
licenses (with one exception being a ZIP file under the info-zip BSD
style license).  As we find more time for altering code notices we hope
to release everything under the GPL and bind the package more tightly
together.  Because it's not a traditional application we refer to it as
a distribution.  The tools cooperate rather than depend on each other,
and the whole is pretty self-contained - allowing you to use it from a
USB stick or from a random location on a computer without installing.
You just need a host Windows OS to load the applications when needed
(but they don't use the registry).

Perhaps the best news is that Mobility Email runs without any
configuration contortions on WINE.  We had a confirmed report of that
from a cheerful Fedora user.  In theory it is then possible to carry
your mail, GPG keys and all of the secret bits on your USB stick, using
it on a Windows machine at work and a Linux machine at home.

You can get it from http://www.mobilityemail.net

I've included our press release below.  Meanwhile, Simon Morris already
blogged about the software here:
http://beerandspeech.org/index.php?/archives/209-Advocacy-Protecting-our-cryptographic-rights.html

==

The Mobility Email client is a secure mobile communication solution that
runs without installation from virtually any location on a computer, USB
stick or iPod.  It is mainly built around Mozilla code and has all the
features of software like Mozilla Thunderbird.  It also provides
advanced security for private communication and local password, mail and
account protection.

The Mobility Email client is designed to remove the single most
significant obstacle to the use of encryption: complexity.  It supports
the S/MIME and OpenPGP signing and encryption standards. It is the first
client to support the forthcoming DSA2 and SHA224 technologies and to be
backward compatible with previously proposed standards like TIGER192. It
allows users to lock their passwords, mail and account details with the
same system used by the US government to protect top secret files.  It
even has pre-installed support for Webmail accounts like Hotmail, Yahoo!
and AOL.

The Mobility Email client is a plug-and-go solution for Windows
98/ME/2000/XP/2003 PCs.  It works with GNU/Linux machines through the
WINE API.  It is a Free (as in Freedom) Software distribution and will
always be available without restrictions.  Various components are
released under the MPL or GPL licenses.

The Mobility Email client is available with an optional subscription to
MobilityEmail.net – a service that provides users with a
@mobilityemail.net email address, at least 250Mb of on-line storage,
full IMAP / POP / SMTP / Webmail access, spam filtering and virus
protection.  The MobilityEmail.net service starts at just $2.08 per
month.  The provider of this service (Everyone.net) is going to give
away a fingerprint-activated USB stick to the first 50 people to sign up
in the USA.

Full details and free downloads are available at
http://www.mobilityemail.net

==

Regards

Shane

[1] According to Gervase at Mozilla the guy behind Portable Thunderbird
(John Haller) has no permission to use the Mozilla trademark on the
Portable Thunderbird/Firefox/Sunbird distributions.  It is therefore of
dubious legal origin.  We asked for permission for our client but
Mozilla decided the mobile application distribution concept was too new
and advised us to customise the client and remove their trademarks
instead.  So we did :)

- --
Shane Martin Coughlan
e: shane at shaneland.co.uk
m: +447773180107
w: www.shaneland.co.uk
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Projects:
http://mobility.opendawn.com	http://gem.opendawn.com
http://enigmail.mozdev.org	http://www.winpt.org
- ---
Organisations:
http://www.fsfeurope.org	http://www.fsf.org
http://www.labour.org.uk	http://www.opensourceacademy.gov.uk
- ---
OpenPGP: http://www.shaneland.co.uk/personalpages/shane/files/publickey.asc
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