Hacking for Christ

Away

I will be away for the next four weeks. Here's a list of alternative people to contact about various issues.

Comments and trackbacks have been disabled until I return. Currently, this blog is fairly spam-free, but I don't want to take the risk.

Plazing A Trail

Funky geolocation fun at plazes.com - track yourself, or other people, all around the world, including Joi Ito, Mozilla Foundation board member (plazes login required). Inevitably, Google Maps is involved.

How Free Software Development Should Work

While at EuroOSCON, I went to a presentation by a company called Zimbra. They have a very cool Ajax/DHTML (both nasty terms, but what's better?) email and collaboration suite. Check out the demo. Afterwards, I mentioned I was from the Foundation, and one of their developers said that there was one particular bug in our XMLHttpRequest implementation which caused Firefox on Linux to spin using 100% CPU when used with Zimbra - bug 273578. They'd had to make their own internal builds of Firefox for testing to get around the problem. We looked the bug up, and there was a patch with review and super-review, but it hadn't been checked in because the author didn't have checkin rights and no-one had been asked to do it.

I sent some email from my laptop via the conference WiFi, and around an hour later Darin checked it in on the trunk. Zimbra QAed the builds on their web application and others, and confirmed that nothing seemed to be broken. So, 48 hours later, the patch made it into the branch as well, and Firefox 1.5 on Linux will work well with Zimbra.

I keep coming across people and companies who tell me they have problems with Firefox, but when I ask them, it turns out that they have never filed or CCed themselves on bugs. They just suffer in silence. This is an extreme case - the patch was a one-liner, and the lack of it hosed their product entirely! This isn't how it's supposed to work; as a free software project, we can be responsive to the needs of our users - but only if we know what they are. Once Zimbra had approached us about it and explained the problem, we were able to correctly prioritise the bug. Importantly, Zimbra stayed involved in the process and did their part (the QA) to make sure that the patch got where it needed to be. So if you're in a similar situation, communicate! :-)

SVG Maps?

The website of Sodipodi, the SVG drawing tool, has a complete collection of the flags of the world in SVG. It would be really great if someone were to start a similar collection of political maps of countries... I always have trouble getting good world or country map data, and SVG maps could be rescaled and changed to suit the needs of each user. Anyone feel like taking this on?

Absence Warning

I will be away and out of contact from Saturday 29th October to Saturday 26th of November, after which time I will be spending at least a week catching up on email. Therefore, if you need something from me, now is the time to ask :-)

Galeon To Become Epiphany + Extensions

The Galeon project has announced that they and Epiphany are now close enough that the extra features that Galeon provides can be implemented as Epiphany extensions, and so plan to move forward in that direction. They feel that this way would mean much less duplication of effort.

It's not an easy thing to make such a decision - pride often keeps "my pet project" going for much longer than it should - and so I applaud the Galeon developers, and hope that the resulting browser(s) become better than the sum of the parts.

Calling Firefox One...

Recently, Oregon State University launched Firefox One, a weather balloon with a camera and Firefox banner attached. Apparently, it went up to 100,000 feet and took pictures of Firefox from the edge of space.

What the article doesn't say is that once it reached 100,000 feet, it burst and came back down again. Furthermore, it wasn't equipped with a working GPS transponder, and they haven't found it yet. So if any geeks in the Western United States have some spare time, they might consider using it to drive around their locality looking for a large white parachute-like thing draped over a tree...

Wikipedia Needs Benevolent Dictators

The controversy over the quality of Wikipedia articles continues. It seems that many contributors prefer to add sentences and make fiddling edits rather than trying to get an article to cohere stylistically. In response, Wikipedians have started "Project Galatea", which encourages people to rewrite articles with a consistent style. Their philosophy says:

For every Galatea, there is one Pygmalion. While Project Galatea members are highly encouraged to work together with both the article's regular contributors and the other project members (see below), the usual Wikipedia method of collaborative, incremental edits simply does not lend itself to proper stylistic rewrites. When all is said and done, for every problematic article there needs to be one Project Galatea member who is willing and able to bring it to life.

They are right; and I think Wikipedia needs to go further. Every article of any significance (perhaps measured by hits) needs a Benevolent Dictator, just like a minature free software project. That person would be responsible for the overall quality of the article, and would have more authority than the average Wikipedian over edits. There would need to be a removal/replacement mechanism which could not be trivially invoked; perhaps it would require other senior contributors to agree that the person was either a terrible author or wasn't writing the article with a NPOV.

Perhaps this is moving away from the principle of "everyone is equal" but, to be honest, I'd rather have an expert in control of an article on their subject than a level playing field.

Browsers At The BBC

It was on Slashdot, but perhaps not everyone reads that, so: here's a very thoughtful article giving detailed stats on the browser breakdown for www.bbc.co.uk. The number you are looking for is 9.7%, but the rest is still worth a read.

DHTML Widgetry

Steven Wittens has created a ridiculously cool DHTML HSV colourpicker, which cunningly uses overlaid transparent PNGs to get the SV square in the middle. Not content with that, he also created a way to turn a select box into a discrete-mark slider bar using only CSS. See his full blogpost for more details.

BarCamp

So much cool stuff happened at BarCamp that it's hard to know where to start.

The first thing I noticed is that there's an emerging "Web 2.0" geek community which only has limited overlap with the free software hacking community. They all have Flickr accounts, think del.icio.us is the best thing since sliced bread, and use the word "mash-up" several times a day. And Flock, which released their first public test version during BarCamp, is designed with exactly them in mind.

Also present were a big contingent from the Drupal CMS project, because BarCamp followed on from their DrupalCon; people from Mediamatic, the conference hosts who kindly let us crash in their workspace and cook in their kitchen; and a load of local Dutch hackers from various projects like Jabber.

One camper whose name I don't know works for a Venture Capital firm, and did a session on how to turn an idea into a successful company. Maybe I missed something, but it seemed very much to me that his VC-recommended business plan for new startups was:

• Build a passionate community around social software
• ???
• Profit!

Hey, if it's VC-recommended, Flock should be fine... [Chris Messina has a t-shirt design which says "Don't ask me about my business model", so I'm currently assuming it's the one above. Of course, I could be wrong.]

Roland ran a "Fabulous Flickr Fun" session, where people were supposed to say the coolest thing about Flickr and a feature they'd like to see. Off the top of my head, I came up with AutoMashups, which would choose two CC-licensed photos at random which had either the left or the right side predominantly one colour (i.e. boring) and fade them into each other to get weird juxtapositions. While he was talking, I tried to do this manually, and found that there are far fewer half-boring photos on Flickr than you might imagine. I finally found two and mashed them up into something really cool, but then realised that they are both All Rights Reserved, so I can't share the result with you! Constrained culture sucks. Note to Flickr: improve your CC-licensed-photos browsing interface. Currently, you can only see 100 in each CC category.

And that's just a start; as my brain unwinds, there may well be more.

Tags: barcampamsterdam, barcamp

Hacking in Amsterdam

After a lie in, a group of BarCampers and I went to a cafe with free WiFi for lunch. It was in the middle of a street of other cafes - so that's ten customers they probably wouldn't have had otherwise. It saddens me that WiFi hotspots in cafes the UK all still seem to be pay-for. I was looking for a free hotspot in London overlooking a park the other day, so I could sit and hack for a few hours, and couldn't find one, (Of course, it didn't help that consume.net's site was down. Obviously someone unmade their switch...).

We then moved on to a techo-squat in Java Straat, Amsterdam called ASCII (Amsterdam Subversive Centre for Information Interchange), from where I'm writing this. They describe themselves as a "people's communication lab" - they provide internet services to the community, including free computers and free WiFi. It's a cool place to hang out.

Here Comes Flock...

I'm currently at BarCamp in a tower block in Amsterdam, it's a quarter to midnight, and Chris Messina and Andy Smith from Flock are here. They tell me that the first public preview of Flock, their browser based on Gecko, is going to be released in the next 24 hours. I've seen a demo, and they have a bunch of really interesting ideas to do with integrating social software and web services - like blogging, Flickr and del.icio.us - directly into the browser. It still has a few rough edges, though, so caveat downloador.

Update: Here it is. I don't know if they password-unprotected the directory, but if they did, go get it. :-)

OpenDocument for Office

It looks like others have had the same idea as me. The OpenOpenOffice project (not convinced by the name, though - how does it make OpenOffice more open?) aims to give the ability to read and write OpenDocument to Microsoft Word users. Their plan is to use a remote conversion server and SOAP. It's being sponsored by Open Source Victoria in Australia, who should have a press release up soon.

In related news, OpenOffice.org 2.0 final has hit the mirrors. Don't all rush at once - this link is to a particular mirror, as it hasn't propagated fully. There's also no official release announcement yet; although I expect that very soon. I hope they won't be upset that I've noticed. No-one tell Slashdot ;-)

Two-Factor Authentication - Practical Issues

Banks are starting to use two-factor authentication for internet banking, One increasingly-popular method, used for years by people like RSA (they call it SecureID) to protect corporate intranet logins, is to have a small hardware key fob with an LCD screen with digits that change every sixty seconds. For those who've never seen them, they are based on a seed value and an algorithm, like a random number generator, which takes the seed and produces a random sequence. When logging in, you need to enter both your password and the current sequence of digits as displayed on an LCD on the device; the server also knows the seed and computes the correct value in the sequence to check against the one you submitted.

The obvious problem this is going to lead to is that people with several of these logins are going to have to carry several key fobs. With each one needing to be big enough to fit an 8 or 10-digit LCD screen on, that's going to get bulky very quickly.

So, why don't the banks get together and figure out a simple open standard, whereby you could make a widget with a screen into which you could plug five or ten tiny, half-matchstick-sized "pins", one for each account? These would be like tiny SIM cards, and would contain the sequence-generation seed which matched the one on the bank's servers. The widget would let you select which pin's sequence to display, when you were logging in to that particular service. So your five or ten login widgets would collapse into one.

Microsoft Announces New Shared Source Licences

I'm sitting in a Microsoft keynote at EuroOSCON, and Jason Matusow of Microsoft has just announced that, in the name of licensing simplicity, in future any code Microsoft releases under the Shared Source program will be under one of three licences:

• The Microsoft Permissive Licence (Ms-PL) - a BSD-like licence;
• The Microsoft Community Licence (Ms-CL) - an MPL-like licence;
• The Microsoft Reference Licence (Ms-RL) - a proprietary "look but don't touch" licence which restricts use and distribution to within your own company.

At least, that's what he said. Reading the small print, it turns out that there are, in fact, five licences in the new set. The other two are the Ms-LPL and the Ms-LCL, where the L stands for "Limited" - in this case, limited to the Microsoft Windows platform. The site says, rather weaselly, that "The platform restriction is a measure that Microsoft, as a commercial software provider, may choose for a particular source code release in order to enable positive interaction with Windows-based developers." Hmm.

Amusingly, Nat Torkington (conference chairman), when summing up the talk just afterwards, said "Microsoft has just announced a BSD-like licence and a GPL-like licence". Now that would have been even bigger news! But his slip does point out a noticeable gap in this licence range. The lack of a fully copyleft option means that Microsoft's opposition to share-everything licences has not changed.

One very interesting feature of the licences, which differentiates e.g. the Ms-PL from the BSD licence, is that they have each got a termination-for-patent-litigation clause. Among other things, this makes the Ms-PL incompatible with the GPL (or, at least, GPL version 2).

If it turns out that the Ms-PL and the Ms-CL are free software/open source licences (and, on a quick reading, it seems to me that they are), then this is a great thing - because more free software is always a great thing. But the rest of Jason's talk made it clear that Microsoft still doesn't see customer value in software freedom, and the definite non-freeness of the "Windows only" versions of each opens up great possibilities of confusion. GPL -> free. LGPL -> still free. Ms-PL -> free. Ms-LPL - definitely not free.

So while I welcome moves by anyone to make their code free, Shared Source is still not Open Source or Free Software. Let's not allow the boundaries to be blurred - Shared Source is not a brand you can trust for software freedom; we mustn't let it become an "embrace and extend" of Open Source.

Technorati tags (experimental): EuroOSCON, Microsoft, Licensing

Second Times Online Article

My second Times Online article is now available. Entitled "Open formats make history - and maintain it", it talks about how the decision of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to use OpenDocument is the start of a move towards people reclaiming control of their data.

As I mentioned two weeks ago, this is the second in a two-column trial. I'll let you know how the discussions go about making the arrangement more permanent.

The Price Of Fame

It seems to be one of the prices of fame for Firefox that anyone who jumps up and down enough can get on the front page of Slashdot with a Firefox security-related story. Frank has pointed out that Firefox has become part of several "master narratives", the major one of which is "the new browser wars" of Firefox vs. IE. As security is one area of comparison, it's easy to connect to that master narrative with a story about "Shock! Firefox is not as secure as its proponents claim". Therefore any suggestion of a new hole, which makes a story like that easy to write, is not treated with an appropriate level of investigative scepticism.

Newsflash: there are quite a few invalid HTML constructs which crash Firefox, just as I'm sure there are a lot of invalid documents which crash Word. That doesn't mean they are all security holes - and no-one has demonstrated any evidence that this one (bug 210658) is. And claiming that it's a DOS is frankly stretching the meaning of that term beyond breaking point. Crashing a single application used by a single person is not a DOS.

Furthermore, it's worth repeating that security is not a state, it's a process - and the fact that we have made regular point releases since the release of Firefox 1.0 shows that we take that process seriously. But we won't be making one for this bug unless someone can demonstrate that it's anything other than a common-or-garden crash.

Off to EuroOSCON

If you're coming, add a comment and then stop me and say Hi :-)

EULAlyser

This (via O'Reilly Radar) should be a Firefox plugin. And it should be called EULAnalyser, because it's much easier to say ;-)

Hacking for Kids

[Here's another one in the long list of ideas I'd like to execute but will probably never have time.]

If kids learn programming these days, it's usually LOGO or BASIC or some other training-wheels language. This is no way to breed the next generation of hackers. And I'm sure there are geeks around the world who would love their sons, daughters, nephews and nieces to get into programming, but look down the shelves of their bookshop with a cry of despair. It seems to be a choice between "Visual Basic for Dummies", "Programming Excel" and "Learn C in 24 Easy Lessons". As Dijkstra famously said, ""It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." And when you are learning to program, you want to write programs which do stuff, not have to spend ages in C managing memory and making sure your strings are terminated with \0.

Sometimes these books come with a CD, containing a cut-down version of a commercial development environment they are hoping you will buy, and perhaps a weedy editor, all running under Windows with no source code available. What sort of example is that to set? Trying to learn to hack on a Microsoft Windows machine or any other closed-source system is like trying to learn to dance while wearing a body cast.

How about a book "Hacking for Kids"?⁰ Written for teenagers, it would explain how cool hacking is and the path to becoming a hacker, and would give kids fun and interesting programming projects using powerful modern languages such as Perl, free Java, Python and JavaScript. It would teach best practice in programming, not treating the user as an idiot who can only cope with cut-and-pasting code chunks in a jigsaw-puzzle fashion.

The obvious problem is that, before the revolution, most kids will still have Windows on their home computer, and parents tend to frown on suggestions from their 12-year-old which go along the lines of "Hey, Dad, there's this cool new operating system - er, that's like software which controls the computer - called Linux that I'd like to use to learn to program. Can I install it on our computer alongside Windows? It probably won't mess it up. I promise." The publishing company might also quail at the thought of the tech support calls.

So, the book would include either a Linux LiveCD, or something based on coLinux which allows you to boot your Linux desktop in a Windows window. Then, of course, you can give them access to decent free editors, compilers, scripting languages, webservers, development environments etc. etc. All the manuals, references and source code samples for the languages and projects would be pre-installed. It would use various cool loopback/filesystem overlay tricks that the LiveCD community have invented to store all the kid's programs and other configuration data on the computer's real hard drive. And, of course, it would include the source for, and ability to rebuild, all the tools - and at least one project would involve hacking on, say, the editor to add a new feature to it.

How compelling would that be?

[0] Of course, in the real world, you wouldn't be able to use that title :-(

IE 7 Exposéd

A screenshot from the latest leaked Windows Vista build show a rather sexy-looking IE 7, seemingly with some sort of "Exposé"-style tab selection interface. Neat.

Auto-UNCO: Stage 2 Completed

OK, so it's all over. Some stats for you:

*: not including all Layout components and SVG, which were excluded

You may remember from last time, two weeks ago, my calculations about filling up timeless' Gmail account. We calculated that we could send him a bugmail every two minutes, and the account would never fill up. Now 14 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes / 2 = 10080. So, with 9722 bugs changed, we are pretty much on target there :-) Anyone got any ideas how we can keep the rate up for the next two weeks?

There are now only 6040 UNCONFIRMED bugs remaining in those five components, which is rather more tractable. If you are in QA and doing UNCO bug triage, I would at first start with bugs which went through this process and were tagged by their reporters as "yes, I still see this". Let's see if we can get the figure below 6000 and keep it there.

Donation Disappointment

It's not every day that the Mozilla Foundation gets an email like this:

I would like to make a $10,000 contribution to your noble cause. Also put me on your mailing list for updates, newsletters, or anything you think I should know about. Call me at 555-555-5555 with details needed for my check. I also want to introduce you to some corporate friends of mine who can make a much larger donation. Keep up the good work...

Wow, jackpot, right? Then again, this sort of thing is usually too good to be true. So we did a little research. Yes, the guy existed, and his phone number in an online directory matched the one in the email. Yes, he was a bigwig in an large company, and an ex-banker, so he's probably loaded. Yes, he'd previously made charitable donations to other organisations. It was all looking really promising.

So eventually, we called the number - only to find an answering machine telling us that his account had been hacked, and to ignore any messages sent in his name.

:-(

The Future For British Geeks (2)

Typing "../../../" into your URL bar can now be a criminal offence punishable by a £1000 fine, even if there are no malicious motives in your actions.

Microsoft VP Plugs Open Office

"OpenOffice isn’t hard to get, just go to their website and download the software."

OpenDocument in Word

Idea picked up from a famous LinuxWorld delegate: wouldn't it be cool if someone took the relevant bits of code from the OpenOffice.org core, and wrote a silent helper app for converting OpenDocument files into MS formats? Once you installed it, it would register in Windows for the OpenDocument MIME types. Then, when an Office user got an OpenDocument document by email and double-clicked it, the program would silently convert it to MS format, and open Word (or Excel or whatever) on the temporary file. So it would appear to the user as if Word could read OpenDocument docs.

(Yes, you might be able to build the same function into Word itself as an addon, but I suspect that might be quite a bit harder, because you'd need to understand Word's internal data structures.)

Such a converter would be an important part of the migration path for an organisation moving to OpenDocument. The great thing about it is that it would turn Word into a second class citizen. If everyone's exchanging OpenDocument documents; OpenOffice.org or KOffice users can both read and write them, but Word users can only read them. What a good reason to upgrade :-)

I wonder how hard it would be to write? It's basically just a scripted copy of OpenOffice.org, so surely not too hard?

Trophy Picture

So I retrieved the award from the hotel this afternoon :-) Here it is, in all its glory. Congratulations to everyone who is a part of SpreadFirefox (or "Spread Firefox", as the award puts it).

The small writing which you can't read on the low-res photo I uploaded says: "In Association With Linuxuser & Developer Magazine and, Open Forum Europe" (sic) - a sentence with three mistakes in, which must be some kind of record for a trophy.

It's going to sit on my shelf for now unless anyone can think of something better to do with it. Suggestions involving blowtorches will be politely ignored.

Update: that last paragraph was a (poor) attempt at humour, prompted by my recollection of the blowtorch incident from Microserfs, and wasn't intended to imply any disrespect towards the award or the organisers. Rereading it, that might not have been exactly clear. By "something better to do with it", I actually meant "someone more appropriate to give it to" - as you know, I'm not heavily involved with SpreadFirefox. It would much rather it sat on the shelf of someone who had earned it rather than mine.

Firefox Downloads Speeding Up?

Asbjørn Sloth Tønnesen keeps some good stats on Firefox downloads. One of his graphs shows the predicted time and date for the 100,000,000th download, plotted over time. As you can see, over the last month the predicted date has been getting sooner - implying that the Firefox download rate has actually been increasing. Doesn't it?

Linux and Open Source Awards 2005

The awards ceremony for the Linux and Open Source Awards 2005 was last night. I was fortunate enough to be sitting between someone from Powys Council, who have implemented a Free software desktop for their schools, and were up for the best Public Sector Implementation award, and Daniel James, the [Update: deputy] editor of Linux User and Developer, the award's organisers. We had some very interesting conversations about how we can encourage kids to be interested in computers as tools they can make do what they want, rather than glitzy televisions where they just sit and consume. Free software is the way forward.

Across the table was a guy from Nokia, who had a pre-release Nokia 770 (warning - Flash) he was letting us play with. It is very cool - it's Linux-based, and has both WiFi and Bluetooth but not GSM, so it's a mobile phone accessory rather than a complete phone in itself. The screen is very high res, and there's a hardware Zoom button so you can increase the page size if it strains your eyes. I got into the hotel's WiFi but they had a captive portal, so I dialled out through his phone instead to look up the latest Firefox download number. 95 million and counting :-) On the show floor, I also met a company, called "OpenHand" I think, who did a lot of the work on the software.

Also on the table was Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of PHP. He was very insistent that PHP was really a tool for his own use, and so features tended to appear when he or another core group member needed them rather than when anyone else did. Which is fair enough :-) At one point, the conversation turned to PHP 5 adoption rates, and Rasmus said it was like Apache - PHP 4 worked so well that it took people time to upgrade.

Oh, and SpreadFirefox won Best Marketing Project! Although I collected the award (amid pounding music), I should point out that it was actually won by everyone who has encouraged anyone to install Firefox on their machines - the thousands and thousands of people around the world who have fallen in love with our software, and care enough about friends, colleagues and workmates that they want to set them free from the scourge of viruses, popups and spyware. This one's for you :-)

I would put up a photo of the award but I accidentally left it at the hotel :-( I'll pick it up on Saturday and post a photo then. Oops...

LinuxWorld Log

LinuxWorld was fun, although it's quite a corporate show - most of the space is big business booths, with the real projects segregated into the ".org pavilion". David, David and Tristan (whose badge said he was from "Moxilla Euorpe") at the Mozilla Europe booth were complaining about the lack of Internet access, which is a bit of a downer if you are showing off a browser.

Wandering around the show floor, I had some interesting experiences:

Non-Technical Salesman: Sir, can I tell you about <product>?

Gerv: Go on, then.

NTS: Well, it lets you run Linux applications on Windows, and Windows applications on Linux!

Gerv: Wow, that's, er, quite impressive.

NTS: <looks at my t-shirt> Hey, you work for those Firefox people, don't you?

Gerv: Er, yes.

NTS: Well, we could make Firefox run on Windows!

A couple of guys from Google were wandering around the stands - a sysadmin chap from Ireland, and his minder from recruitment ;-) They were giving away very cool magnetic Google logo badges with six coloured LEDs which flashed in sequence - one for each letter. Apparently they are looking to hire 50 developers this year for their Dublin office so, if you think you've got what it takes, visit www.google.ie/greatjobs.

I managed to get into the Technical track to hear Klaus Knopper on Knoppix, and some very interesting data from Alan Cox's Masters thesis. I don't know if Alan's slides are online; basically, he was looking at "Linux on the Desktop", the relative popularity of GNOME and KDE, and users' perceptions. The most interesting thing was that users tend not to care which one they have, and perhaps don't even know there is a difference - they just use what their vendor ships by default. The differentiators are now at the level above - the apps, like OpenOffice.org and Firefox.

I would have liked to have heard more talks, but when I went back for one on Open Source in Local Government, they told me that my Exhibitors pass wasn't supposed to let me in :-(

Update: Here's a writeup of Alan's talk.

LinuxWorld London

Today is the first day of LinuxWorld London; Tristan and David Hallowell are running the Mozilla booth in the .org pavilion. I'll be there in the morning; I have a PET scan in the afternoon. In the evening, it's the Linux and Open Source Awards - SpreadFirefox has been nominated for Best Marketing Campaign, and Firefox has been nominated for the Best Linux/Open Source Project reader award. Watch this space :-)

First Column in The Times Online

Following on from the interview I gave a couple of weeks ago, The Times Online has been kind enough to offer me a fortnightly column - straplined "Our Man from Mozilla" (after "Our Man in Havana" by Graham Greene). I'm on a two-article trial, and then they'll let me know if they want me to continue :-)

The first article is published today; entitled "Cry Freedom", it talks about the difference between Free Software and Open Source, and why it's important to the average user as well as programmers.

Copilot on Linux?

A lot of Linux-running geeks are their family's technical support helpdesk, whether they like it or not. Given that fact, it would be great if Copilot, Fog Creek's easy-to-use VNC-based desktop remote control system released in August, supported Linux for the helper even if not for the helpee. The software is based on TightVNC, which is cross-platform, so compiling a version for Linux surely can't be too hard. They just need to integrate it into their website - and, perhaps, to disclaim all support if they feel it would be too great a burden. The people the Linux client is aimed at probably wouldn't need it.

Hmm... the source is available so perhaps someone could compile it for Linux and make it available? What I don't quite get is, when I download and run the helper's software on Windows, it knows "who I am". Does it look at my browser cookies? Or is the download customised on-the-fly to embed identifying information? I read the spec, but it doesn't say...