freenode #live 2018
3 - 4 Nov 2018 at We The Curious

Opening Remarks

Currently Project Leader of the Debian GNU/Linux project and a member of Board of Directors for the Open Source Initiative, Chris is a freelance computer programmer, author of dozens of free-software projects and contributor to 100s of others. He has been official Debian Developer since 2008 and is currently highly active in the Reproducible Builds sub-project for which he has been awarded a grant from the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative. In his spare time he is an avid classical musician and Ironman triathlete. Chris has spoken at numerous conferences including LinuxCon China, HKOSCon, linux.conf.au, DjangoCon Europe, LibrePlanet, OSCAL, All Things Open, SCALE, Software Freedom Kosovo, #freenode Live, FOSS’ASIA, and many more.

Libreboot is a free (as in freedom) BIOS or UEFI replacement, initialising the hardware and booting your operating system. It replaces the proprietary BIOS/UEFI typically found on a computer system.

Open source electronics is only useful if you actually know how to make and assemble a given design. In this talk Kaspar will walk through the build of an electronic circuit assembly: from ordering or making the board, getting the parts and soldering them on to get to a working project.

Generating random numbers is essential to cryptography and providing a source of true randomness is an important feature for modern systems. The kernel provides a software implantation but this often lacks sufficient entropy at critical points (especially at boot), is not trusted by components running in secure contexts such as Arm TrustZone, and an equivalent rarely exists in the small RTOSes that power the IoT. An alternative is a hardware true random number generator (TRNG) but what if you are working on a system without one? This session is a case study describing our work to bring an OP-TEE port and a hardware TRNG to the 96Boards Developerbox. This platform does not include a TRNG peripheral so we had to find an alternative. We wrote an OP-TEE static Trusted Application (TA) to collect entropy using thermal noise from the on-chip thermal sensors. The data we got required conditioning to eliminate bias but with simple conditioning we were able to generate sequences of numbers that pass suitable fitness tests. We will also look at how we optimized entropy collection using secure timer interrupt to avoid busy loops.

The devices and applications that users engage with are being made in such a way that the user loses the capability to fully take advantage of the power of their device. This then limits the freedom the user has to do or create whatever they want. For example, modern mobile devices are built on top of the Linux (or similar) kernel, but they don’t easily allow users to install or build anything they like. This is even more concerning given that, for many children and for many people in developing countries, a mobile device is their only computing device. UserLAnd will remedy this situation by providing applications and cloud services that make sure Linux and all of its capabilities are never out of reach. This talk will start at the problem, then discuss our existing solutions and what is coming in the future and then dig even deeper into how we make it all work (including tricks like system call manipulation and the use of LD_PRELOAD). There will be something for everyone.

Find us in the Rosalind Franklin room in We The Curious for some food

A discussion with Doc Searls and Simon Phipps

The free software movement aims to have all software be free “as in freedom.” But communication tools are especially important, because they are fundamental to the movement’s infrastructure, and its self image. We are supposed to be the experts in distributed, online collaboration. Communication and collaboration tools are also where we have had some of our greatest disappointments and challenges in recent years – consider the popularity and subsequent network effects of tools like Skype, Slack, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger. Can free tools – IRC, XMPP, GNU Ring, WebRTC, and others – overcome or even just compete with the network effect of the proprietary platforms? If so, how? What’s the current state of affairs and what should we be focusing on?

Someone believes in you, loves what you’re doing, and wants to contribute their time to your project - it’s a great feeling! But how do you keep your volunteers and contributors engaged and motivated, especially when you’re not in a position to pay them? This talk will explore different ways to reward and encourage the volunteers who dedicate their time, skills, and energy to your projects and to your communities. In addition to a discussion about leadership practices and some of the psychology behind volunteer engagement, you also should come away with some practical, easy-to-implement ideas for your projects.

A lot has happened since CGI:IRC was first released. The first versions didn’t even use JavaScript; now JavaScript webapps are taken for granted. This talk may contain nostalgia.

This talk should represent the Container as a Service platform Kubic by openSUSE. You will receive an overview about the docker based image with openSUSE Tumbleweed and how to benefit from all the features other Linux distributions don’t provide.

Bradley M. Kuhn is the Distinguished Technologist at Software Freedom Conservancy, and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, as an early adopter of GNU/Linux, and contributor to various Free Software projects. Kuhn’s non-profit career began in 2000 at FSF. As FSF’s Executive Director from 2001-2005, Kuhn led FSF’s GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. Kuhn was appointed President of Conservancy in April 2006, was Conservancy’s primary volunteer from 2006-2010, and has been a full-time staffer since early 2011. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. Kuhn received an O’Reilly Open Source Award, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing.

Join us at We The Curious for our evening event

As an internationally known Developer Relations strategist and Community Management expert, Leslie Hawthorn has spent the past decade creating, cultivating, and enabling open source communities. She’s best known for creating Google Code-in, the world’s first global initiative to involve pre-university students in open source software development, launching the second-most trafficked Google Developer Blog, receiving an O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2010 for her work to grow the Google Summer of Code program and her contributions to Humanitarian open source projects. During her 15+ years working in the technology industry, Leslie has developed, honed and shared open source expertise spanning the Enterprise to NGOs, including senior roles at Google, Red Hat, the Open Source Initiative, the OSU Open Source Lab and several startups, including Elastic. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, she and her family now call Amsterdam home, though she travels worldwide to keynote about open source, and building products and teams that are built to last. You can follow her adventures on Twitter @lhawthorn. Text from Hawthorn Landings [CC BY 3.0]

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How do you build a lasting and successful company that also stays true to its open source roots? This talk takes a look at why open source is important to business and three essential elements of this path: * Strategy: How can you monetize your open source product? Is it support, an open core approach, cloud services, or a combination of the three? And which ones are the features you can even commercialize without alienating your community? * Struggle: “You received a 100 million dollars in venture capital and yet you have so many open issues?!” Once money is involved the dynamics often change. How can you manage expectations and still build on a flourishing open source community? * Success: How do you balance open source and commercial success? How do you align engineering and sales decisions? This talk takes the perspective of Elastic, the company behind the open source products Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats, and Logstash, which makes its money with support, the commercial X-Pack extensions, and cloud offerings. But we are also taking a look at how others are approaching this challenge, what worked, and what failed.

You might be working on an open source project, and it seems that you will require people to sign up to use for your service. Seems easy enough, right? But, what happens when you start collecting user information? What are the implications? How do you keep the information secure? How do regulations like GDPR impact the service that you will be providing? The top concern of many open source users is privacy, and making sure that their private and personal information and details do not get leaked, misused, or abused. During this talk, you will learn what identity management is, what are some best practices around gathering and storing user information, and about a couple tools that you could find useful for making this job easy. You will also learn a bit more about the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union, which was implemented on May 25th. What information is covered under this regulation and what changes with it? Who are going to be affected?

Having using GNU Emacs for more than 6 years now and doing Python development for equal amount of time I’d like to share my experience with this great GNU software which has been for 30 years. I’d like to go through how I use Emacs for almost all my tasks like note taking, agenda, LaTeX, reveal.js presentations, IDE, and IRC. In this talk I’ll demonstrate how Emacs can be configured to do all such thing without a need to a dedicated application for each specific task. I’ll also talk about how to maintain Emacs configurations using org-mode and literate programming.

With security issues regularly hitting press, we are more worried than ever about our reputations. How do you know if the newest security flaw to hit the news is a panic situation or not? Come along to discover some of the processes, data, tools and communications that the Red Hat Product Security team uses to help our customers and the community stay safe. Using Meltdown/Spectre, we will walk through behind the scenes of what happens within the Red Hat Product Security team, the decision making processes, work with researchers and the community, and ultimately the resulting customer facing fixes and content we publish.

Have some Lunch... on Sunday!

Kyle Rankin is the Chief Security Officer at Purism, SPC and a Tech Editor and columnist at Linux Journal. He is the author of Linux Hardening in Hostile Networks, DevOps Troubleshooting, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, Knoppix Hacks, Knoppix Pocket Reference, Linux Multimedia Hacks and Ubuntu Hacks, and also a contributor to a number of other O’Reilly books. Rankin speaks frequently on security and free and open source software including at BsidesLV, O’Reilly Security Conference, OSCON, SCALE, CactusCon, OpenWest, Linux World Expo and Penguicon. You can follow him at @kylerankin.

The talk will explain the key features like provisioning, monitoring, and configuration management in brief and how easy it becomes to have all these features under the same hood. The talk will consist of how foreman manages to solve real-world problems and how I began my journey with the Foreman project. Lastly, I will show you, how to contribute to the project and the benefits of the same.

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VM (aka Vicky) spent most of her 20 years in the tech industry leading software development departments and teams, and providing technical management and leadership consulting for small and medium businesses. Now she leverages nearly 30 years of free and open source software experience and a strong business background to advise companies about free/open source, technology, community, business, and the intersections between them. She is the author of Forge Your Future with Open Source, the first book to detail how to contribute to free and open source software projects. Think of it as the missing manual of open source contributions and community participation. The book is published by The Pragmatic Programmers and is now available in an early release beta version. It’s available at https://fossforge.com. Vicky is the Vice President of the Open Source Initiative, a moderator and author for opensource.com, an author for Linux Journal, and a frequent and popular speaker at free/open source conferences and events. She’s the proud winner of the Perl White Camel Award (2014) and the O’Reilly Open Source Award (2016). She blogs about free/open source, business, and technical management at {anonymous => ‘hash’};