freenode #live
28 - 29 Oct 2017 at We The Curious (formerly At-Bristol)

Come and get checked in!

Welcome and Opening Remarks

Deb Nicholson is a free software policy nerd and passionate community advocate. She is the Community Outreach Director for the Open Invention Network, the largest patent non-aggression community in history which serves Linux, GNU, Android and other key FOSS projects. She’s won the O’Reilly Open Source Award, one of the most recognized awards in the FOSS world, for her work on GNU MediaGoblin and OpenHatch. She is a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community. She also serves on the Software Freedom Conservancy's Evaluation Committee, which acts as a curator of new member projects. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Think about what you've just heard whilst we get sorted for the rest of the day

If you develop or distribute software of any kind you are vulnerable to whole new categories of attack including blackmail, extortion or simple malware injection... even if all you distribute is the source code. By going after software developers, malicious actors can attack and infect thousands — if not millions — of end-users. However, the motivation behind "reproducible" builds is to allow verification that no flaws have been introduced during compilation processes. This prevents against the installation of backdoor introducing malware on developers' machines as well ensuring any attempts at blackmail are pointless or futile. Through a story of three different developers, this talk will focus on this growing threat to developers and how it affects everyone involved in the production lifecycle of software development… as well as how reproducible builds can help prevent against it. It will also mention some of the cool tools that have come out of the Reproducible Builds development.

Gone are the days when IRC was the only place to engage with open source communities in real time. Now, projects have a gluttony of choice when deciding on a platform to host their community and development chat rooms. But how can we manage the problem where half the community insists on sticking to their painstakingly cludged together command line IRC configurations, and the other half just can't function without emoji reactions? Well, yes, it's more nuanced than that, but can we help bridge the gap by teaching an old protocol new tricks? This talk will cover the IRCv3 working group's progress on modernising the IRC protocol, and how to use gateways to merge a forked community back together.

In this hands on workshop, we use Opensource friendly vendors' developer kit hardware to piece together a mini IoT Empire. The hardware is made available for the duration of the workshop and may include nRF-51DK, FRDM-KL25Z, Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone Black, Minnowboard, Tessel2 or similiar devices. This workshop is a beginner level for enthusiasts of many languages including Python, JavaScript, C/C++, Go, and more. Development environments Self paced participants can choose from a variety of Opensource portable frameworks and development environments such as: PlatformIO Arduino IDE Cloud9 IDE NodeJS ARM Mbed ...or an unportable one of their choice Step by step instruction will likely be given using ARM Mbed or PlatformIO. IoT Empire appearances The IoT Empire series of training is delivered at events throughout the world, most recently selling out a full class at Black Hat in Las Vegas. For more information, please review the wiki at: https://edu-europalab.rhcloud.com Requirements Please bring a portable computer (any kind) with two or more free USB ports. Optionally bring a smartphone or embedded device of your own, like Chip, Omega, LoPy, and other similar IoT relevant devices not in our inventory.

One of the amazing things about the GNOME project is how it brings people together, both by bringing new developers into free software for the first time, and by fostering cooperation and interoperability between different Free Software components. The "year of the Free Software desktop" may not be in the next twelve months, but for those that use GNOME, we can work together to ensure that software freedoms are accessible by all. This talk will have a look at some of the challenges that GNOME faces at the moment, a brief look into the future, and how we can meet those head on and thrive.

Free and open-source software has had a huge impact on software development and computing overall. Many thousands of projects have been created by numerous people for a variety of reasons. However, this variety makes it difficult to figure out what to work on next. To the person just starting out in open-source, it's almost as it seems like everything's already been solved. In this talk, I'll talk about how I was able to use things in my life--most seemingly unrelated to open source--to create brand new projects and contribute to existing ones. I'll also give ideas on where one can look for inspiration when determining what to work on next. At the end you too will be seeing things that you can improve with the power of open source software and well on your way to making an impact on the community.

Have a break, get some food.

TBA

This talk is an attempt to take a long durée view of challenges to IRC in the context of the changing technology landscape and its political economy, with a conclusion that addresses the burning questions of the day: the widespread adoption of Slack on one hand; innovation in decentralised technologies on the other hand, as well as the acquisition of freenode. IRC manifests a basic human desire to chat, hang out and collaborate in an informal manner. However, these activities have not always been valued too high by managers and gatekeepers of IP networks. At other times, they have been perceived as the potential basis for lucrative business models. Therefore, IRC communities and operators met various challenges through the history of the technology, ranging from outright ban to corporate takeover. Social conflicts unfolded in close interaction with industry actors, where sometimes users even reclaimed resources from employers. However, the very meaning and consequences of peer directed projects also shifted with the reorganisation of production during the recent decades of late capitalism. Nonetheless, the story of IRC is an outstanding example of the self-organisation and self-management of users, showing how norms of organising and managing infrastructures prevalent in the early days of the Internet could persist through increasingly hostile historical circumstances.

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The passing of the Digital Economy Act 2017 means that porn websites will need to verify that their UK visitors are over 18. Websites that fail to do so may be blocked by Internet Service Providers. It is still not clear how this badly thought-out legislation can be implemented without putting the privacy and security of UK citizens at risk. Some of the proposals could leave people vulnerable to credit card fraud, blackmail or an Ashley Madison style hack. Our free speech is threatened too - the blocking powers could set a precedent for censoring legal content on a massive scale. The UK's leading obscenity lawyer and Legal Director of the Open Rights Group, Myles Jackman, will explain how this latest law is part of an ongoing attempt by the Government to 'control' the Internet, and how it puts our liberty and freedom at risk.

freenode has nearly 100,000 active daily users and over 50,000 channels. However, only a small team made up of a couple dozen volunteers gets to see all of the work taking place behind the scenes to keep the network running smoothly. In this talk, Nathan Handler (nhandler) will share some details about the common (and not so common) tasks that staff perform. He will also discuss how staff and their work have evolved over the the years. Finally, he will share some of the goals freenode has for the future and ways that you and your projects can help freenode meet those goals.

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Bringing great software to Linux doesn't have to be hard

If you haven't been paying attention to javascript (and I can entirely understand why you might prefer not to), things have changed quite amazingly over the last few years. Ok, they got 'use strict' years ago - but now they've added 'let', which is proper scoping, anonymous function declaration syntax that won't give you RSI, a class keyword, and more. Plus annotations now let you make all sorts of trouble, and the tooling to transpile to Olde JS is mostly comprehensible and no longer replaced by something completely different every two weeks. So, clearly, the only sensible thing to do was to try and write ES6 in the same OO-heavy style I write perl5, and see how far I managed to get. Come to this talk and you'll find out.

Come and talk about something interesting!

Drinks Reception with entertainment by Stand-Up Mathematician Matt Parker

Only here for Sunday? Don't worry, you can still register.

Communities, collaboration and conflict Many of us are here because we're part of at least one online community. Many of us have made lifelong friends, found jobs, travelled the world and had experiences we could never have imagined, all as a result of collaborative online projects bringing us together - participating in communities has grown our lives and brought us joy and success. And others have had the opposite experience. Membership of online communities has brought them stress and unhappiness or targeted them for abuse. People have been attacked for their sex, race, sexuality or neuroatypicality. People's professional lives have been ruined, and in some cases also their personal lives. Communities are not always welcoming. Online communities have existed for decades, but we're still only now coming to terms with building ones that help without hurting. What's the difference between communities that foster collaboration and communities that create conflict? What have we learned through that history? And in a world that's basically on fire, is there any hope of doing better in future?

Give us time to magically create three rooms out of one

TBA

New systems are always interesting targets since their security model couldn’t mature yet. NoSQL databases are no exception and had some lurid articles about their security, but how does their protection actually look like? We will take a look at three widely used systems and their unique approaches: * MongoDB: Widely criticized for publicly accessible databases and a common victim of ransomware. Actually, it provides an elaborate authentication and authorization system, which we will cover from a historic perspective and put an emphasis on the current state. * Redis: Security through obscurity or how you can rename commands. And it features a unique tradeoff for binding to publicly accessible interfaces. * Elasticsearch: Groovy scripting has been a constant headache, but the new, custom-built scripting language Painless tries to take the pain away literally.

From newborn to adulthood: how the maturation of self mirrors the evolution of community In this talk I am going to be expressing some observations, matched to a few social theories, these observations are about the Perl community but also refer to other technical communities and the broader social fabric. I will discuss how I see the evolution of the community as a mirror to the development stages of the individuals who are its members. To do this I have used simple analogies. Broadly this is an examination of community as a societal construct and a familial evolution, how much is contained within the confines of the other and how communities exist in these paradigms. These are my own, initial, observations and thoughts and are part of an evaluation of the Perl community and my interaction in other technical communites and are generally useful to those of us who look sideways at the interactions of the technical worlds we exist within. At the end of it I want to give you 5 things you should have learned.

In this talk, We will talk about Openstack-Manila as a Filesystem and will take a deep look into Manila as a Filesystem with NFS. Originally conceived as an extension to the Block Storage service (Cinder), but emerged as an official, independent project in the Grizzly release. Manila is typically deployed in conjunction with other OpenStack services (e.g. Compute, Object Storage, Image, etc) as part of a larger, more comprehensive cloud infrastructure.

IRC is a great medium for communities to get together, answer users’ questions and collaborate. Although it may seem primitive, its low-bandwidth consumption and wide variety of ways to access it make it an ideal way for people to connect from any location or background. There are virtually unlimited clients (programs) available to connect to IRC networks. Their UI does the work of presenting the protocol in a friendly format, tailored to the user’s needs. Many popular FOSS projects are on IRC already, and it is likely that most of the open source software you use will have their own channel (or channels) for discussion. Aside from chatting, IRC allows further features & extensions by 3rd party tools and services. For example, some individuals & companies run bouncers. Bouncers stay permanently online and connect to whichever IRC network and channels you wish. When you come back online, they replay your messages back to you. This allows you to maintain a constant connection to IRC without actually keeping your personal machine online all the time. Also, most IRC networks have services, which are bots that appear as fellow users. They help you register nicknames and channels, and help with other network-related tasks—but more on that later. Although IRC use in general has been declining, the use of IRC networks meant for project collaboration, like freenode, has increased consistently.

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Privacy Workshop

Have some food and chat to people.

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How do you go about writing a talk? How do you go about learning to write a talk? What are the skills involved? What's the process from taking an urge to say something all the way through to giving the talk to an audience? What happens afterwards? I've been writing and delivering talks since 1996. Some are public presentations like the talk today, but most are private - whether an in-house pitch, pre-sales, or delivering training. And recently I was asked - how do you do it? So that's what I'm going to share. I'm going to take you through the process of writing a talk. More specifically, I'm going to take you through my process. I'll show you how I go about it, and all the things I'm considering when crafting a talk. I'll share 3 specific things that you can go away and do to help you craft your own talks. And, hopefully, I'll give you the confidence that you can do this too.

In the last 15 years, Arch Linux has grown from a one man project to one of the most popular Linux distributions. In contrast to most other successful open source projects, it has no commercial backing, no governing body and no formal rules. It is not particularly user friendly, welcoming to newcomers or easy to learn. So where does Arch's success come from? In this talk, we look inside Arch Linux. We show how platforms like the Arch Wiki and the AUR built a strong community of competent Linux users that makes Arch unique and keeps it alive.

Guix provides a way to describe packages, services and systems, then make those descriptions a reality, with a methodology inspired, and often compared to functional programming. This approach brings with it enormous expressiveness and reliability, allowing you to avoid common problems. We will discuss the history behind Guix, how it builds on the foundations of the Nix package manager. We will cover what Guix can offer you, how you can use it for reproducible and reliable systems. Finally, we will discuss how you can get involved.

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Lightning talks

Have another break whilst the world moves around you

Karen Sandler is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, former executive director of the GNOME Foundation, an attorney, and former general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Karen will be delivering the closing keynote on Ethics and Technology