foss-north 2017

Encrypting at the Source - Protection from Creation - Zifra

foss-north 2017 — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 10:15:00 GMT

In many parts of the world, journalists and human rights activists have their equipment seized or checked by oppressive forces. The information carried by these individuals can be compromising to themselves and their sources. Nowadays, nothing is done to protect this information before it reaches a safe environment, so anyone with a physical access to the journalists' cameras and memory cards can see their content.

The team from Zifra will introduce their encrypting memory card and present how it can solve the challenges of journalists and human rights activists around the world, by protecting the information from its creation. The importance of the design of the user experience and the role of the user-friendliness in information security products for non-technical users will also be discussed.

Zifra is a Gothenburg-based startup that develops a live-encrypting memory card to protect information from the moment of its creation.

http://foss-north.se/talks.html#zifra

Open Source on Internet of things - Knut Yrvin

foss-north 2017 — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 14:14:35 GMT

We are in a middle of a Internet of Things innovativ period with greater impact than the changes we've seen with smartphone the last 10 years. This spans over a huge variety of use-cases at home, in public services as healthcare and in industry. Knut Yrvin will give an overview of what's needed to make all this a success with libre and open source software, including open standard.

Co-founder of Skolelinux project which is a part of Debian Edu. Hes career started at Telenor, a phone carrier. He graduated with an engineering degree in electronics in 1992 and Masters degree in Computer Science and System Development in 2000. Yrvin has worked in various businesses from Telecom to consultancy and education. He might got mostly known for working as community manager for Qt for Trolltech and later Nokia and Digia.

http://foss-north.se/talks.html#yrvin

Why values, motivation and team culture is what really creates innovation - Niklas Lindhardt

foss-north 2017 — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 13:09:48 GMT

Innovation is hot! To say the least. And extremely important for Sweden in an ever increasing global competition. But what factors are truly relevant when it comes to create the right conditions for innovation?

This talk will paint the picture of a softer perspective of software innovation. With a model built on research in motivation, organization and innovation, perspectives as culture, team and values are highlighted as truly crucial.

His own company, CaptureInnovation, is built on this research, in a manager-free and innovative environment. Lessons learned, from four years of running an innovation-centered company without hierarchy, driven by individual motivators, are shared.

Niklas is a 41 year M Sc från Chalmers. He has always found his energy in the people behind technology. What makes a person and a group really deliver and feel great, at the same time? In 2013 he was part in founding CaptureInnovation. A SW development company run in a new way: without managers, driven by motivation and culture, forming an innovative platform for new ideas. Ideas both within technology and organization.

http://foss-north.se/talks.html#lindhardt

Open Source Silicon : Where software ends and hardware begins - Olof Kindgren

foss-north 2017 — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 11:37:29 GMT

Free and Open Source Software has since long proven to be a massive success in many areas, and the same can be said about Open source hardware over the last decade. But what about the chips themselves that are placed on circuit boards by hardware developers and programmed by software developers?

This is where the Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) movement comes in. Driven by the same forces as open source software - cost, curiousity, availability, security, flexibility - the FOSSi movement is about using Open Source code and tools to build the chips themselves that are at the heart of most electronic devices. This is hardly a new movement, and the roots can be traced back 20 years from the early days of OpenRISC and OpenCores, but in the last few years there has been an explosion of new projects and technologies coming from industry, academia and hobbyists. The boundaries between hardware and software are dissolving and and we're beginning to see whole new fields open up. This also means that there is an increasing number of software engineers entering the digital design domain, bringing best practices such as CI, modern languages and package dependency handling from the software world.

Despite all the recent advances, the world of Open Source Silicon is still unknown even to many people working close to hardware. This presentation will give an overview of the events leading up to the current state of FOSSi. We will look at what lies ahead, both in regards of challenges and opportunitiies, and by taking a quick dive into some of the most promising projects such as RISC-V, LibreCores, FuseSoC and yosys to see how and why they can be used instead of proprietary technologies.

Olof Kindgren is a co-founder and director of the FOSSi Foundation. Starting out with open source software in the 90's, he later became an active contributor to many different FOSSi projects such as OpenRISC and FuseSoC, and writes about this on his blog.

http://foss-north.se/talks.html#kindgren

Nextcloud: the future of private cloud sync and share, collaboration and coffee machines - Jos Poor

foss-north 2017 — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 10:40:55 GMT

The Cloud continues to be all the rage, despite the hate most techies have for it ("what does it even mean") and (because techies tend to be right) the confusion about what it means. One thing most people associate the cloud with is: that vague, amorphous place where your data goes after you've captured it with your phone, laptop or fancy IoT device. That place is invariably not under your control - it is how the tech giants provide 'value' (and keep you locked in). It is also the place from where your data leaks, in high profile hacks or direct attacks from, presumably, Russians, or Chinese. Well, and Germans and Italians and everything else, both criminal and, more outrageous, government sanctioned.

Nextcloud's ambition is to give you a chance to take it back, that stuff from the cloud. Control it, decide where it is and who has access. And we've built an ecosystem around our web server and apps that helps you do that. You can store and sync your files, calendar and contacts. Share holiday pictures. Listen to music. Keep your passwords secure. Edit documents, with others, collaboratively. Have video calls. All that, and more! Just not yet coffee. But you can get involved and make it happen...

And obviously, when you claim to be the future, you have to address the elephant in the room: the past. So I'll talk about why and how we left ownCloud, the project we ourselves started.

Jos Poortvliet has been marketing and promoting in communities for over a decade, active in KDE and working as community manager for SUSE and ownCloud. He currently heads marketing at Nextcloud.. He occasionally shares some of his thoughts on his blog.

http://foss-north.se/talks.html#poortvliet

Immutable and Stateless Systems with systemd - Lennart Poettering

foss-north 2017 — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 09:26:46 GMT

In many embedded and IoT applications, but also on trusted web servers and end-user devices, read-only and cryptographically protected OS images are essential. In this talk I will discuss how systemd helps with setups like this, how to create and update immutable, stateless and volatile OS images, and how systemd will help you booting and keeping them up.

Discussed technologies will be systemd itself, Verity, the "mkosi" experimental image generator, systemd volatile boot modes, and more.

Lennart Pottering from Red Hat is known for systemd, PulseAudio, Avahi and more. He has been contributing to open source since the early 2000's.

http://foss-north.se/talks.html#poettering

AsteroidOS under the hood - Florent Revest

foss-north 2017 — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 08:21:11 GMT

AsteroidOS is an open-source alternative operating system for smartwatches. It is built on embedded Linux technologies such as Qt5, BlueZ5, OpenEmbedded, PulseAudio and libhybris and currently runs on eight different models of watches.

This talk will provide a general overview of the various stacks involved in the making of Asteroid. We'll focus on several topics ranging from graphics adaptation to Bluetooth Low Energy communication. This can be seen as a global introduction to the architecture of an embedded Linux system.

20 years old CS student at INSA Toulouse with a soft spot for embedded systems and free software. Behind several open-source projects such as a Qt4 DE, an x86 kernel, a Quadcopter flight system and a FOSS OS for smartwatches.

http://foss-north.se/talks.html#revest

foss north 2017 Keynote Session

foss-north 2017 — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 06:31:15 GMT

Keynote session covering the following topics:

WikiData by Lydia Pintscher - http://foss-north.se/talks.html#pintscher
Open source and IoT by Knut Yrvin - http://foss-north.se/talks.html#yrvin
Why start-ups love open source by Carl Josefsson - http://foss-north.se/talks.html#josefsson

Flatpak: Apps on the linux desktops - Alexander Larsson

foss-north 2017 — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 05:32:35 GMT

Have you ever wanted to run a linux application that was not packaged in your distribution, or a newer/older version that what is packaged? Was it painful? Did you fail?

Flatpak is here to help you. It is a sandboxing, distribution and deployment system for Linux desktop application that puts the power back in the hands of the application developers.
In this talk you will learn about the architecture and benefits of flatpak, and how the technologies behind it, like bubblewrap, ostree and portals work.

Alexander Larsson has worked at Red Hat the last 15 years, working on projects like Gnome, GVfs, Gtk+, and docker. Recently he has spent most of his time working on Flatpak.

The UX of UX - Behind the scenes of effectively designing in the open - Raghu Nayyar

foss-north 2017 — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 04:49:34 GMT

Open source software has always been engineering driven. Most of the people building open source software are engineers with major turn on for features and more features which kind of explains how a lot of open source projects have rich and extremely important features but are a pain to see or work with. This talk aims to deal with this problem of designing in the open which is often neglected. Tools like GitHub, GitLab, etc. can actually become an arena for usability testing and give extremely promising output only if it follows an effective design process. This talk is also a practical guide for budding designers to get started with open source software.

Ragy Nayyar, 23, is a post graduate student in Interaction Design at KTH, Stockholm. Prior to this he has worked, both as a designer and a developer for both big companies and startups for around 2 years. He has been a contributor to open source since he started writing code and majority of my contributions are related to front-end programming and user experience decisions. He started contributing to ownCloud when they were not even on GitHub, but on Gitorious and now its one of the highest contributed PHP project on Github. He does pretty much the same thing at Nextcloud now in his free time. He co-authored and designed the Nextcloud and ownCloud calendar which is one of the most famous self hosted calendar solutions. He loves writing CSS and building scalable CSS architectures.

http://foss-north.se/talks.html#nayyar

Reproducible builds - Chris Lamb

foss-north 2017 — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 03:17:27 GMT

Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, most Linux distributions provide binary (or "compiled") packages to end users.

The motivation behind "reproducible" builds is to allow verification that no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical binary packages are always generated from a given source. This prevents against the installation of backdoor-introducing malware on developers' machines - an attacker would need to simultaneously infect or blackmail all developers attempting to reproduce the build.

This talk will focus heavily on how exactly software can fail to be reproducible, the tools, tests and specifications we have written to fix and diagnose issues, as well as the many amusing "fails" in upstream's code that have been unearthed by this process. In addition, you will learn what to avoid in your own software as well as the future efforts in the Reproducible Builds arena.

Chris Lamb is a freelance computer programmer who is the author of dozens of free projects and contributor to 100s of others. Currently holding the position of Debian Project Leader, Chris has been involved in the Debian GNU/Linux project since 2007. He is currently highly active in the Reproducible Builds project where he has been awarded a grant from the Core Infrastructure Initiative to fund his work in this area. In his spare time Chris is an avid classical musician.

http://foss-north.se/talks.html#lamb

ACME - Not just for rockets anymore - Magnus Hagander

foss-north 2017 — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 02:43:10 GMT

In today's world where everything moves towards https and other TLS secured connections, certificate management is more important than ever. Through the use of the ACME protocol, LetsEncrypt provide the infrastructure, but to make it a scalable solution from a management perspective, integration is needed. In this talk I'll take a look at how we integrated with LetsEncrypt for the postgresql.org infrastructure management, to reach zero manual work.

Magnus Hagander is a member of the PostgreSQL Core Team and a developer and code committer in the PostgreSQL Global Development Group. He mostly works on different parts of the PostgreSQL backend, recently with a focus on security features such as authentication and encryption, and backup/availability. To pay the bills, he is an open source software consultant, primarily on PostgreSQL and Varnish at Redpill Linpro in Stockholm, Sweden, where he works with consulting, support and training.

http://foss-north.se/talks.html#hagander

ManageIQ - the open source management platform for your hybrid IT environments - Carol Chen

foss-north 2017 — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 01:06:59 GMT

ManageIQ is an open-source project that allows administrators to control and manage today's diverse, heterogeneous environments that have many different cloud and container instances spread out all over the world. In this talk I will give an overview of ManageIQ's capabilities, a short demo, and introduce ways to get involved in the community.

Carol Chen is the Community Development Manager for ManageIQ. From Nokia to Jolla and Red Hat, she has been actively involved in open source communities over the past decade.

http://foss-north.se/talks.html#chen

Actionable Agile Tools - Jeff Campbell

foss-north 2017 — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 23:16:41 GMT

Do you find that all the books and talks you attend about Agile are sort of fluffy?

Do you often feel like all you need is a solid starting point?
If you want to see a few handy things that will be usable to you directly when you get back to work, then this is the talk for you.

Of course Agile is more a way of thinking than it is a particular tool or practice, but sometimes you simply have a problem you need to solve and getting a starting point will make a big difference. That is the purpose of this talk and the book it is based on: https://leanpub.com/actionableagiletools/ .

Most of these tools are very simple and can be implemented in less time than it takes to hear about them. Many of these tools were developed incrementally within teams I worked with, some literally taking years and exposure to a variety of organisations to reach their current state.

Jeff is an Agile Coach who considers the discovery of Agile and Lean to be one of the most defining moments of his life, and considers helping others to improve their working life not to simply be a job, but a social responsibility. As an Agile Coach, he has worked with driving Agile transformations in organisations both small and large and has published an open source book on the subject: https://leanpub.com/actionableagiletools/ .

Jeff is also involved in the Agile community outside of the work place being one of the founding members of Gothenburg Sweden’s largest agile community at 900+ members www.scrumbeers.com, a community run agile discussion group which he has helped to spread to 3 countries. He also organizes the yearly conference www.brewingagile.org. http://foss-north.se/talks.html#campbell