I attended LinuxTag 2014 in Berlin. The event reinvented itself again, after it lost attraction is the recent years. We, GNOME, couldn’t even get enough volunteers to have a presence there. In Berlin. In perfect spring time. Other projects were struggling, too. For this year, they teamed up with re:publica and AndroidCon. The venue changed and the new format of the event made it more attractive and made a good number of people attend.
The venue was “Die Station“, apparently used by those Web people for their Web conference for a couple of years now. It has much more character than the expo in the west where LinuxTag used to be located. But it’s also a bit too unpolished to have a proper conference there. It’s very nice for the fair or expo part of LinuxTag, but not so nice for the conference part. The problem is the rooms. The infrastructure does not really allow for a nice conferency feeling. E.g. many plastic chair made the seats for the audience, the rooms were right next to each other and not sound proof so that you could hear the other talk from the other room. Some lecture halls were actually not really separated from the corridor, so people were walking by and making noise. As for the noise: Except for two big stages, the audio was really bad. I can’t really tell why, but I guess nobody actually tested whether the microphones would sound alright…
While I was grateful to be invited to give a talk on GNOME, I think someone in the organisation team didn’t like me 😉 The conference party started at 18:00 that day and my talk was scheduled for the last slot at 21:30. So I had to compete with the beer outside and other talks in the slot that I wanted to see myself. At least I only had very motivated people in the audience 😉
The LinuxTag deserves its name as it’s unusually kernel focussed for a “normal user” event. As in depth kernel session do not necessarily make sense for the every day computer user, teaming up with DroidCon seemed promising. But the two events were too separated. I actually have not seen any schedule for the DroidCon. And I couldn’t find a joint schedule anywhere on the Internet nor in the venue itself. I don’t think it’s bad intentions, though. It’s probably due to lacking resources to pull it off. A big thank thank you to the organisers. I think it’s an important event that connects many people, especially those from the Industry with the Community. Keep rocking, guys.
The first thing that impressed me was Dubrovik. A lovely city with a walled old town. Even a (rather high) watch tower is still there. The city manages to create an inspiring atmosphere despite all the crowds moving through the narrow streets. It’s clean and controlled, yet busy and wild. There are so many small cafés, pubs, and restaurants, so many walls and corners, and so many friendly people. It’s an amazing place for an amazing conference.
The conference itself featured three tracks, which is quite busy already. But in addition, an unconference was held as a fourth track. The talks were varying in topic, from community management, to MySQL deployment, and of course, GNOME. I presented the latest and greatest GNOME 3.12. Despite the many tracks, the hallway track was the most interesting one. I didn’t know too many faces and as it’s a GNU/Linux distribution conference which I have never attended before, many of the people I met had an interesting background which I was not familiar with. It was fun meeting new people who do exciting things. I hope to be able to stay in touch with many of them.
The conference was opened by the OpenSuSE Board. I actually don’t really know how OpenSuSE is governed and if there is any legal entity behind it. But the Board seems to be somehow elected by the community and was to announce a few changes to OpenSuSE. The title of the conference was “The Strength to Change” which is indeed inviting to announce radical changes. For better or worse, both the number and severity of the changes announced were limited. First and foremost, handling marketing materials is about to change. A new budget was put in place to allow for new materials to be generated to have a much bigger presence in the world. Also, the materials were created by SuSE’s designers on staff. So they are considered to be rather high quality. To get more contributors, they introduce formalised sponsorship program for people to attend conferences to present OpenSuSE. I don’t know what the difference to their Travel Support Program is, though. They will also reimburse for locally produced marketing materials which cannot be shipped around the world to encourage more people to spread the word about OpenSuSE. A new process will be put in place which will enable local contributors to produce materials up to 200 USD from a budget of 2000 USD per quarter. Something that will change, but not just yet, is the development and release model. Andrew Wafaa said that OpenSuSE was a victim of its own success. He mentioned the number of 7500 packages which should probably indicate that it is a lot for them to handle. The current release cycle of 8 months is to be discussed. There is a strong question of whether something new shall be tried. Maybe annual releases, or even longer to have more time for polish. Or maybe not do regular releases at all, like rolling releases or just take as long as it takes. A decision is expected after the next release which will happen as normal at the end of this year. There was an agreement that OpenSuSE wants to be easy to contribute to. The purpose of this conference is to grow the participants’ knowledge and connections in and about the FLOSS environment.
The next talk was Protect your MySQL Server by Georgi Kodinov. Being with MySQL since 2006 he talked about the security of MySQL in OpenSuSE. The first point he made was how the post-installation situation is on OpenSuSE 13.1. It ships version 5.6.12 which is not too bad because it is only 5 updates behind of what upstream released. Other distros are much further away from that, he said. Version 5.6 introduced cool security related features like expiring passwords, password strength policies, or SHA256 support. He urged the audience to stop using passwords on the command line and look into the 5.6 documentation instead. He didn’t make it any more concrete, though, but mentioned “login paths” later. He also liked that the server was not turned on by default which encourages you to use your self-made configuration instead of a default one. He also liked the fact that there is no pre-packaged database as that does not configure users that are not very well protected. Finally, he pointed out that he is pleased to see that no remote access is configured in the default configuration. However, he did not like that OpenSuSE does not ship the latest version. The newest upstream version 5.6.15 not only fixes around 25 security problems but also adds advanced AES functionalities such as keys being bigger than 128 bits. He also disliked that a mysql_secure_installation script is not run after installation. That script would put random passwords to the root account, would disallow anonymous access, and would do away with empty default passwords. Another regret he had was that mysql_config_editor is not packaged. That tool would help to get rid of passwords in scripts using MySQL by storing credentials in encrypted files. That way you would have to protect only one file, not a lot of scripts. For some reason OpenSuSE activates the “federated plugin” which is disabled upstream.
Another weird plugin is the archive plugin which, he said, is not needed. In fact, it is not even available so that the starting server throws errors… Also, authentication plugins which should only be used for testing are enabled by default which can be a problem as it could allow someone to log in as any user. After he explained how this was a threat, the actual attack seems to be a bit esoteric. Anyway, he concluded that you get a development installation when you install MySQL in OpenSuSE, rather than an installation suited for production use.
He went on to refer about how to harden it after installation. He proposed to run mysql_secure_installation as it wouldn’t cause any harm even if run multiple times. He also recommended to make it listen on specific interfaces only, instead of all interfaces which is does by default. He also wants you to generate SSL keys and certificates to allow for encrypted communication over the network.
Even more security can be achieved when turning off TCP access altogether, so you should do it if the environment allows it. If you do use TCP, he recommended to use SSL even if there is no PKI. An interesting advice was to use external authentication such as PAM or LDAP. He didn’t go into details how to actually do it, though. The most urgent tip he gave was to set secure_file_priv to a certain directory as it will restrict the paths MySQL can write to.
As for new changes that come with MySQL 5.7, which is the current development version accumulating changes over 18 months of development, he mentioned the option to log to syslog. Interestingly,
a --ssl option on the client is basically a no-op (sic!) but will actually enforce SSL in the upcoming version. The new version also adds more crypto functions such as RANDOM_BYTES() which interface with the SSL libraries. He concluded his talk with a quote: “Security is like plastic surgery. the more you invest, the prettier it gets.”.
Michael Meeks talked next on the history of the Document Foundation. He explained how it used to be in the StarOffice days. Apparently, they were very process driven and believed that the more processes with even more steps help the quality of the software they produced. He didn’t really share that view. The mind set was, he said, that people would go into a shop and buy a box with the software. He sees that behaviour declining steeply. So then hackers came and branched StarOffice into OpenOffice which had a much shorter release cycle than the original product and incorporated fixes and features of the future version. Everyone shipped that instead of the original thing. The 18 months of the original product were a bit of a long thing in the free software world, he said. He quoted someone saying “StarDivision a problem for every solution.”
He went on to rant about Contributor License Agreements and showed a graph of Fedora contributions which spiked off when they dropped the requirement of a CLA. The graph was impressive but really showed the number of active accounts in an unspecified system. He claimed that by now they have around the same magnitude of contributions as the kernel does and with set a new record with 3000 commits in February 2014. The dominating body of contributors is volunteers which is quite different when compared to the kernel. He talked about various aspects of the Document Foundation like the governance or the fact that they want to make it as easy to contribute to the project as possible.
The next talk was given on bcache by Oliver Neukum. Bcache is a disk cache which is probably primarily used to cache rotational disks with SSDs. He first talked about the principles of caching, like write-back, write-through, and write-around. That is, the cache is responsible for writing to the backing store, the cache places the data to be written in its buffer, or write to the backing storage, but not the cache, respectively. Subsequently, he explained how to actually use bcache. A demo given later revealed that it’s not fool proof and that you do need to get your commands straight in order to make it work properly. As to when to actually use Bcache, he explained that SSDs are cool as they are fast, but they are small and expensive. Fast, as he continued, can either mean throughput or latency. SSDs are good with regards to latency, but not necessarily with throughput. Other, probably similar options to Bcache are dm-cache, but it does not support safe writes. I guess that you cannot use it if you have the requirement of a write-through or write-around scenario. A different alternative is EnhanceIO, written originally by Facebook, which keeps hash structure of the data to be cached in RAM. Bcache, on the other hand, stores a b-tree on the SSD instead of in the RAM. It works on block devices, so anything goes. Tape drives, RAIDs, … It places a special superblock to indicate the partition is a bcache partition. A second block is created to indicate what the backing store is. Currently, the kernel does not auto detect these caches, hence making it work with the root filesystem is a bit tricky. He did a proper evaluation of the effects of the cache. So his statements were well founded which I liked a lot.
It was announced that the next year’s conference, oSC15, will be in The Hague, Netherlands. The city we had our GUADEC in, once. If you have some time in spring, probably in April, consider to go.
I am at the LGM in Leipzig. The venue, the university of Leipzig, is amazing. Infrastructure is optimal and rooms are spacious enough. The organisers have also made sure that the weather is great 😉
I’ve never attended an LGM and I regret not having visited one earlier. It’s a cosy event with around 200 people from various parts of the world and from various projects. I am glad to have met a few great minds that I could exchange ideas with.
One of the highlights, so far, for me was the open movie night which showed movies which were either created using Free Software or at least licensed freely. Everybody knows tears of steel or big buck bunny. I was surprised by the long list of movies I didn’t know. Many of them were really good! So good that I can’t even select my favourite. My personal top three movies are, however, Mortys, which I consider to be a good mix of drama and comedy:
Mac n Cheese movies are definitely more on the action side of things, well worth watching:
These movies are, as far as I am aware, licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND. So very restrictive. Much more liberally licensed videos are the Caminandes videos.
I show many more very great videos, but I’ll just link to them here: Parigot, which I’d say is an action comedy. The Forest, definitely worth watching, also as artsy as the Palmipedarium. Camanchango is also interesting, more dramaesque, well animated. Happy Hour has some interesting effects, more on the humorous side.
There are so many great free movies. Is there any database like web site that lists and ranks free movies?
If you know, or if you just want to talk about GNOME, come and find me at LGM 🙂
It is this time of the year again *yay*. The biggest and greatest Free Software conference took place in Brussels, Belgium. It’s good to see all those interested and passionate people care about Free Software. I hope that the (intellectual) gravity of the people gets more people interested and strengthens our communities. In fact, I feel it was one of the better FOSDEMs so far. Maybe even the best. We, GNOME, had a hand full (not kidding) of new members of our communities staffing the booth or just being available. I was very please to see new faces and to identify them as people who were very committed to Free Software and GNOME.
As indicated, we, GNOME, had a booth and a fun time entertaining people stopping by. With the help of many volunteers, we presented our most recent GNOME release, sold some t-shirts, and discussed our future ideas. It’s not necessarily a venue to convince people to use Free Software, or even to use GNOME. But I have the feeling we manage to get both messages across. Bar one case in which an unlucky fellah was angry about everything and especially that this Linux 20 we had installed wouldn’t ship Emacs by default. Other than that we showed people how cool the GNOME Shell extensions are, how to quickly launch applications, or how to access the notification area quickly. Or, yes of course, how to suspend. Or to shutdown…
I also had the pleasure of being interviewed by an Irish dude who produced episodes for Hacker Public Radio. I didn’t know about that but it seems to be a cool project. I don’t know when it will go live or whether it actually has been published already.
We also had panel with the governing bodies of GNOME and KDE. The intention was to debunk some myths and to make the work more visible. I was on the Panel (on behalf of GNOME) with Kat (from GNOME…) and Lydia from KDE. She was joined by Cornelius who serves on the KDE board for more than 9 years. We were lamenting about various aspects of our work such as where does money come from, where does it go to, what are the processes of getting rid of the money. But also why we were doing that, why we think it is important and what achievements we are proud of. Our host, Paul, was a nice and fun guy and did his job very well. I think it was a successful event. It could probably have been better in the sense that we could have focussed more on the audience and making them want to step up and take over responsibilities. But the way it went and the participation of the audience makes me happy nonetheless.
Oh, I almost missed to report on this year’s CCCongress, 30C3. The thirtieths CCCongress. It has grown considerably over the last few years. We’ve reached over 9000 visitors whereas we had 4000 a couple of years ago. The new venue in Hamburg is amazing. Despite the impressive number of attendees, it didn’t feel crowded at all. So many nice details made the venue just awesome. It really felt like it was *the* place to be. A rather big detail was the installation of a letter shoot. Yes, a real pneumatic postal delivery system. With routing and all. Just amazing.
That’s pretty much all I have to say. It was, of course, nice to meet so many old friends and people. I couldn’t even say hi to all of the ones I wanted to meet. What follows is a bit of a rundown of some of the talks that I’ve actually seen, hoping you can evaluate whether you want to see any of that yourself.
I was a bit late for the conference, probably one of the first talks I’ve seen was DJB on, guess what, crypto. It even has a reference to Poettering (who I was also able to meet 🙂 )!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJB1mYEZPPA
Funnily enough, Nate from the EFF mentioned DJB in his talk on disclosure Dos and Donts. He said that it would be smart to think about how much fuzz one wants to make about a vulnerability at hand. Sure enough, the title needs to be catchy enough for people to notice. If you were DJB, then the lecture hall would be filled even if the title was “DJB has something to say”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSi6PxVBOx4
Something that stirred up the community was Assange’s talk. Apparently sabotaged, the Skype connection wasn’t all too good. But it was also not very interesting. The gist: Sysadmin: Go to the three-letter-agencies and carry out document to become the next Snowden. Good advice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzhtGvSflEk
As for carried out documents, Jake Applebaum presented the NSA’s shopping cart which includes all sorts of scary techniques and technologies. If you have only time to watch one video, make it this one. That’s probably even safer than sitting in the audience. Just after he showed the reconnaissance tools for the investigators to combine various data sources, undoubtedly including cell phone location and people around you, he switched on his cell phone so that the audience would have a connection with him. The one who knows he is being spied on. It was a very emotional talk, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vILAlhwUgIU
Another depressing thing was Jöran talking about the missed (digital) opportunities in education. The most noticeable thing he said was that Apple products are consuming devices only. But the reality is that they make it work 93% of the time as opposed to 90%. But that difference makes teachers use it…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a90Tto1b4eo
More scary, was the presentation on exploration and exploitation SD card controllers. You’re basically screwed. You have close to no idea what it running on the micro controller on your SD card. And on the various other controllers you carry around. They got themselves access to the chip and were able to flash their own firmware. Doesn’t sound all too exciting, but it is an eye opener that your stupid almost invisible SD card can spy on you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPEzLNh5YIo
A strange talk was the one on Digital Bank robberies. There are so many weird details they talk about. They claim to have been called for investigation of a malware that found on ATMs in Brazil. The weirdest thing for me was that the physical damage done to the ATMs went unnoticed. The gangsters needed to install a pendrive so they had to break the case. Which apparently isn’t all too secure. And then they had to make the ATM reboot to boot off the pendrive. Without having to press a key. It is unclear to me whether they could leave the pendrive or not. Apparently they could remove it, because if they couldn’t then the malware could have been found much earlier. But given that the ATMs reboot so easily, it would make sense to install the malware on the ATMs hard drive. In that case they could have spotted the malware rather easily. Anyway, the presenting people were not Brazilian. Why would such a sensitive Brazilian investigation be undertaken by foreigners?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c08EYv4N5A
Another interesting, although weirdly presented, talk on X Security was given by Ilja van Sprundel. He looked at X code and identified a good number of easily exploitable bugs. No wonder given that the code is 30 years old… He also mentioned libraries on top of X such as GTK+ or Qt and explained how the security story from GNOME was very different from Qt’s. Essentially: The GNOME guys understood security. Qt didn’t.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l7ixRE3OCw
On the more fun side, the guys from Ztohovenpresented their recent work. They are probably best known for their manipulated video which ran during morning TV shows (IIRC).
In their presentation they talked about their performance for which they obtained numbers from parliamentarians and sent them text messages during a session that was aired live. Quite funny, actually. And the technical details are also interesting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBxeSmBBdfg
Another artsy piece is “Do You Think That’s Funny?” (program link) in which the speaker describes the troubles their artistic group had to go through during or after their performances. They did things like vote auction (WP), Alanohof, or AnuScan, and their intention is to make surveillance visible and show how it makes activists censor themselves.
It’s been a while since I attended the mrmcds. In 2011 the event did not take place and I couldn’t make it the year after. Fortunately, 2013 allowed me to participate and I was heavily surprised by the quality of everything. The (newish) location, the people, the provided catering, the atmosphere, …
The event itself is relatively small. I don’t have numbers but I felt like being surrounded by 100 people. Although the stats about connected devices suggests there were at least twice or thrice as many people present.
The talks were good, a refreshing mix of technical and non-technical content. With an audience generally inclined to discuss things. That allowed for more lively sessions which create new insights, also for the speakers. My favourite was Akiko talking about her job as air traffic controller. I learned a lot about how the aviation industry is organised how various pieces fit together.
Fukami keynoted the conference and tried to make us aware of our ethics. Surveillance was made by hackers, he said. People like you and me. The exercise for the audience was to further think and conclude that if we didn’t help implementing and deploying surveillance infrastructure, it wouldn’t have gotten that bad. While the talk itself wasn’t too bad, I wonder who the target audience was. If it meant to wake up young hackers who have not yet adjusted their moral compass, it was too weak. The talk didn’t really give advice as to how to handle dubious situations. If it was not meant for those hackers, then why talk about it in a very basic way and not ask hard questions? Anyway, I enjoyed seeing the issue of people’s responsibility coming up and creating a discussion among the hackers.
Mine and Stef’s talk went well, although it was the in the very last slot of the conference. After two long party nights. I barely made it to the talk myself 😀 We presented new ideas to guide the user when it comes to security critical questions. If you have been to GUADEC, then you haven’t missed much. The talk got a slight new angle though. In case you are interested in the slides, you can find them here.
The design of the conference was very impressive. The theme was aviation and not only did we have an impressive talk monitor as seen above, we also had trolleys with drinks and food as well as the time for various interesting locations. We also received amazing gadgets like the laser engraved belt made from the typical air plane seatbelt.
As always, parties were had with own DJs, light show, beer straight from the tap, cool people and music. To summarize: I’m glad to have visited a very enjoyable event. It’s a pleasure to be around all those smart hackers and to have inspiring discussions. I’m looking forward to next year.
I was lucky to be able to attend OWASP’s AppSec EU Research conference in Hamburg, Germany. I’ve been to the one in Dublin and looked forward to the German edition. With 400+ attendees I thought that the conference was surprisingly well attended. And rightfully so. The people organising it were doing a fantastic job. Everything seemed to work smoothly and although I volunteered I was able to see a good bunch of talks.
The program looked promising and most of it was quite good. I was told that there will be recordings soon which is also quite remarkable. The video team definitely deserves a round of applause. So does the venue. We were locked up in the upper most floor of the Emporio, which allowed for awesome views over Hamburg. Although I’ve lived in that beautiful city for so long, I didn’t realise one could actually get such a nice view from a conference room. Sometimes it was hard to not get distracted by the views during the talks…
The first talk I attended was given by Paul Stone and he showed us how he reads your browsing history and pixels. This is amazing work. He examplified the significance of these attacks by showing how to obtain the Google+ profile information. His trick was to apply some obscure SVG filters to HTML elements. Based on the amount of time it took to do so, he could deduce whether the pixel was black or white. He leveraged that possibility to read source code by analysing properties of the fonts used and what key pixels exist to tell which character was rendered. So amazing. If you have time to only watch one talk, it should be this one.
The next talk on Burp was given by Nicolas Gregoire. I was not so impressed, because it was mainly a tutorial as to where to click to make it do $things. But I was told by people actually using burp that it was insightful and interesting.
Taras Ivashchenko from Yandex was talking about Content Security Policy (CSP). I was surprised to learn that Yandex have their own browser. And that their bigger service is mail. I thought it was search. The title of the talk promised an answer to the question whether the CSP was actually useful. He didn’t deliver though. But it gave an insight to how a big company with a well used web site deploys CSP. Unfortunately, he couldn’t tell how much effort it actually was and whether it was actually an economical decision.
He reminded us that the CSP was a second line of defense. It’s not a solution to broken code which does not escape properly. It’s merely a parachute to land safely in case you screwed up. I found it interesting that he mentioned ten contexts that one would potentially need to escape for. My conclusion is that JavaScript is probably the worst language to use on the Web as it offers only two escaping functions. And not even for the most important contexts like plain HTML. I’m curious to learn about all ten contexts. Another interesting idea he presented was that CSP may allow inline scripts if they are “signed”. The “signature” was a random string that is shipped with a header and the script element on the page must carry a “nonce” attribute with that random number.
Matryoshka was the theme of Eduardo Vela’s talk. The Google guy showed various hacks, one of them was “wrapping overflow leaks on frames (wolf)”. It was possible to get an idea of the word rendered on a page with mocking around with the page’s width and height. With the information about the dimension you could detect when a scrollbar was placed and hence can find out how wide the wrapped word was. He claimed that especially new performance APIs were going to create a whole lot of privacy related issues. Another problem was the lack of a JSON format validator, he said. Several problems such as deep array parsing would currently exist. If you serialise a big enough array, you could get into trouble, he said.
A great show was delivered by Mario Heiderich talking about the The innerHTML Apocalypse. He compared the three currently distinguished types of Cross-Site scripting (XSS), namely reflected, stored, and DOM-based XSS, with the three horsemen. The fourth horseman, he said, were “mXSS”, mutation-based XSS. Essentially it is circumventing HTML filter libraries by using mutations done by the web browser.
The problem, inappropriately shortened, was that people use “document.write” to inject elements into the DOM instead of using proper DOM APIs. But that is, he claimed, due to convenience. A call to “document.innerHTML” was so much easier than calling out to “createElement”, “addChild”, etc. And it is true. Too bad that, as we’ve learned earlier, using JavaScript is totally inappropriate to write web applications as it cannot even escape for the HTML context. Anyway, the browser is quite relaxed and accepts slightly malformed HTML. It will even do optimisations or transformations for you. Internet Explorer, for example, will happily drop quotes around arguments to HTML tags for you.
To make the long story short: CSS escapes are badly handled in many of the existing escaping libraries. So you could break out of the element’s contexts by cleverly using some CSS escape sequences. Also, SVG should be avoided at all costs. It’s a can of worms, he said. You could do so many evil things within SVG, like executing JavaScript, loading remote resources or accessing attributes.
OWASP AppSec Reseaerch EU 2013 was good fun. The location was absolutely fantastic. Probably the most noble venue I was at to have a conference. The organisation looked flawless and everything seemed to work out smoothly. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to meet great people. I hope to be able to do so for the next conference.
I also attended this year’s GUADEC and it was quite good. Especially because the weather was so nice. It was so burning hot that I sometimes wished it wasn’t; especially in the night… My room in the Taufer dormitories, whose service was basic at best, was heating up so heavily over the day that it took until 4 in the morning to be cool enough to be able to sleep. When opening the cold (!) water tap, the water was as warm as a mildly hot shower… But well, GUADEC is not about sleeping anyway, right? 😉
I was kept busy with various meeting before, while and after the conference and I piled up work lasting for a few months, I guess…
The conference itself was nicely organised. The bar was set quite high last year, so I didn’t expect this year’s team to match the overall quality. And they didn’t, but they were close. The staff was helpful and professional. Issues were dealt with promptly and quite well. I hope, again, that the knowledge gained can be transferred to future GUADEC organisers.
As for the talks, I couldn’t follow many of them. The ones I have seen were mostly great. We had (too?) many keynotes which were generally interesting. Too bad the crowd didn’t notice it was trolled by Ethan Lee. He is a game developer who ported games to Linux. The message was poor and I doubt we, GNOME, profited from this keynote. The next keynote was given by the CEO of Endless Mobile, a company which tries to leverage the potential of the “middle of the pyramid” to get the next billion users and “get 50% of the market share”. The idea is to bring a cheap enough, but also elegant enough device to the people who can afford a 40 inch TV (via loans) but not a PC. As they want to sell ARM devices, he asked us to make GNOME run better on ARM chips. Cathy Malmrose, CEO of computer manufacturing company zareason, was keynoting the last day. The company puts only GNU/Linux systems on their machines before shipping them to customers. The computers they sell range from desktops over laptops to tablets. She told us that we were quite well positioned, because GNOME was so easily usable by people who don’t have much or any experience with computers. That was very refreshing and I am happy that she told us that we were doing very well. She was opening a perspective many of us probably didn’t think about before. She was really enthusiastic about Free Software and my feeling was that she cared more about the Freedoms than many of the participants.
Other talks by members of the GNOME community were lively and one the most enjoying talks was given by the sysadmin team. It was nice to be able to applaud for them in person, because they are doing such a great job.
There were Twitter walls (hehe) in every room (supposedly made with QML) and I found it to be mainly distracting while at the same time not very informative. The news running over it were mostly not worth the electricity they consumed.
Anyway, thanks to the local team and all the sponsors for making such a great event happen! If you have anything to say, leave your feedback on the wiki.
Initially I thought I’ll go to Seoul straight from LinuxTag which would have been quite stressful. Unfortunately, LinuxTag didn’t happen for GNOME :-\ We lacked people to run the booth and it’s insane to try to run the booth with only two or three people over four days. So I went more or less straight to Seoul. Via CDG. So far I didn’t like that airport because it is huge and transfers between terminals are very slow and the terminals themselves rather poor in terms of infrastructure (power, seats, WiFi, shops). But terminal 2E was surprisingly nice. It’s got designeresque chairs to sit in, lots of power sockets, free WiFi, some shops, water fountains, and it’s generally airy. So thumbs up for that.
As for Seoul, things went surprisingly well. While i did organise this GNOME.Asia Summit to some extent I didn’t expect things to work out that nicely. The local team, which was pretty much unknown to me, was surprisingly big and they found a good venue and good sponsors.
Lemote gave us a few laptops to give away *yay*. A raffle was organized and the best speaker got the biggest machine. I didn’t win in the raffle, but I got a machine as the best speaker. It’s a Lemote Loongson. I don’t know yet whether it is what I need. I have a very underspecced Lenovo ideapad which barely runs GNOME. Running anything that requires memory is really dreadful. Yes Firefox, looking at you. And some things like Gajim, an XMPP client, don’t even work because the machine starts to swap so heavily that every TCP connection times out. Again and again. I have to explore whether the Lemote laptop performs any better. It’s MIPS after all. And according to Wikipedia the CPU alone draws 15W.
Anyway, the conference itself was good and I felt that it was bringing together people nicely. I hope that it relevant Korean businesses are happy, too. We will have to see though whether any measurable output has been generated.
The reactions to my talk about GNOME 3.8 were, as already mentioned, positive. To my surprise I have to say. I was still a bit tired and jetlagged, but from talking to people afterwards I know that I inspired some folks to take a closer look at GNOME. You can find my slides here.
I found a surprising large number of other talks interesting, too. Unfortunately, the aforementioned laptop died while taking notes so I can’t provided a nice summary. The most interesting thing I found was a talk about seafile. A Dropbox-like tool which sounds really good. But to be ready they have to fix some design problems like depending on a local webserver or not using established authentication and encryption protocols (think SSH).
I’m happy for the GNOME.Asia. May it prosper in the future. I hope we can gain some more sponsors for future editions of the event and also for GNOME. Asotherpeoplealreadystated: I’d like to thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my attendance at the conference. I’d also like to thank the conference sponsors for their support, including NIPA, Lemote, LG, Google, Linux Pilot, ONOFFMIX and Bloter.net.
I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this year’s DFN Workshop which happened to be an anniversary as the event turned 20. Needless to say that I didn’t make all 20 😉 Well, I did a fewanyway.
The keynote was surprisingly political. Marcus J. Ranum (Tenable Network Security) talked about Cyberwar – A Matter of Logistics and Privilege and made witty and thoughtful points. So he asked questions such as whether Stuxnet was an act of terrorism and whether its victims could sue the US to get their damages reimbursed. Highly interesting subject, highly interesting speaker.
Jan Ole Malchow presented “distPaste”, a HTML 5 based webapp that uses all the browsers to store data. So a distributed storage. Might be related to the fun projectFillDisk.com.
Jens Liebchen from the awesome Redteam Pentesting did again a nice presentation this year. They got a new “Multi Function Printer” like a Canon C5051i (so a huge thing…) and had certain requirements regarding its security. He presented a threat model and shared some insights he gained while dealing with the vendor, and, more importantly, after having analysed the machine himself. It turns out that the device has a regular hard drive and runs some flavour of Linux with a big BLOB for their services. However, data was found to be spread over the partitions even though they bought a licence for “secure deletion” of data. They, rightfully, did not expect to find traces of their print or scan jobs. He mentioned that the security properties of such devices were not assessed yet. So there are loads of toys to play with.
Also funny was the work of Benjamin Kahler and Steffen Wendzel who did “Wardriving against building automation“. Basically, the question was how easy it is to break into a network and remote control the building, i.e. open doors and windows. Turns out, there are standard products which are not well secured and the deployment is usually not done properly either, so that network boundaries either don’t exist or can be passed easily.
The security of Android-App’s SSL/TLS usage was presented by Matthew Smith. They examined many many “Apps”, decompiled them and statically analysed how well they handle various conditions when building up a TLS connection. Apparently, many programs just do not care about the security properties of their TLS connection so that they just disable the verification of the certificate chain. The model is said to be too complex and too burdensome to set up during development. They also recommended to introduce a new privilege, namely sending data unencryptely. So that a user could select that an application must not transfer data as plain text.
Besides listening to the talks and chatting to people, I tried to get on the wireless in the hotel. Turns out, they interfere with your traffic, i.e. they block everything and redirect your web traffic to present you a landing page from which you are supposed to log in to the gratis wireless. The credentials to be entered were the room number and the last name of a guest of that room. Well, given the speakers and attendees list (or some knowledge of popular names in the region) it seems easy enough to just poke some data in and hope for the best. Or, instead of doing that manually, have a program doing that for you. Voila, je vous presente “petitelysee”. A simple Python script to try to log in to a landing page. As I’ve said, it’s the result of three hours or so work. So it’s not very nicely done and I obviously didn’t try it out. It has just been coded in a way that I *think* might work.
