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GNOME@FOSDEM 2014 – Stand and Panel

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.

Update: The interviews have been posted: http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=1452

MRMCD2013

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, …

wlan stats

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.

trolley

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 doro

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.

Enjoy Cock

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.

clocks

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.

GNOME.Asia Summit 2013

This year’s GNOME.Asia Summit took place in Seoul, Korea. It’s my second GNOME.Asia Summit after the previous one in Hongkong and it’s again amazing to see how nice the local team put everything together.

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. As other people already stated: 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.

Talking at FOSS.in 2012, Bangalore, India

As reported, FOSS.in took place this year, in Bangalore, India. I was fortunate enough to be invited again to this leading Free Software event in India, if not Asia.

Queueing people trying to get in to FOSS.in

The event hosted many very good people and it was a real pleasure to be surrounded by smart folks that love Free Software. It’s a real honour to be invited and speak on the same stage as these people. And it’s an honour to be able to talk about Free Software in a so called developing country and try to form the next generation of Free Software hackers.

There were many talks and I think I will follow up with a separate post about that.

My first talk went really well I think (others do seem to think so, too). The audience seemed to be genuinely interested and I enjoyed being on stage. At some stage, I need to revamp my slides though. I usually go with TeXed slides, but for the GNOME ones, I keep using LibreOffice. One of the minor problems is, that I want to play videos from within the presentation. I can do that (more or less) with LibreOffice and PDF can also do it. But this is not working with my version of Evince $:-\$

Anyway, thanks to hasgeek.tv, we have recordings of FOSS.in (Day1, Day2, Day3)! And here is my first talk live on tape:

The second talk was a surprise for me, because I was told just a few hours in advance that I need to give another one. Apparently someone couldn’t come and the slot needed to be filled. I jumped in and did my show. I was still a bit hung over from the night before, but it went off well. Except for the fact that my laptop went off the presenter desk. It’s a bit shaky still, so if you happen to have a spare machine that’s decent enough, let me know. Anyway, I have to say, that I dislike the fact that I was told just a few hours in advance that I had to give another talk. But I appreciated being the one that is considered to entertain the people the most. Also very interesting was that I sat on a panel that Lenny moderated. I remember well when Lenny was asked to do that for the first time last year in Japan. He does it well and again, I felt very honoured to be invited to sit next to all those important people, eventually being considered being one of them. However, it appears that there no videos yet.

As for the rest of the trip, we went to Sri Lanka and did a round trip there. An interesting country indeed. Very developed. Not as affordable as expected but still very good value for us whities.

I hope that the FOSS.in team manages to pull it off again next year. I really believe that the event impacts the development of Free Software in the region. And without such an event, great opportunities are lost.

As usual, thanks to FOSS.in ~~and the GNOME Foundation~~ for supporting me to go there.

FOSS.in 2012 \o/

After it didn’t happen last year, it will this year! I’m talking about FOSS.in, the premier Free Software conference in India, if not Asia. I’m very pleased to see that this event managed to pull it off again. Also, everything seems to be very much in time this year, so I expect things to go down smoothly.

If you have something cool to share and want to attract a highly motivated audience, which doesn’t only want to listen, but also to do something, then you should consider submitting something. The FOSS.in 2012 takes place, again, in Bangelore, India, from 2012-11-29 until 2012-12-01.

The Call for Papers is closing soon, so hurry up!

GNOME.Asia 2012 in Hong Kong

I had the great pleasure to be invited to GNOME.Asia taking place in Hong Kong and to give a talk there.

The first day started off with a very nice introduction by the local organizing committee. It is amazing how much energy they invest in Free Software, especially in GNOME. I think it’s outstanding given that I don’t see that many contributers from eastern Asia and that I was told several times that the attitude in Free Software communities is discomforting, at best, to people from eastern Asian cultures. But maybe it’s because of GNOME’s rather friendly community these people feel comfortable in GNOME. Let’s keep it that way.

The organizers greeting us

The main talks were given by westerners and I hope we (the westerners) could encourage the audience to believe in themselves and in GNOME. We, I and my old GNOME friend Andre Klapper, were talking about how to start contributing to GNOME as a member of the Bugsquad. We already talked together a couple of GUADECs back. Our slides can be found here. With probably 75% of the conference attendees the talk was comparately well attended and I think it went well, too. We had a good and very unexpected discussion afterwards, too. That was very refreshing.

The crowd for our talk

The second day was filled with talks, too, although I didn’t find it as interesting as the first one. Mainly because I couldn’t understand many talks. The language barrier was quite high for me as my Chinese isn’t all too good While I do appreciate the Free Software communities for enabling everyone to have access to computing, i.e. by translating the software into every language in the universe. I do sometimes wonder whether we actually fragment ourselves and should rather concentrate on improving the actual code. Especially since we are an international community having interational conferences. If there were isolated communities, it is crystal clear that translating everything into these languages is a major bonus. But since we eventually want to talk to each other and support each other, the translations are a bit of a hurdle to overcome. But this point is very moot because these people probably wouldn’t even know about Free Software, not to mention want to exchange thoughts, if the software wasn’t translated in first place.

Allan Day talking about Every Detail Matters

There was actually one talk about Asian Women’s participation in Free Software Projects. But the talk disqualified itself quite early by bringing the common biological argument of different brains and that thus women could not code (sic!).

The *Woman are too stupid to code* talk

I enjoyed the stay in Hong Kong so much that I decided to append two weeks of traveling through China. It was very hot and humid and next time I’ll try to carry less things with me (although I do travel very lightly already).

Thanks a lot to the GNOME Foundation for making this possible for me. I also think that it helped to foster Free Software and GNOME in Hong Kong, China and Asia.

LinuxCon Brazil 2011

I was lucky to be invited to LinuxCon Brazil, taking place in *drumroll* Brazil! Sao Paulo to be precise. The conference centre was very spacious and the conference itself seemed to be much bigger than in Japan.

My talk on GNOME 3 (actually 3.2 and 3.x) was well received and I hope I was able to entertain a bunch of people and make some of them try the new GNOME. Fortunately, our friends from OpenSuSE just released their new version a couple of days ago and brought some machines and media to try it out. Needless to say that it features the latest and greatest GNOME release. We had a good discussion during the talk and I talked to many people after the talk. There was more interest that I expected. I was told that even Linus and Dirk Hohndel commented on it in the speaker’s room when I was not there.

I couldn’t really attend the other talks as I wanted because they were held in Portuguese $:-\$ There was translation but only for the foreign speakers not talking in Portuguese. So sadly I had to stick to talks that I either knew or didn’t interest me that much. But there were a couple of interesting ones, nonetheless My favourite was Jan Kiszka talking about “Developing Linux inside QEMU/KVM Virtual Machines” because I learned how to actually be able to pass data from my host system into my guest QEMU machine.

So the conference could have made more effort to actually indicate whether the talks were held in English or not. Other than that, it was a good conference which was held in a pretty good conference centre. As the other South American conference I attended a couple of weeks ago, it slipped behind schedule. But only for half an hour

It wasn’t all too easy to get to Brazil though. I had flight troubles in Amsterdam with KLM again. The security at the gate wanted to search my bag but I refused. I was told to either let them search the bag or wait for the supervisor. I chose to wait as I had quite a bit of newspaper left. Eventually one of the security guys called me out and told me to go out of the gate area to talk to the supervisor. We talked and came back to the gate where I was about to put my stuff into the xray machine. But then the guy came and told me that the flight attendant told him that I couldn’t fly. So I asked the woman directly whether I was denied boarding. She said yes because I caused a queue. I demanded a list of my rights because I was denied boarding and she sent me to the Transfer desk. Then she left… When I went to the transfer desk, I figured out that I was not referenced as being denied boarding but No-Show, i.e. I just wasn’t present. But that’s ridiculous as I sat in the gate except for three minutes when the supervisor called me out. For that reason, I wasn’t provided a list of my rights and the transfer agent wasn’t friendly at all. A second transfer agent managed to get me on the next flight though. I thought I’d like KLM, at least for them flying to South America not crossing the US. But I probably have to go with Iberia the next time.

I’m looking foward to come back to Brazil, either for GNOME Forum or for LinuxCon

Ekoparty 2011

I was invited to Ekoparty in Buenos Aires, Argentina. It all went very quickly, because when I was accepted for my talk on Virtualised USB Fuzzing using QEMU and Scapy, I couldn’t read email very well. I was abroad and had only a replacement laptop (which we got at MeeGo Summit in Dublin) at hand because my laptop broke down And of top of that I wasn’t very well connected. Anyway, I got notice exactly two weeks before the conference and actually I had other plans anyway. But since it was in Argentina and I haven’t been there yet, I was very eager to go.

I was going from Hamburg via Amsterdam and Sao Paulo to Buenos Aires. And back from Buenos Aires via Charles de Gaule to Berlin. After my first fight I had a good break at Shiphol but when I wanted to board the next flight, I was denied at first. After a couple of minutes, some officials came and I was interrogated. Because my itinerary looked suspicious, they said. So I was asked and searched and the information I gave was promptly checked by they woman and her smart-phone. Weird stuff. The next flights and airports were fortunately much better.

The very first day of the conference was reserved for the keynote and workshops. Unfortunately, the workshops were held in Spanish only so I couldn’t really follow anything. But I still attended some folks playing around with an USRP. It was interesting enough despite the Spanish. They decoded normal FM radio, pager messages and other (analogue) radio messages flying through the ether. The keynote was held in Spanish, too, but two translators simultaneously translated the talk into English. It’s the first time that *I* am the one needing a translation device I didn’t fully get the keynote because the there was a lot of noise in the radio of the Spanglish

The first talk by Agustin Gianni from Immunity was about Attacking the Webkit Heap and was, well, very technical. A bit too detailed for me as I don’t have much desire to exploit memory issues in Webkit, but it’s good to know that there people looking into that. Just after that, there was a talk about security of SAP products. The message I got was, to read the SAP advisories and documentation. Because he was showing exploits that used vulnerabilities that were either known and fixed or documented. It was still a bit interesting for me as I didn’t know much about SAP systems and could see what it’s actually about.

I don’t have much to say about the iOS forensic talk, because you can find the things he mentioned with a one liner: find / -name '*.db'.
Ryan McArthur talked about Machine Specific Registers which I didn’t even know what it was. But apparently CPUs have special registers that you usually don’t use. And these have special capabilities such as offering debug facilities. Also you can issue a simple instruction to detect whether you are in a virtual machine or not. That sounds damn interesting. With Intel it’s called Last Branch Recording. And he implementing something that would be able to trace programs like Skype. I wonder though what difference to PaiMai is. An implementation using these facilities apparently exists for Linux as well.

A bit off the wall was Marcos Nieto talking about making money with Facebook. So he realised that he could send the AJAX request, which some Flash game sends to the game server, himself. He didn’t think about writing a bot playing the game for him though. Instead, he used a proxy to capture the HTTP traffic his Flashplayer was generating and replaying that traffic with the proxy software. And the money part would then be to sell the account that had all the experience points on eBay. I hope it was just the translation and the crappy quality of the radio that made it seem so lame.

As for my presentation, I wasn’t too lucky with the MeeGo laptop I used, because it only has an Atom processor which doesn’t have KVM support. That is very bad if you want to do something with QEMU But I tried to prepare my things well enough to not have many problems. But what happened then was really embarrassing. I prepared demos and I did that very thoroughly. I even recorded some videos as second line of defence in case something fails. But I didn’t expect anything to fail because my demos were simple enough, and just a few copy&paste jobs. That’s what I thought and Murphy proved me wrong. I hate him. So my demos did not work, of course. I still don’t really know why, but I guess that I left a QEMU instance running due to the nervousness. And that instance would still mess around with the pipes that I was using. So lessons learnt: Whenever you think it’s simple enough, think harder.

Demo-Video. If it doesn’t play inline (stupid wordpress) please download yourself.

The rest of the conference was relaxed and the talks were much better than the day before. I feel that the second day was saved for the big things while the first was thought of as a buffer for the people to arrive. There was the SSL talk which caught a lot of attention in international media even before the conference. For reference: The issue was assigned CVE-2011-3389. I was astonished, really, to hear *the* talk being held in Spanish. I absolutely expected that thing to go off in English. Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand much of the things that were told. It took me quite a while to understand that the “navigator” the translatress was constantly referring to is actually the browser… So I was disappointed by that talk, but the expectations were high so it was easy to be disappointed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lauFlKi56aM

So all in all it went fine. It’s a nice enough conference, really relaxed, maybe even too relaxed. Given that there was one track only, it didn’t really matter that things bent the schedule by two hours. I felt that generally things went off the radar of the organising folks, most likely due to organising a conference being very stressful But well, it would still have been nice if they actually provided the facilities they promised to give a talk, like a USB cable or a demo laptop I barely got a T-Shirt

LinuxCon Japan 2011

Thanks to the Linux Foundation I was able to attend LinuxCon 2011 in Japan.

I used the opportunity to distribute GNOME 3 DVD Images and leaflets during my talk about GNOME 3 which was well enough received I’d say. While I collected a lot of experience approaching people and telling them about all the niceties that GNOME 3 offers over the last few month, I really had too little time to tell all the brilliant things about our new GNOME. Anyway, it was nice to be on the very same schedule as the very important Linux people like Greg KH, Linus or Lenny.

The conference itself was hosted in a very spacious building: The Pacifico in Yokohama. One could see that impressive building from our hotel room. Just nice. The conference was well organised and the provided amenities such as food and drinks were good enough. I was particularly impressed by the simultaneous translations that were done by two elderly men.

The talks were generally interesting, probably because I haven’t been to a kernel focused conference and I found it interesting to get new input. My favourites were the Kernel Developer Panel were one could pose question onto the Kernel people face to face and the talks about the social aspect of Kernel development.

Despite all the trouble in Japan, we had a very good time and in fact, there weren’t many indicators to the earthquake or the nuclear catastrophe. The most annoying inconveniences probably were the turned off elevators. Other than that, we didn’t really see any disrupted services or chaos or problems at all. Traveling in Japan is a real pleasure as the train system is gorgeous and the cities are very well mapped. You encounter a city map just about every other corner and it’s very detailed and helpful. Japanese people are extraordinarily friendly and although there is a language barrier, they try to understand and help you. The downside is, that Japan is quite expensive. Especially the train system, but also lodging and food. However, the quality is very good, so it’s probably worth the money.

I’m looking forward to attend the next LinuxCon, maybe even in Japan

RFID Workshop at CampusGruen’s Datenschutzkongress

I was asked to give a workshop about RFID for the CampusGruen Datenschutzkongress in Hamburg. So I did

I used the opportunity to introduce the audience to the basics of RFID, i.e. what technologies exist and what they are used for. Also, I took arguments from pro and anti RFID groups to have them discussed.

You can have a look at the slides altough I doubt that they make much sense without actually having heard what was to be said. We spend good two hours talking and discussing over my twenty-something slides. Thanks again to the interested audience.

Afterwards, we had a small hacking session. I brought some RFID readers, tags, a passport, etc. and we used all that to play around. We also scanned some wallets to find out whether anybody had unwanted chips in their wallet.