linux.conf.au 2020
2020-01-13..2020-01-17
Gold Coast, Australia
[linux.conf.au 2020, linux.conf.au 2021, Linux.conf.au 2021 Kernel Miniconf, Linux.conf.au 2021 Systems Administration Miniconf, linux.conf.au 2022]
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| The Training Gap: GLAM and The Carpentries | Sara King | 37m |
AARNet describes bridging a GLAM skills gap by repackaging tools and teaching: a SWAN Jupyter environment for hands-on notebooks, CloudStor storage and… | ||
| Open Education Through the Ages | Claire Reeler | 47m |
Archaeological overview claims open education is not new but rooted in ~100,000 years of practice: storytelling and hands‑on apprenticeship preserve… | ||
| Marketing: Not such a dirty word after all | Ben Long | 20m |
Argues that combining precision, accessibility and reach makes technical content work harder: mine Stack Overflow to find high‑value questions (example: a… | ||
| Microwatt Microarchitecture | Paul Mackerras | 34m |
An open-source Power ISA soft core written in VHDL implements most integer user-space instructions and targets simulation and FPGA use, using a Wishbone memory… | ||
| Information Architecture: build it better | Nicola Nye | 37m |
Argues that good IA cuts support load, boosts user empowerment and can drive sales, then walks through a hands‑on method: content inventory and taxonomy… | ||
| Privacy and Transparency in VPN industry | Ruben Rubio Rey | 31m |
Claims that most consumer VPNs sacrifice privacy and that TheVPNCompany is an open source, end-to-end VPN stack including website, config management automation… | ||
| Lessons from Planet Makerspace | Steve Dalton | 33m |
Started in 2011 on the Gold Coast to fill a local tech vacuum, the makerspace pivots from a clubhouse into an education hub that routinely serves parents… | ||
| Build your own Open Hardware CPU in 25 minutes or less | Anton Blanchard | 16m |
Shows how to fetch Microwatt, simulate it with GHDL and run a MicroPython binary in the simulator, then synthesize the core to an Artix‑7/Nexus board with… | ||
| Introduction to Twine | Tim Nugent | 39m |
Twine generates interactive fiction as a single HTML file and runs in a browser or small ~10MB desktop app, using passages (nodes) linked by [[text|target]]… | ||
| A Practical Introduction to Docs-As-Code | Alec Clews | 41m |
Practical demo converts a Word doc to reStructuredText with Pandoc inside Docker, adds images, and builds a static site with Sphinx + reStructuredText and… | ||
| Don’t eat my data - 30+ years of storage war stories | Steven Ellis | 39m |
Thirty-five years of storage war stories lands on concrete fixes: using DDrescue, TestDisk and PhotoRec to recover a manuscript and a degraded RAID 5… | ||
| Organising A Non-Commercial Remote Study Team | Inga Pflaumer | 28m |
A volunteer remote study group builds a card game called Bitvan with Node.js, React, Electron and a simplified Redux pattern, runs for two years with 50+… | ||
| Co-developing RISC-V Hypervisor Support | Anup Patel | 21m |
Anup Patel
https://lca2020.linux.org.au/schedule/presentation/204/
The RISC-V Hypervisor Extension Specification and RISC-V Hypervisor Software are being… | ||
| Using a cloud to manage a cloud | Alex Sharp, Andrew Reimers | 21m |
OrionVM runs QubesOS for three years to manage sysadmin tasks, using Xen VMs for each role and Dom0 as the GUI management surface; they isolate networks so one… | ||
| px3d: a free software browser based pixel 3D nano-engine in ClojureScript | Chris McCormick | 27m |
px3d is a browser-based free software pixel 3D engine written in ClojureScript that runs on top of three.js and WebGL. It targets game jams with an opinionated… | ||
| The appropriation of culture - issues in data management | Claire Reeler | 34m |
Covers concrete ethics and tech: UNESCO 2015 pushes open source and FAIR, archaeology uses LiDAR and 3D rendering, cloud/SaaS and providers like AWS/Gmail… | ||
| RISC-V 32-bit glibc port | Alistair Francis | 13m |
Adds 64-bit time_t on RV32 so RISC‑V 32‑bit can avoid the 2038 overflow, implements the new 5.1+ year‑2038‑safe syscalls and reworks glibc syscall wrappers… | ||
| Bash-my-AWS: CLI commands for managing AWS resources | Mike Bailey | 25m |
Bash-my-AWS is a lightweight shell toolkit that thinly wraps AWSCLI to produce line-oriented output instead of JSON, adds pipe skimming (first-field STDIN… | ||
| The Art of the Linux Desktop | Simon Lees | 31m |
Argues for prioritizing visual experimentation over pure usability and shows practical work: a revived set of 170 Enlightenment themes run inside an Analects… | ||
| SRE for Smaller Organisations | Allan Shone | 16m |
Small organisations apply five practical principles: make everything infrastructure as code (Puppet/Ansible/Chef/Terraform in version control + runbooks) so… | ||
| Revisiting Cross-Stitch generation with a restricted palette | Jill Rowling | 15m |
Method converts an alpaca association shade card into a usable palette for Experiment 626 by photographing swatches, sampling averaged RGB/hex values with a… | ||
| RISC-V software ecosystem in 2020 | Atish Patra | 24m |
Toolchain is mostly upstream: GCC and LLVM support RISC-V, but 32-bit glibc is still being finished; Rust and Go land, Java and JS engines are missing. QEMU… | ||
| Film Freedom: making and releasing films with free software | Andrew Pam | 31m |
Film Freedom builds practical tools and releases: KitCAT integrates the TACTIC DAMS with Blender, Kdenlive and other FOSS apps via Python/Qt plugins so assets… | ||
| Easy Geo-Redundant Handover + Failover with MARS + systemd | Thomas Schoebel-Theuer | 23m |
Long-distance, transaction-logged replication using MARS transaction-logged replication and a new systemd unit-template generator automates geo-handover so a… | ||
| Configuration Is (riskier than?) Code | Jamie Wilkinson | 32m |
Claim: configuration is actual code and causes many high‑impact outages because a few characters can trigger thousands of actions. Evidence comes from public… | ||
| Introduction to Linux's License | Bradley M. Kuhn | 48m |
Explains that Linux’s effective license is GPLv2-only, documents many GPLv2 specifics (history, syscall exception, dual-licensing traces) and argues… | ||
| Fonts and Math | Jussi Pakkanen | 28m |
Explains how fonts get generated from math not manual outlines: a nib‑based Metafont model produces strokes defined by equations (Computer Modern is a… | ||
| Write your own modular synthesizer in Golang | Jacob Lister | 22m |
Project Noisefloor implements a modular software synthesizer written in Golang and transpiled to JavaScript so it runs in-browser and natively on Linux and… | ||
| Tuesday Welcome | Joel Addison, Ben Stevens | 07m |
Morning announcements cover prizes announced (one Samsung tablet and a course voucher), daily raffle draws and sponsor acknowledgements, network details… | ||
| Anatomy of a run-time: your contract with the kernel | Curtis Millar | 30m |
Argues that the kernel interface constrains what a language runtime can offload and what “write once, run anywhere” actually buys, demonstrates a two-function… | ||
| Facebook, Dynamite, Uber, Bombs, and You | Lana Brindley | 46m |
Hollerith punch‑card tabulators process 80 cards a minute and scale into national databases that IBM subsidiaries tie to census and bank records; that… | ||
| The awful design of everyday things | Christopher J Biggs | 28m |
Argues that recurring design failures cause needless documentation and cites concrete IoT examples: an oven with confusing oven dials that forces people to… | ||
| Samba 2020: Why are we still in the 1980s for authentication? | Andrew Bartlett | 17m |
Samba 4.11 scales to 300,000 users in simulated load tests, moves to Python 3, adds CI via GitLab, disables disabled SMB1 by default and removes DES while… | ||
| Synchronised Playback with GStreamer | Arun Raghavan | 22m |
A C library called GstSyncServer provides a client‑server API that syncs playback by distributing a network clock and control messages while leaving media… | ||
| Building a Community for Game Developers | Jon Manning | 24m |
Yarn Spinner is an open source narrative tool that powers choice-driven dialogue and cutscenes and ships the scripting language and node editor used in Night… | ||
| Dev/Ops relationships, status: It's Complicated | Anna Fiofilova | 19m |
Starts in an era where devs email packages to ops and lack production access, CI is absent and QA environments differ wildly, then shifts to team‑managed… | ||
| Conference Opening | Joel Addison, Ben Stevens | 29m |
Conference opens with a Welcome to Country and Yoakum dancers followed by practical briefings: 12 mini comps, over 80 talks across six tracks, lightning talks… | ||
| Easy Geo-Redundancy with MARS | Thomas Schoebel-Theuer | 44m |
MARS is a production kernel module that provides long‑distance geo‑redundancy for ~15,000 servers, millions of customers and multiple petabytes of data… | ||
| Designing Syscalls for Extensibility | Aleksa Sarai | 26m |
Examines a practical syscall extensibility pattern used by openat2, clone3 and new BPF calls: userland passes a struct plus its size and the kernel uses… | ||
| OCIv2: Container Images Considered Harmful | Aleksa Sarai | 45m |
Argues that tar‑based OCI layers cause waste and duplication (touching a 10 GB file can double an image, deletions add 512‑byte whiteout headers), and proposes… | ||
| WEMOS mini's are such a timesaver - or am i doing this wrong? | Sven Dowideit | 18m |
Uses cheap WEMOS Mini boards and Aliexpress shields to build distributed props that actually run reliably for months: six Raspberry Pis plus many WEMOSes drive… | ||
| You Shall Not Pass | Peter Burnett | 27m |
Moodle gets a password-policy plugin that rejects dictionary words, sequential digits, user-identifying data and compromised credentials by checking the SHA-1… | ||
| The Psychology of Multi-Factor Authentication | William Brown | 47m |
Passwords are brittle: complexity rules and forced rotation drive reuse and credential stuffing that succeed against real services daily. Time-based codes… | ||
| Every Image Has A Purpose | Allan Shone | 23m |
Uses Docker language to show concrete image recipes: a multistage build that compiles Go then copies only the binary into a scratch stage producing a ~6 MB… | ||
| Authentication Afterlife: the dark side of making lost password recovery harder | Ewen McNeill | 31m |
Cloud backups plus password managers plus 2FA (TOTP, hardware tokens, SMS) still fail when a fire or theft destroys the main device and its password store or… | ||
| Wednesday Welcome | Joel Addison, Ben Stevens | 11m |
Conference logistics and house rules are laid out: registration opens 08:00 daily, lanyard required for entry, morning and afternoon tea in foyer E/F, Wi‑Fi… | ||
| Keynote: From 2020 to 2121: How will we get there? | Donna Benjamin | 47m |
Argues that the free and open source community must act now to shape 2121, distinguishing surveillance vs observation with intent as the line between harm and… | ||
| Dynamic Workloads need Dynamic Storage - using rook-ceph with k8s | Steven Ellis | 25m |
Demonstrates building a container‑native Ceph cluster using the Rook operator and rook‑ceph on Kubernetes/OpenShift, provisioning multi‑AZ EBS volumes and… | ||
| API Standardising for the GLAM Sector - Workshop | Sae Ra Germaine, Hugh Rundle | 01h 23m |
Short workshop that maps concrete issues and tools: points to the Australian design guide at api.gov.au/standards, discusses using Trove API and Wikidata for… | ||
| Like, Share and Subscribe: Effective Communication of Security Advice | Serena Chen | 40m |
Everyday users know some security basics but often don’t act; advice must be incremental, personalized and habitual not abstract. The talk claims shame… | ||
| Kernel hacking like it's 2020 | Russell Currey | 18m |
Coverage shows concrete tooling: modern editors like Neovim, Spacemacs, Doom Emacs and VS Code integrate with the language server protocol so C completions… | ||
| What UNIX Cost Us | Benno Rice | 34m |
Describes having rewrote libusb in Rust to talk to a USB product across Windows (WinUSB), macOS (IOKit plugin interfaces) and Linux (udev, sysfs, functionfs)… | ||
| Panfrost: Open Source meets Arm Mali GPUs | Robert Foss | 30m |
An open-source Mesa driver called Panfrost implements Midgard (Mali‑T, T700/T800) and initial Bifrost support after reverse engineering starting in 2017… | ||
| Unsafe Defaults: Deploying Kubernetes Safer(ish) | James | 27m |
Kubernetes clusters frequently ship with dangerous defaults: the API binds locally on port 8080 with no TLS or auth and older controller managers speak that… | ||
| Kubernetes Developer Workflows in Visual Studio Code | Ivan Towlson | 47m |
An open-source VS Code extension that ties into kubectl and the Kubernetes JavaScript client to give visual cluster browser, YAML intellisense from the cluster… | ||
| Securing Container Runtimes -- How Hard Can It Be? | Aleksa Sarai | 45m |
Container runtimes repeatedly allow host breakouts via path races, procfs “magic links” and symlink-exchange attacks that succeed in under a second and… | ||
| How internet congestion control actually works in the bufferbloat age | Dave Taht | 43m |
Explains why uploads/downloads wreck latency and how TCP’s slow start, congestion avoidance, ACK-clock and loss-driven sawtooth interact with oversized buffers… | ||
| Electronics from your Kitchen Drawer | Peter Chubb | 46m |
Homemade parts include graphite-PVA conductive glue resistors (examples: stable ~10 Ω, drawn film ~33 kΩ, a 1 MΩ that collapses under 500 V), capacitors from… | ||
| It's All About Timing | Dave Chinner | 46m |
Built a portable timing system that achieves millisecond accuracy for a 1.15 km hillclimb with no line of sight, using off‑the‑shelf infrared beam pairs… | ||
| The Linux network stack extension for DDoS mitigation and web security | Alexander Krizhanovsky | 42m |
An open source, in-kernel HTTP accelerator-plus-firewall called Tempesta FW kernel module implements HTTPtables (nftables-aware rules), JavaScript and cookie… | ||
| Clevis and Tang: securing your secrets at rest | Fraser Tweedale | 47m |
Tang and Clevis implement network‑bound encryption: the server remains stateless and never learns client secrets, using the McCallum‑Relyea DH‑based exchange… | ||
| Automated acceptance tests for terminal applications | Róman Joost | 40m |
Automated acceptance tests exercise a terminal MUA called purebred by driving windows with tasty-tmux, taking periodic screenshot captures and asserting on… | ||
| Open Source Citizenship | Josh Simmons | 42m |
Research from interviews with corporate open source program leads and project maintainers maps what companies actually do—hiring paid committers at Google and… | ||
| Skills for Managing your Documentation Team | Joe Robinson | 21m |
Hiring feedback from application number 52 reveals a concrete mismatch: managers treated tech writer and developer roles as discrete while the candidate’s… | ||
| OpenZFS and Linux | Nikolai Lusan | 30m |
OpenZFS on Linux now provides native encryption (since 0.8), replaces mdadm/luks/lvm combos, and ZoL is the main upstream contributor after BTRFS lost… | ||
| What Makes Decentralisation Hard? And How Do We Overcome This? | Martin Krafft | 43m |
Argues the web is now a set of silos with Google and Facebook handling ~75% of requests by 2019, IPv4 limiting direct addressing to ~4.3 billion entities, and… | ||
| Keynote: Who cares about Democracy? | A/Prof Vanessa Teague | 58m |
Analyzes two concrete cryptographic bugs: a broken shuffle proof and a broken decryption proof in the SCYTL/SwissPost code that let a mixnet produce… | ||
| FreeBSD, The Other Unix-Like Operating System and Why You Should Get Involved! | Deb Goodkin | 46m |
FreeBSD traces to 1993 with a UNIX lineage, ships as a complete OS (not just a kernel), and supports 33,000+ packages and millions of deployments including… | ||
| The ZFS filesystem | Philip Paeps | 44m |
Hands‑on ZFS on FreeBSD: creates pools using mdconfig memory devices, runs zpool and zfs commands to make pools and datasets, shows snapshots and boot… | ||
| Improving the FreeBSD security advisory process | Philip Paeps | 32m |
FreeBSD acknowledges slow historic security response and now formalizes reporting via a PGP-encrypted security officer address, a bug tracker and fortnightly… | ||
| Introduction to FreeBSD Ports - 25 years and counting | Ben Woods | 46m |
FreeBSD ports celebrate 25 years and the tree now holds ~38,000 ports; it supplies the formulas that fetch upstream source, apply patches, run configure and… | ||
| Lightning talks and open discussion | Jonathan Woithe | 25m |
Room runs an open lightning session where attendees present short projects and an informal discussion surfaces concrete examples: webcomic Pepper & Carrot and… | ||
| The Case against Gratuitous Tech in the Classroom | Arjen Lentz | 01h 13m |
Argues schools buy tech because it’s shiny not effective: iPads in kindy lead to children who cannot hold pencils; school laptops often log in in five to fifty… | ||
| ESP32 memory management, Neopixels, and RGBPanels | Marc Merlin | 19m |
ESP32 reports 520KB spec, ~160KB usable for large global arrays, but memory is fragmented (DMA vs instruction cache regions) so big framebuffers blow out… | ||
| Open AND High Performance Computing | Hugh Blemings | 47m |
OpenPOWER describes concrete hardware and software wins: Power9 on 14nm, up to 4GHz, 22 cores/socket with 4 threads/core, systems shipping with fully open… | ||
| Analysis of FOSS Gaming Failure: A history of PokerSource and Open Source Online Poker | Bradley M. Kuhn | 57m |
An AGPL/GPL online poker stack built around a C hand‑evaluator, a Python server and the first widely deployed pure JavaScript jPoker client ships for… | ||
| Keynote: Drop Your Tools – Does Expertise have a Dark Side? | Sean Brady | 48m |
Argument that expertise can blind decision making is illustrated with two failures and controlled studies: a 1971 Hartford convention roof (10,000 seats… | ||
| Kerbal Space Program: A Journey into Mod Metadata Herding | Leon Wright | 25m |
Builds and operations of the Comprehensive Kerbal Addon Network evolve from a brittle, monolithic cron-and-mono pipeline into a set of decoupled services… | ||
| STEM: Our approach to Stem @ PLC | Wes Warner | 30m |
Middle school STEM uses problem‑based learning across Year 9 and Year 10 to deliver underwater ROVs, rollercoasters, bionic prosthetics and solar ovens… | ||
| Velociraptor - Dig Deeper | Mike Cohen | 01h 42m |
Installs from a single binary and boots a front end plus clients, generates server/client configs and Debian packages, then runs real exercises: collect bash… | ||
| Snek: A Python-Inspired Language for Tiny Embedded Computers | Keith Packard | 44m |
A Python subset called Snek compiles to a small bytecode VM that runs in 32kB ROM and 2kB of RAM, targets ATmega328 boards and the classroom workflow, and… | ||
| LPI and BSD Working Together | G Matthew Rice | 12m |
Linux Professional Institute relaunches the BSD certification relaunch formerly run by the BSD Certification Group and maps it into LPI levels with… | ||
| Open Hardware Lightning Talks | Jonathan Oxer, Andy Gelme | 46m |
A set of five-minute projects reports practical outcomes: a six LattePandas cluster housed in a laser‑cut, fan‑cooled box that auto-builds Docker images and… | ||
| Why Linux Systems Administrators Should Care About the Mainframe | Elizabeth K. Joseph | 24m |
Claim that mainframes are alive and relevant with more mainframes sold in 2018 than 1990 and Linux on s390x since 1998. Modern z15-class boxes fit standard… | ||
| [PATCH v22] Landing a Large Series | Casey Schaufler | 25m |
Seven years of work refactors Linux security modules from a single-user design into a multi-module stack, culminating in [PATCH v22] and many incremental patch… | ||
| RISC-V FDPIC/NOMMU toolchain/runtime support | Maciej W. Rozycki | 27m |
Proposes an FDPIC psABI for RISC‑V that reserves an ABI GP register per module so read‑only text can be shared on NOMMU systems while data maps independently… | ||
| In-depth technical story: Fixing I/O performance for Windows guests in OpenStack Ceph clouds | Trent Lloyd | 45m |
A private OpenStack cloud with Ceph shows Windows VMs stalling because many writes are unaligned <4KB partial writes; 1.4% of operations consume ~40% of CPU… | ||
| Donkey Cars at Yarra Valley Tech School | Matt Pattison | 21m |
Yarra Valley Tech School runs a hands-on program where students build and tune small self-driving platforms using Donkey Car kits, race trained models, and… | ||
| Upstreaming a linux kernel driver. | Hasjim 'futaris' Williams | 10m |
Walks through the concrete steps to upstream a Linux driver: read kernel docs and kernelnewbies, split patches, find mailing list recipients, send plain‑text… | ||
| How Australian IaaS OrionVM uses FreeBSD | Ruben Schade | 28m |
OrionVM runs FreeBSD as a first‑class guest OS, uses OpenZFS for primary storage (clients report >95% space savings on one legacy document system), offers… | ||
| Planning for and handling failures from open hardware, aviation, to production at Google | Marc Merlin | 46m |
Covers concrete failures and fixes: LiPo batteries that reignite days later and using protection boards, the Samsung Note7 root cause of slightly thicker cells… | ||
| An intro to improving the security of your code with free analysis tools | Jason C Cohen | 44m |
Overview of free tooling for reducing code attack surface with concrete demos and outcomes: shows Flawfinder flagging a C buffer overflow and spotting the… | ||
| The future of the desktop is on hypervisor powered containers | Alex Sharp, Anuj Dhavalikar | 24m |
A working Xen-based Qubes OS desktop isolates apps into ZEN VMs with per-VM X servers stitched in dom0 via a GUI daemon, Vchan RPC and shared-memory X… | ||
| Control Flow Integrity in the Linux Kernel | Kees Cook | 39m |
Linux kernel gets forward-edge checks by inserting per-type jump tables and runtime validation using Clang/LLVM CFI, requires whole-kernel visibility via thin… | ||
| 3 Talks for the Price of 1! | Tim Ansell | 29m |
Built an open SystemVerilog acid test suite that exposes what each parser and tool actually implements, then absorbs new parsers (Google’s verible-based… | ||
| We know when you are sleeping: The Rise of Energy Smart Meters | Rachel Bunder | 43m |
Australia has roughly 30% smart‑meter penetration and meters typically record 15‑ or 30‑minute intervals, with a legal right to request two years of data… | ||
| FreeBSD bhyve intro | Peter Grehan | 34m |
A minimal FreeBSD hypervisor originally written 2011 and upstreamed later, bhyve runs as a UNIX process with vCPUs as threads, uses a kernel module + character… | ||
| Compiling Your Story: Using Techniques from Compiler Design to Check Your Narrative | Jon Manning | 46m |
Yarn Spinner is treated as a full language, compiled to bytecode and converted into basic blocks and a control‑flow graph so symbolic execution can run every… | ||
| Decoding battery management data - back in the old school | Paul Wayper | 45m |
USB adapter exposes an RS‑232 stream from a Lithium8 Light pack and the code decodes per‑cell voltages, amp readings and flags (discovering a 3‑byte uptime… | ||
| Verified seL4 on secure RISC-V processors | Gernot Heiser | 45m |
seL4 is ported and running on RISC-V hardware (tested on SiFive HiFive Unleashed) with IPC latency comparable to ARM; HENSOLDT funds a full verification effort… | ||
| NTFS really isn't that bad | Robert Collins | 48m |
Explains why rustup install time on Windows falls from 3m30s → 14s by combining small code changes and Windows fixes: replace copies with moves, increase… | ||
| VM block error injection, a novel approach for testing Linux storage | Tony Asleson | 44m |
Proposal to inject real hardware-like block errors from the VM layer for reproducible storage testing, claiming virtualized device models can force read/write… | ||
| Finding aids as open data: Access points to data-drive stories of the past | Bonnie Wildie | 41m |
Archives indexes from New South Wales are released or scraped into GitHub and the GLAM Workbench and get interrogated with CartoDB, Trove and simple scripts to… | ||
| Good, better, breast: Building a sensing mastectomy prosthetic with open hardware | Kathy Reid | 46m |
A working prototype called SenseBreast embeds a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and a Sense HAT into a medical‑grade silicone mastectomy prosthetic, logging IMU, temperature… | ||
| A Political History of X | Keith Packard | 46m |
Narrative traces X from a two‑week W hack at Stanford through X10 and the X11 rewrite, shows the internet’s mid‑80s bandwidth/latency limits forcing a… | ||
| Privacy is not Binary: A discussion of data systems, ethics, and human rights | Elizabeth Alpert, Amelia Radke | 45m |
Argues that privacy is not binary and legal definitions like personal information in the Australian Privacy Act and the new Queensland Human Rights Act don’t… | ||
| The EU Says The Laws of Mathematics Apply in Australia | Dan Shearer | 47m |
EU privacy and security laws (GDPR, ePrivacy, NIS, Telecoms Code) force concrete engineering choices worldwide: up to 4% fines for failures, explicit bans on… | ||
| Opening a treasure trove: The Historical Aerial Photography project | Paul Haesler | 39m |
Geoscience Australia curates ~1 million historical aerial photos, about 280,000 images digitised so far but only ~20% fully scanned; flight-line diagrams live… | ||
| Desktop Linux, without a keyboard, mouse or desk | Shervin Emami | 43m |
Demonstrates a full-time, hands-free Linux workstation built from demos: speech recognition for dictation and voice coding (Kaldi with active grammar and… | ||
| Kicad for software developers | David Tulloh | 01h 41m |
Hands-on KiCad 5 tutorial that walks through drawing a complete schematic for a 24 V sprinkler relay controller with an ESP8266 Wi‑Fi switch and… | ||
| Room scale VR tracking with OpenHMD | Jan Schmidt | 45m |
OpenHMD adds positional room‑scale tracking for the Oculus Rift CV1 by reverse‑engineering its UVC infrared cameras, LED 10‑bit blink IDs, and radio sync… | ||
| How to Write a Retro Arcade Emulator | Josh Bassett | 40m |
Builds a working emulator that runs an unmodified Rygar ROM in seconds and ports the design into an FPGA core that eventually boots the actual game. Emulation… | ||
| Using WhatsApp as a Command Line ( Breaking out of the walled Garden) | Tishampati Dhar | 39m |
Shows concrete methods to automate WhatsApp: reverse-engineered protocol libraries (Yowsup), Puppeteer with WhatsApp Web, Android notification listeners… | ||
| The Story of PulseAudio and Compress Offload | Arun Raghavan | 37m |
PulseAudio adds support for sending encoded MP3/AAC/etc. straight to DSPs by using the ALSA compress offload API and a modified client protocol that attaches… | ||
| Large Pages in Linux | Matthew Wilcox | 44m |
Argues for making Linux page caching work with arbitrary power-of-two page sizes instead of only 4KB or 2MB, and shows code that generalizes the page cache and… | ||
| Practical Ethics: building it better in 2020 and beyond | Nicola Nye | 48m |
Argues that ethics can coexist with capitalism and gives concrete tools: a three‑part checklist (external product, company policies, internal treatment of… | ||
| DAING - A monitoring stack for datacentres | Dave Kempe, Oliver Lowe | 01h 00m |
Hands-on lab boots an OVA with Icinga (with Director), NetBox, Ansible, InfluxDB and Grafana running in VirtualBox (requires ~4 GB RAM and 10 GB disk). NetBox… | ||
| Macro Security for your Microservices | Sreejith Anujan | 01h 41m |
Hands-on demo of Istio on OpenShift with Envoy sidecars shows service identity, mutual TLS, fine-grained ACLs and rate limiting enforced at the proxy, not in… | ||
| Privacy Preserving IoT | Christopher J Biggs | 46m |
Argues that IoT privacy is recoverable with concrete tools and prototypes: uses Google’s Private Set Intersection (private join and compute) for matching… | ||
| Introduction to Rust (for people who have never used a compiler) | Tim McNamara | 01h 42m |
Promises a hands‑on path from zero to a working CLI and shows the exact commands to get there: rustup / cargo init then cargo run and optional cloud play… | ||
| From bits to legs to locomotion: Building a hexapod from the ground up | Daniel McCarthy | 46m |
A six‑degree‑of‑freedom hexapod is designed and built from cheap hobby parts to be an order of magnitude less expensive than kits, using STM32F103 controllers… | ||
| An introduction to Penetration Testing using Kali Linux | Marcus Herstik | 01h 41m |
Hands-on Kali session that scans the 192.168.1.x lab with nmap -sP/-sV, extracts EXIF from a webpage image, and brute forces an HTTP password with… | ||
| Building a zero downtime Kubernetes cluster | Feilong Wang | 46m |
Catalyst Cloud builds and runs an open source Magnum Auto Healer for OpenStack Magnum that detects unhealthy masters, etcd or worker nodes via API endpoints… | ||
| The Internet: Protecting Our Democratic Lifeline | Brett Sheffield | 51m |
Argues the Internet is the best democratic tool but is degraded by centralisation, tracking, censorship and harmful laws, and proposes rebuilding parts of the… | ||
| AI/ML Won't Save you | Julien Goodwin | 09m |
Argues that ML systems repeatedly fail at real ops problems and gives concrete replacements: a 2011 deployment uses a probe mesh over Force10/MPLS paths plus a… | ||
| Piku: git push deployments to your own servers | Chris McCormick | 40m |
Piku is a minimal Git-driven PaaS you can bootstrap onto a fresh VPS: ~1,000 lines of Python installs nginx, uWSGI and incron, provisions LetsEncrypt certs and… | ||
| Open collaborations: leadership succession and leadership success | Ann Smith, Myk Dowling | 44m |
A case study of the Kerbal mod index demonstrates concrete claims and fixes: an MIT‑licensed C# client (Ckan repository client) grows to 124 releases, 2,000+… | ||
| Linux in the Cloud, on Prem, or... on a Mainframe? | Elizabeth K. Joseph | 44m |
Modern mainframes run Linux natively and as VMs, with IBM shipping Linux One 3 and IFL chips that can reach 5.2 GHz across hundreds of processors and up to ~40… | ||
| No Docs? No Problem! From Zero to Full Documentation in Less Time than You Think | Nathan Willis | 43m |
Turns a codebase with virtually no docs into a full set of internal and external references plus code‑integration and end‑user guides for HarfBuzz, documenting… | ||
| Musings of an Accidental Chair - change from the inside out | Lyndsey Jackson | 44m |
Built a rapid-response campaign site #notmydebt using govCMS Drupal distribution to collect anonymous stories; 300 submissions arrive in the first three weeks… | ||
| Engineer tested, manager approved: Migrating Windows/.NET services to Linux | Katie Bell | 48m |
Campaign Monitor migrates legacy .NET Framework microservices to .NET Core on Linux using Docker and AWS ECS, running a two‑week spike with three engineers… | ||
| When Jargon Becomes Gibberish | Casey Schaufler | 42m |
Explains why technical shorthand degenerates into misunderstanding: uncontrolled acronyms (ACLs and SCSI), reused metaphors (desktop, bootstrap), code names… | ||
| DingoCar: A machine learning platform | John Spencer | 10m |
Raspberry Pi HAT that combines power management and I/O for on-board ML rigs, with a KiCad-designed HAT, 8 PWM channels / servo outputs, and a small 128×64… | ||
| Behind (and under) the scenes of the Meson build system | Jussi Pakkanen | 45m |
Meson history and hard lessons: how Meson actually builds systemd, X.org, GStreamer and Mesa, how it handled distro upgrades and bootstrapping RISC-V, and why… | ||
| Building an ethical data infrastructure | Marissa Takahashi | 29m |
A research infrastructure called the Digital Observatory implements privacy and security by design, uses professional software engineers, and secures data bank… | ||
| How to capture 100G Ethernet traffic at wire speed to local disk | Christoph H Lameter | 31m |
Shows how to capture 100G (12.5 GB/s) into a single 1U box by combining Mellanox ConnectX‑6 NICs and userland/driver techniques (DPDK/SPDK or RDMA verbs) or a… | ||
| Collecting information with care | Opal Symes | 48m |
Advice: stop splitting names and store a full-name plus greeting so legal and preferred names coexist; migrate databases to utf8mb4 migration and update… | ||
| ROS on your robot: the tale of an inside, an outside robot and 2 arms | Ben Martin | 48m |
ROS runs as a node framework on Linux and is used here to convert Kinect depth into Kinect→fake laser scan data, build SLAM maps, publish odometry from wheel… | ||
| OpenWRT for Energy Monitoring | Tishampati Dhar | 26m |
A DIN‑rail energy monitor is built around Microchip energy‑ASIC over SPI with voltage and current channels (two‑channel sampling shown), migrating from… | ||
| KUnit - Unit Testing for the Linux Kernel | Brendan Higgins | 44m |
KUnit is a lightweight in-kernel unit test framework that is merged upstream for 5.5 and already provides ~100 test cases across about seven suites and has… | ||
| Friday Welcome | Joel Addison, Ben Stevens | 09m |
Morning housekeeping covers logistics and community items: conference Wi‑Fi includes eduroam and an SSID with password, registration desk swaps badges and… | ||
| Thursday Welcome | Joel Addison, Ben Stevens | 09m |
Conference opens with housekeeping: sponsors include IBM and Western Digital, registration opens 8:00, sessions after lunch start 13:30, and WiFi LCA2020 /… | ||
| Emersive theatre tech - building actuators last minute | Sven Dowideit | 28m |
A DevOps-built kit of interactive props uses six Raspberry Pis and RFID podiums plus neopixels, servos, motors, smoke machines and UHF tags to make… | ||
| Playable Ads: What REALLY are they? | Evan Kohilas | 46m |
Uses a man‑in‑the‑middle proxy on a Raspberry Pi with an installed certificate to intercept Unity Ads auction JSON (device fields, cached ad hashes) and the… | ||
| Essential Git Fu for tech writers | Gaurav Nelson | 22m |
Shows concrete git aliases and bash functions that replace messy sequences—examples include git newbranch (creates branch instead of checkout -b), git remember… | ||
| Zero Trust SSH | Jeremy Stott | 45m |
OpenSSH certificates replace per-user keys with a single CA key and short expiries, implemented here with short-lived SSH certificates obtained via an OAuth2… | ||
| The magical fantasy land of Linux kernel testing | Russell Currey | 41m |
Linux kernel testing faces scale: over 14,000 commits and 1,800+ developers per release, thousands of distro and vendor variants, and hardware ranges from 512… | ||
| RFC 1984: Or why you should start worrying about encryption backdoors and mass data collection | Esther Payne | 46m |
Argues that government pushes for encryption backdoors and mass data collection actively weaken security and privacy, cites William Barr’s call to weaken… | ||
| Advanced Stream Processing on the Edge | Eduardo Silva | 39m |
An open source C tool brings stream processing on the edge to logs by parsing raw bytes into fields, running in-memory SQL-like queries and windowed… | ||
| The life of open source spatial with QGIS - From hobby to grown up, with bonus growing pains | Nathan Woodrow | 45m |
QGIS starts in 2002 as a hobby PostGIS viewer and grows into a cross‑platform desktop GIS that layers GDAL/OGR, PROJ, Qt and Python, with almost a million… | ||
| Universal Tools for Acceleration, Timing, Integration & Machine Enhancement | Hasjim 'futaris' Williams | 24m |
Argues that RISC‑V plus FPGA toolchains let teams build and run real accelerators today: demonstrates a tiny USB‑sized RISC‑V board with USB softcore and RGB… | ||
| Tyranny of the Clock | Craig Miskell | 30m |
A GitLab.com incident response story tracing intermittent git-over-SSH failures to early TCP terminations caused by synchronized cron spikes. Packet captures… | ||
| Highly available DNS recursion with PowerDNS | Dave Kempe | 06m |
A highly available DNS cluster built with PowerDNS DNSdist in front of multiple PowerDNS Recursors and an authoritative backend uses a keepalived VIP for a… | ||
| Conference Close | Joel Addison, Ben Stevens | 24m |
Closing session rounds up donations and logistics, announces outcomes and next year’s city. The charity raffle raises $14,000 which with Linux Australia… | ||
| Betrusted: Better Security Through Physical Partitioning | Sean "xobs" Cross, Tom Marble | 48m |
Project builds a separate, verifiable device that isolates secure apps on a dedicated screen and keyboard, using an FPGA-based single-chip enclave with a spy… | ||
| Paying it Forward: Documenting your Open Hardware Module | Sean "xobs" Cross | 23m |
lxsocdoc embeds register and protocol metadata in Python/LiteX HDL so a human- and machine-readable reference manual is generated at build time rather than… | ||
| picolibc: a C library for small 32-bit systems | Keith Packard | 42m |
A compact C library combines newlib math/string code with a tiny AVR-derived stdio to target 32-bit embedded cores, dropping newlib’s libgloss and buffering to… | ||
| Suriving the robot apocalypse: How technical writers can (and should) embrace automation | Dan Macpherson | 32m |
Argues that automation won’t replace tech writers but shifts the role toward providing quality training and test data, designing models and supervising… | ||
| Linux Australia Annual General Meeting | Sae Ra Germaine | 44m |
Annual accounts show about $800k in liquid assets, ~ $38k executive operating spend and $5.5k auditor fees; membership system migration exposes a fall from… | ||
| DingoCar: Perception module Small scale, self-driving car | Andy Gelme | 35m |
Small-scale self-driving kit runs TensorFlow on Raspberry Pi (Jetson Nano support) with a camera, IMU, PWM motor outputs and LiPo power; data collection… | ||
| Pia's digital state of the State address: with a GLAM twist | Pia Andrews | 42m |
Reports that a new Victorian + federal API standard for government is already published and usable, and that releasing an API guide in one week once caused… | ||
| Keynote: Out of the sausage factory and into the streets - Defending digital rights | Lizzie O'Shea | 48m |
Australian Assistance and Access (AA) Act grants broad powers to many agencies to issue technical assistance requests or compulsory notices that can compel… | ||
| Keeping the Watchers at Bay | Mark Nottingham | 44m |
Recap of concrete wins and remaining fights: old attacks like Firesheep force migration from HTTP to HTTPS, Let's Encrypt and ACME automate free certs (≈100M… | ||
| Open Source Won, but Software Freedom Hasn't Yet: A Guide & Commiseration Session for FOSS activists | Bradley M. Kuhn, Karen M. Sandler | 44m |
Open source code keeps growing but everyday software freedom shrinks: since about 2006 utopia the web installs proprietary JavaScript on every visit, modern… | ||
| What Lies Beneath: What are they really tracking and how? | Anne Jessel | 49m |
Used webpagetest.org, GTmetrix, Chrome DevTools to load news.com.au once (no scrolling, no login) and observed ~40 marketing/analytics domains contacted, with… | ||
| Privacy, Security, Convenience; when it comes to home automation, can we pick all three? | Ben Dechrai | 46m |
Shows a practical home-automation stack that keeps control local: VLAN segmentation with an isolated IoT VLAN, end-to-end encrypted payloads signed as JSON web… | ||
| Everything Awesome about GPU Drivers | Daniel Vetter | 47m |
About 10 years after initial kernel modesetting lands, open GPU drivers support 57 atomic mode-set drivers and scale from 250 lines to 2 million+ lines of… | ||
| TPM based attestation - how can we use it for good? | Matthew Garrett | 42m |
Systems with TPMs produce signed PCR quotes plus an event log; this shows which boot components hashed into the final PCR value and lets a verifier check… | ||
| Everything you know is wrong: why using big words can made you sound stupid | Lana Brindley | 46m |
Research finds abstract phrasing signals power (people who sound vague are perceived as in control) while specific detail increases perceived truth — e.g., a… | ||
| Behind the scenes of an ELK system | Rafael Martinez Guerrero | 01h 30m |
Architecture that handles billions of logs a day from 15,000 devices uses Filebeat -> HAProxy (SSL terminate) -> Logstash receivers and separate Logstash… | ||
| LumoSQL - updating SQLite for the modern age | Dan Shearer | 47m |
LumoSQL forks SQLite and replaces SQLite KV store with LMDB, updating a 2013 prototype and publishing the code on GitHub. It ships a makefile and scripts that… | ||
| Affordable Custom Input Devices | Jonathan Oxer, Chris Fryer | 44m |
Workshops show building low-cost custom input hardware using an Arduino Leonardo to emulate keyboard/mouse/gamepad, 3.5 mm switch sockets for standard… | ||
| Building a Compiler for Quantum Computers | Matthew Treinish | 39m |
Explains why a quantum compiler is essential and shows concrete effects: compiling the same five‑qubit circuit with different passes yields 56% vs 28% correct… | ||
| Professional quality layout design with Scribus | Kathy Reid | 01h 28m |
Hands-on 100‑minute Scribus tutorial shows how to configure preferences (set default page to A4 and measurements to millimetres, autosave ~5 min, guides… | ||
| Transpile anything to everything! | Anna Herlihy | 44m |
Compass adds a web‑friendly JavaScript transpiler that translates MongoDB queries and aggregations from any language to any language by combining ANTLR… | ||
| Write a single library to handle all input devices, it'll be easy they said... | Peter Hutterer | 47m |
A single C library called libinput is presented as the unified input backend used by all major Wayland compositors and the default X.org input driver (Fedora… | ||
| smbcmp: A new tool to diff network captures | Aurélien Aptel | 37m |
A new tool called smbcmp loads pcap/x files via tshark XML output and shows two captures side-by-side with a line-by-line diff of packet details plus… | ||
| Tensorflow on open source GPUs | David Airlie | 43m |
TensorFlow builds to CUDA/PTX currently, so work focuses on replacing CUDA with a SYCL/DPC++ frontend that emits SPIR-V kernel vs shader binaries, feeding… | ||
| How to make kernel and user space CI for input devices? | Benjamin Tissoires | 31m |
Builds a per-commit CI that injects synthetic devices via uinput and parses HID descriptors to generate realistic event reports, runs about 248 manual-style… | ||
| Privacy and Decentralisation with Multicast | Brett Sheffield | 47m |
Argues that IP multicast is the missing piece for decentralisation and privacy, demonstrating concrete tools and tricks: IPv6 multicast with MLD/IGMP snooping… | ||
| Lightning Talks | Joel Addison, Ben Stevens | 48m |
Fourteen two‑to‑three minute pieces range from hiring interns (one TAFE intern converted to paid staff after a 30‑day internship) to a live reverse‑engineered… | ||
| POWER OpenISA and Microwatt introduction | Anton Blanchard | 16m |
OpenPOWER ISA becomes royalty free in August 2019 and a tiny reference core Microwatt implements the 64‑bit base subset in VHDL 2008, simulates with GHDL and… | ||
| New Phone, Who Dis: Human Authentication in the Digital Age | Yaakov | 43m |
Reverse-engineering the New South Wales digital licence app reveals a QR payload of three base64 sections, a double base64 header with a missing expiry check… | ||
| Miniconf Keynote: The Who of CSIRAC | Roland Gesthuizen, Gillian Kidman, Hazel Tan, Caroline Pham | 01h 10m |
CSIRAC is Australia’s first digital computer and the uploader claims the fifth stored‑program machine worldwide, built from 1949 hardware that weighs over two… | ||
| Securing firmware: Secure and Trusted boot in OpenBMC | Joel Stanley | 39m |
OpenBMC implements a hardware root of trust on newer BMC SoCs so the boot ROM verifies a small SPL image against one-time programmable keys (ASPEED 2600… | ||
| Pop-Up Education Makerspaces | Caroline Pham, Roland Gesthuizen | 32m |
Pop-up makerspaces run across a year at Monash set up short public events where pre-service teachers build hands-on stations using micro:bits, Bee-Bots, VR… | ||
| OpenISA Miniconf Introduction | Alistair Francis, Hugh Blemings | 17m |
High-level orientation to two open ISAs with concrete details: RISC‑V is a small base ISA plus modular extensions (M, A, F, D, G, C) and Linux typically… | ||
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