Blogs

Free Software Stammtisch job networking event this Tuesday at 18:00.

We encourage engineers from groups that are hiring and hiring managers to attend. The goal is for prospective candidates to learn about the company and the actual job while giving the team a chance to meet prospective candidates. Interviews are bi-directional, so are job searches.

We have several confirmed employers this month:

Topic: Command Line Tools Seminar
Instructor: Ryan Hermens

This month's east side meeting is a seminar on important command line tools. It's a good month to bring friends and family that have interest in GNU/Linux.

Thursday, October 11th @ 19:00

CactusConKids was even better this year. #CactusCon is a two day regional security conference in #Arizona with a couple thousand attendees.

The one day program added an escape room. To participate in the escape room kids had to first complete three stations: lock picking, arduino updates and a simple breadboard build.

Each of the three rooms in the escape challenge had a puzzle matching one of the three pre-requisite skill stations. Each room also had a hack to bypass the challenge. CactusCon is a hacker/security conference after all :).

SeaGL accepted one of my talks again this year! This year I'll speak about Joey Hess' excellent etckeeper.

etckeeper makes it easy to keep system configuration files in revision control. In addition to normal revision control, etckeeper includes important features to track file ownership and permissions, work with package managers and track empty directories. etckeeper supports git, mercurial, bazaar and darcs revision control systems.

I went to my first Tübix this year. Tübingen is a beautiful college town ( Universitätsstadt ) on the Neckar river in southwestern Germany.

I particularly enjoyed the talks on SSH and authentication, both of which led into my talk on privacy and security via a password manager. I picked up a couple new ways of explaining things from the SSH talk and look forward to listening to it again.

PLUG has two topics for August.

Ed Nicholson - Technical Debts and Digital Assets

Exploring the analogy of debt and real world financial obligations, as a context for a software's or system's life cycle. Debt and Software are both fundamentally types of Intangible Assets. This talk is an exploration of how the much older asset class, Debt, may be usefully applied in understanding the relative newcomers, Software and Systems.

der.hans - Introduction to /etc/alternatives

Thursday's PLUG meeting for July went well. We had a large crowd for mid-summer including lots of new faces.

Announcements included an opening for teaching electronics at a local community college. The department head showed up, so I handed it over to him for descriptions of the classes and what they need. He's adamant about a GNU/Linux infrastructure being vital to the success of the program and has hired 4 previous instructors from PLUG.

[This is an article I wrote for Linux Journal]

Internet and cloud companies do not have perfect security. We're all familiar with large scale data theft from big corporations. While most do a great job considering the attacks against them, you can do your part by protecting your own accounts.

It's common wisdom to use a different password for each account. Better yet is using a unique email address as well. That quickly becomes unwieldy, so we need an external brain.

Tübix has kindly accepted two of my proposals for the beginning of June conference in Tübingen, Germany.

In the morning I will be showing uMatrix, a privacy and security webextension browser add on. Via a simple interface uMatrix allows personal rules for website cookies, JavaScript, CSS, pictures and video.

In the afternoon I will be speaking on privacy and security via better control o
f account credentials and private data.

Both talks will be in German. The conference is in German and Schwäbisch.

I will be presenting uMatrix at PLUG in May.

I'm looking forward to Barbara's presentation on power company planning to kick off our infrastructure series, SRP Resource Planning.

Aaron is crossing over from his security meetings to talk about Social Media Safety.

uMatrix is a webextension security and privacy add on for Firefox.