FOSDEM: more boring shit (2020/01/29)
Let's take a look at my annotated copy of the FOSDEM 2020 main talk schedule, shall we?
Keynotes
Welcome to FOSDEM 2020
Preëmptive apologia.
The Linux Kernel: We have to finish this thing one day ;)
Solving big problems in small steps for more than two decades
The speaker would like to ascribe credit to Linux for the invention of all of the groundbreaking features that Linux has poorly copied from better operating systems and then conclude that Andy Tanenbaum was right.
Speaker's name anagram: THEME: HE RUINS LOTS
FOSSH - 2000 to 2020 and beyond!
maddog continues to pontificate
We are not treated to a definition of "FOSSH," but we may presume that poorly-supported hardware has joined the ranks of poorly-supported software as a topic of this conference.
Speaker's name anagram: LOGJAM? OLD HAND
FOSDEM@20 - A Celebration
The cliché of constant change
The FOSDEM organizers were unable to recruit a third keynote speaker willing to talk about anything interesting, so instead they tagged someone with twenty years' worth of nothing-better-to-do to rely on a nostalgia filter to make past conferences seem interesting in comparison.
Speaker's name anagram: VETOED OWN SIGN
Closing FOSDEM 2020
Post-facto regret.
Community and Ethics
How FOSS could revolutionize municipal government
with recent real-world examples
Fifty entire minutes from a person who thinks that the copyright license matters at all when operating a city government. The people who write the software used by actual city governments will not be in attendance, because neither Excel nor Powerpoint are available under a free-software license.
Speaker's name anagram: PEON DOES CARE
The Selfish Contributor Explained
The speaker attempts to resolve the cognitive dissonance inspired by the repeated claims of "protecting user freedoms" despite all open-source programmers being employed by massive software companies. No solutions are provided, but some advice is promised regarding the maintenance of license-cult affiliation while conning some webshit company into paying you to mismanage your hobby projects.
Speaker's name anagram: MOTLEY TAME JOBS
The Ethics Behind Your IoT
The speaker is convinced that some of the attendees might not have noticed the six hundred thousand articles from Buzzfeed, Gizmodo, Engadget, and Reader's Digest that personal surveillance furniture is not made with the owner's best interests in mind. This talk consists of @internetofshit's twitter feed on a five-year time delay.
Speaker's name anagram: CAN LOB MY DELL
Freedom and AI: Can Free Software include ethical AI systems?
Exploring the intersection of Free software and AI
Some ostensible programmers have decided they are the proper people to introduce ethics to the latest buzzword factory, based on close consultation with the largest privacy-violation apparatus ever constructed and a hodgepodge of B-team politicians-in-exile.
Speakers' name anagrams: I JUSTLY FROWN and HELL NO, MANIAC
Containers and Security
How Containers and Kubernetes re-defined the GNU/Linux Operating System
A Greybeard's Worst Nightmare
A Red Hat arrives to try to convince other middle managers that this container stuff is totally different and somehow relevant to that 5G thing you keep seeing in TV commercials. It is not different, and it is not relevant to any specific radio communications technology, but Red Hat's not paying for the talk to make sense. Red Hat is paying for the talk to convince ISP operators to buy Openshift licenses.
Speaker's name anagram: NERDLIKE AI
Fixing the Kubernetes clusterfuck
Understanding security from the kernel up
In this roller-coaster of a talk, the speaker will outline the crippling security failures of current IT-industry darling Kubernetes, then reassures us that these problems do have solutions, only to horrify us again by revealing the solutions start with "shitting arbitrary code into a Turing-complete interpreter in Ring 0."
Speaker's name anagram: N.K. SAVIOR
Address Space Isolation in the Linux Kernel
Some programmers think they can work around hardware information leaks in code.
Speakers' name anagrams: LAMEST BYTE MOJO and TAPROOM PIKER
Guix: Unifying provisioning, deployment, and package management in the age of containers
The developer of a package manager nobody asked for, written in a programming language nobody likes, insists that the package manager is in fact a perfect replacement for whatever the hell you've been doing, regardless of what that is.
Speaker's name anagram: I COULD SCOUR TV
Databases
LumoSQL - Experiments with SQLite, LMDB and more
SQLite is justly famous, but also has well-known limitations
This talk, awkwardly shoved into the schedule at the last minute, sees the speaker claim that shitty fifty-cent on-device sensors are generating data faster than SQLite can store it. This is obviously horse shit, and the speaker hasn't actually got anything working yet, but the speaker needed some attention, which is the primary factor in whether one is allocated speaking time at FOSDEM.
Speaker's name anagram: SANE HARDER
SECCOMP your PostgreSQL
A PostgreSQL consultant tries to drum up public support for a patchset nobody wanted.
Speaker's name anagram: ENJOY A COW
dqlite: High-availability SQLite
An embeddable, distributed and fault tolerant SQL engine
An Ubuntu gets on the "SQLite, but better" bandwagon. Unlike the previous project, which combined SQLite with some code derived from academia to solve perceived flaws in the wrong layer, this project takes the revolutionary approach of combining SQLite with some code derived from academia to solve perceived flaws in the wrong layer.
Speaker's name anagram: A FAKE ARENA KEY
MySQL Goes to 8!
An Oracle shows up to convince us their also-ran database product is still relevant. The only remaining users of the program in question are people running Movable Type, and those people are using the non-Oracle fork of the program anyway. Still, the speaker has to say something to justify Oracle's payment for the trip. As a result, this talk will consist of the speaker reading the MySQL changelog directly from the commit log.
Speaker's name anagram: LØGS VARY? I'D HIKE
SWIM - Protocol to Build a Cluster
SWIM gossip protocol, its implementation, and improvements
While their government may have lost interest, some Russians are still interested in pretending to participate in Europe. The talk is about taking an academic paper from Cornell in 2002 and shoving it into the source code of a MongoDB clone.
Speaker's name anagram: VOILA! SLY VIPS HALVED.
Freedom
Open Source Under Attack
How we, the OSI and others can defend it
A Google, a Facebook, and a Linux Foundation (a trade organization representing Google and Facebook) lecture us about how hard we must fight to keep their employers from destroying our access to computer software.
Speakers' name anagrams: SNAZZY? RICH? SICK. and SMALL SIX with HI, MEGA-CLENCH!
Is the Open door closing?
Past 15 years review and a glimpse into the future.
A bullshit peddler has a crystal ball, which would like us to know that all open-source programmers are wasting their time. Time is stressed in the talk description as being a precious resource, not to be squandered. It is greatly to be hoped that readers will heed this admonition and not waste any of their finite time listening to this jackass jabber for an hour.
Speaker's name anagram: LADY'S TOKEN FRIZZ
The core values of software freedom
A bureaucrat would like greasy computer nerds to stop getting angry on the internet about Codes of Conduct, but is too much of a coward to just say that.
Speaker's name anagram: RETHINK RACISM HATS
Why open infrastructure matters
OpenStack is a suite of computer management software which is most recently notable for having missed the boat and imploded at the same time. While the flaming wreckage slowly sinks into the ocean, one of the people responsible for the disaster would like us to know how important it is to support the class of software to which OpenStack belongs, even though anyone who is receptive to that message is already using Kubernetes.
Speaker's name anagram: RARER ICY HERTZ
Why the GPL is great for business
Debunking the current business licensing discussion
As terrified programmers desperately try to squeeze every drop of value from the code they relentlessly shit into GitHub, some conclude that the obvious path to profit is copyright law. A bureaucrat arrives to declare that copyright law can be profitable, but not that way, and out of the thousands and thousands of companies on Earth, successfully names three adherents to the copyright cult which have achieved success. One is no longer an independent company, another has had five owners in the past ten years, and the other was founded as a direct result of the mismanagement of its predecessor, but I'm sure none of that will come up in the talk.
Speaker's name anagram: RANKER FLAK SHTICK
United Nations Technology and Innovation Labs
Open Source isn't just eating the world, it's changing it
Another bureaucrat tries to convince us our tax money isn't being wasted. They're fucking around with blockchains (still!), so nobody will be convinced.
Speaker's name anagram: BACK ON DRAMA
Regaining control of your smartphone with postmarketOS and Maemo Leste
Status of Linux on the smartphone
Having failed to gain any traction in commercial telephony, Maemo is the natural place some programmers would turn when searching for a telephone interface to poorly copy. By combining bad clones of proprietary software, niche Linux distributions with no clear policies or mission, and vaporware hardware from a fly-by-night bad-computer vendor, you can have complete control of a telephone that doesn't exist, wouldn't boot if it did, and couldn't make phone calls if it booted. Rejoice, for your time is at hand.
Speakers' name anagrams: JEWEL, WARN MR. JIB! and ERR: BARB BITS
History
LibreOffice turns ten and what's next
Lots to learn, and get excited about
The fact that the talk description is beset with typesetting errors is so hilariously on-message for LibreOffice that I can make no further enhancements to the sense of derision this talk should inspire.
Speaker's name anagram: HECKLES A MIME
Over Twenty Years Of Automation
The speaker mysteriously refuses to specify what has been automated for twenty years, but cursory examination of the namedropped software product reveals the truth: yet another half-assed domain-specific language intended to abstract away those pesky computers. Only the speaker knows what systems administrators were doing prior to 1999 (hint: there has been an IEEE standard about it longer than that) and why it wasn't really automation -- much less why "reimplement everything from scratch in a fad language" became the right answer in 2015.
Speaker's name anagram: JAM IN BUSHES
Blender, Coming of Age
18 years of Blender open source projects
A programmer made some software people use and would like you to sit through an origin story.
Speaker's name anagram: NEONATAL ODORS
The Hidden Early History of Unix
The Forgotten history of early Unix
This is the annual "FOSDEM organizers accidentally scheduled an interesting talk" talk, delivered by someone who has put actual effort into communicating information that is not self-aggrandizing or otherwise devoted to corporate marketing.
Speaker's name anagram: HER OWLS RAN
Generation gaps
Another SUSE needed some business justification for the FOSDEM trip; this time it's a combination of "you're doing it wrong" and some mournful rehashing of failed also-rans from recent computing history.
Speaker's name anagram: PRIMEVAL NO
Internet
HTTP/3 for everyone
The next generation HTTP is coming
The author of curl, Daniel Stenberg, who wrote curl, is so excited to find a country he's allowed into that he takes a break from being the author of curl to tell us about a new version of HTTP, which addresses HTTP/2's "TCP over TCP" problem by migrating to a "TCP over TCP over UDP" model. By formalizing layer violations directly into the protocol, Google can remove any opportunity to interfere with advertising and surveillance, since the application (specified in the standards as Chrome) communicates directly to AdSense without leaking signs of important personal information exfiltration to hostile third parties, such as the user. Daniel Stenberg, author of curl, is the author of curl, which is written and maintained by Daniel Stenberg.
Speaker's name anagram: ABSENT IN LEDGER
State of the Onion
The Road to Mainstream Adoption and Improved Censorship Circumvention
Some people from the United States Navy's bestselling honeypot promise, as in previous years, new ways of attracting users who are not drug vendors, murder vendors, or furries. None of them will work.
Speaker's name anagram: I RAP UGLIER
SCION
Future internet that you can use today
Some academics arrive to tell us that (once again) they have Fixed the Internet, and (once again) it runs on top of the current actually-working internet, and (once again) if you sign up you can communicate with as many as twelve other computers.
Speakers' anagram names: OW! KAMIKAZE SLUTS and A ČASUÁL VIM KOOK
Miscellaneous
Improving protections against speculative execution side channel
The busiest human being on Earth, responsible for mitigating the weekly-discovered security failures in Intel hardware, gets paid to fly to Europe and show us how to work around his employer's increasingly-broken products by writing more computer programs.
Speaker's anagram name: ADD A TWIST REV
SaBRe: Load-time selective binary rewriting
Some academics have gone to a lot of effort to allow us to interfere with software whose source code we already have. Since there's no immediate use for this technology, and the speaker is somewhat bored, we're going to get a demo.
Speaker's anagram name: NEUTRAL PARANOIAS
The year of the virtual Linux desktop
Someone thinks anyone still cares about VR.
Speaker's name anagram: URBAN LOCK SIZES
Making & Breaking Matrix's E2E encryption
In which we exercise the threat model for Matrix's E2E encrypted decentralised communication
Yet Another IRC Clone reports that they've successfully solved some of the problems they inflicted upon themselves.
Speaker's name anagram: DAMN GHETTO SHOW
FOSDEM: more boring shit (2019/01/30)
Let's take a look at my annotated copy of the FOSDEM 2019 main talk schedule, shall we?
Keynotes
Welcome to FOSDEM 2019
The sign-in sheet for this session doubles as a census of people nobody wants to talk to.
Can Anyone Live in Full Software Freedom Today?
Confessions of Activists Who Try But Fail to Avoid Proprietary Software
Some bureaucrats make excuses for the conference attendees' hypocrisy. In place of productive information or actual technical content, the speakers will whine about which programs nobody's writing for free. The audience will take notes on Macbooks, iPads, and other Apple products.
FLOSS, the Internet and the Future
A primordial webshit travels to a conference devoted to serving a specific copyright cult, and then holds a lecture about why the copyright cult is really important. Nobody in the room will learn anything new, and the speaker will not reach any audience not already in the cult. While this is arguably a massive failure of advocacy, it's also about on par with copyright cultists' track record to date.
Blockchain: The Ethical Considerations
Another bureaucrat speaks to a very specific confluence of misapprehensions, to wit:
- Any functioning human gives a shit about bitcoin,
- Bitcoin has any effect on human society at all,
- Anyone has found a valid use case for blockchain technology,
- Blockchain dunces are ever given any position of responsibility,
- Anyone cares about the ethical value judgments of a professional copyright cultist
Nobody attending the talk will have the heart to point any of this out.
The Cloud is Just Another Sun
The speaker is very angry that people are using computers in a manner that renders specific copyright licenses irrelevant. The audience will be instructed to care even harder, even though no solutions are available. The speaker works for a company whose profitability depends on a customer base who gives a shit about copyright licenses.
2019 - Fifty years of Unix and Linux advances
Jon Hall observes the 50th anniversary of the creation of UNIX, and generously includes Linux in the observance. Linux does not deserve this, and the FOSDEM audience does not deserve Jon Hall, but on the bright side this talk will ruin the "100% useless dipshittery" streak in this year's FOSDEM lineup. That's right: they can't even fuck things up correctly.
Closing FOSDEM 2019
if they'd just started with this talk we'd all be spared a lot of noise
Communications
Mattermost’s Approach to Layered Extensibility in Open Source
Why, you might ask, would "open source" layered extensibility be different from any other extensibility approach (layered or otherwise) in any other software? It would not, of course, but the CEO of the company needed a reason to fly to Brussels for the weekend, and this is as good a reason as any to write it off as a business expense. Spoiler alert: "layered extensibility" here is a code for "everything is webshit."
Matrix in the French State
What happens when a government adopts open source & open standards for all its internal communication?
DNS over HTTPS - the good, the bad and the ugly
Why, how, when and who gets to control how names are resolved
A webshit will try to convince the audience that replacing other protocols with webshit is healthy and good. "Why" will be answered with "because we want to track you more closely," "how" will be answered with "extremely poorly," "when" will be answered with "as soon as the Chrome team tells you to" and "who gets to control how names are resolved" will of course be "Google."
Netflix and FreeBSD
Using Open Source to Deliver Streaming Video
A corporate drone explains that using non-Linux operating system makes it easier to get your company's shitware committed upstream, spreading out the maintenance burden and magically converting some of your operating expenses into externalities you can ignore. Sorry, I mean "engaging with a close-knit developer community benefits your product's ROI."
Databases
PostgreSQL Goes to 11!
A database management program has not yet ceased development. The speaker will read the version control commit log for one hour.
Hugepages and databases
working with abundant memory in modern servers
A Postgres will mumble about RAM management features that everyone has been using for approximately twenty years. This talk belongs at some kind of professional database symposium, but it's happening at FOSDEM, so the audience will consist entirely of the speaker's co-workers and the people who are going to use the room next.
PostgreSQL vs. fsync
How is it possible that PostgreSQL used fsync incorrectly for 20 years, and what we'll do about it.
Another Postgres regrets to inform us that they've been fucking up basic storage primitives for at least the entirety of the 21st century, and continue to fuck them up today. This talk will comprise an extended apology, followed by a lot of excuses and whining, wrapping up with wholly unsubstantiated claims regarding future improvements. The only people who care already know.
Raft in Scylla
Consensus in an eventually consistent database
The programmer behind an also-ran database program will discuss the only interesting aspect of that program: someone else's algorithm. The program in question is a port from Java to C++ of a database management program so shitty that Facebook, who created it, almost immediately discontinued all use and development thereof and donated the software to the Office of Software Terminal Care, also known as the Apache Foundation. The speaker chooses to work on this disgraceful travesty full-time.
Hardware
The TPM2 software community
Getting started as a user, becoming a contributor
Some corporate programmers are released from the mines long enough to pretend anyone cares about the things they work on. The anxiety and excitement induced by being allowed out of the cave caused them to paste the talk description into the web form twice. Nobody noticed.
Mender - an open source OTA software update manager for IoT
This talk is an hour-long sales pitch for the speaker's employer, which sells a product that other companies can use to provision TLS certificates and spyware updates to touchscreen refrigerators. In order to lure idiots into attending the sales talk, the speaker will point out that the license of the software conforms to the thematic goals of the conference.
Tesla Hacking to FreedomEV!
Bringing Freedom to electric vehicle software
This talk is from a VA Linux alum, which means the talk will almost certainly be a story about how the speaker spent way too much money on poorly-performing hardware, then made it worse by crowbarring a half-working Linux installation onto it, resulting in a very expensive disaster that works about a third of the time. This will be followed by an invitation to others to follow suit in purchasing and then ruining a hundred-thousand dollar car, leading to a brand-new interpretation of the well-worn phrase "malfunctioning Linux driver."
Go on Microcontrollers: Small Is Going Big
TinyGo takes the Go programming language to the "final frontier" where we could not go before... running directly on microcontrollers.
Some rando is excited because you can now check if err != nil on smaller processors than ever before. Like literally every other language, the entire project is just transpiling to llvm intermediate code and then letting the existing toolsets handle the rest, completely removing any advantage of using a specific programming language.
Miscellaneous
Love What You Do, Everyday!
A bureaucrat will ramble incoherently about seeking life advice from copyright law cultists.
Crostini: A Linux Desktop on ChromeOS
Some Googles will present propaganda in order to sell low-quality laptops, on the principle that they can sometimes be tricked into functioning like actual laptops. With any luck, this will give Adsense valuable insights into the behavior patterns of gullible idiots, which sounds like a pretty juicy demographic to advertise in front of.
Making the next blockbuster game with FOSS tools
Using Free Software tools to achieve high quality game visuals.
The speaker would like anyone at all please to use software maintained by the speaker. To achieve this goal, the speaker will try to convince a bunch of random strangers to choose graphical design tools not on their suitability for a given task, but based on the copyright licenses under which they are available. This conference is ridiculous.
Open Source C#, .NET, and Blazor - everywhere PLUS WebAssembly
A Microsoft tries to convince everyone to install a shitload of .dll files onto their Linux systems in order to use expensive IDEs to produce the same shit everyone else already does. Along the way, the Microsoft will brag about tricking many rubes into working for free on corporate platform code.
SUSI.AI: An Open Source Platform for Conversational Web
The rich and lengthy tradition of the Free Software community making inferior copies of other, better-engineered systems continues, in this instance enabling underemployed nerds the world over to shout things at their computers. Shouting at computers while some shoddy software desperately attempts to parse and respond to this input is apparently preferable to using any of the well-supported existing input devices that come with every single computer on earth, so this talk will be well-attended and extremely beneficial to anyone who has nothing better to do on Sunday afternoon.
Online Privacy
SSPL, Confluent License, CockroachDB License and the Commons Clause
Is it freedom to choose to be less free?
This talk, from a Facebook lawyer apparently being punished with public relations duty, has nothing to do with privacy at all. The entire point of the talk is to make the audience believe that Facebook gives a single shit about their opinions regarding intellectual property law. The actual product whose weaponized license caused a shitstorm in nerd circles is not mentioned even once: misdirection, or idiocy? That's a trick question; nobody can tell the difference.
Solid: taking back the Web through decentralization
App development as we know it will radically change
An academic, enrolled in the Tim Berners-Lee fan club, will engage in a performance-art piece hypothesizing about a world where anyone gives a shit about what Tim Berners-Lee wants. In accordance with the colorful tradition of web-reinvention nutcases, bold claims and broad promises will rain down upon a rapt audience. After forty minutes, the speaker will ask for questions from the audience, who will respond by spending ten minutes' sober contemplation of profound questions like "what if we COULD do things better?," "I wonder what room I was supposed to have been in?," and "if I leave now, can I get something to eat before the next unhinged rant?"
The Current and Future Tor Project
Updates from the Tor Project
The United States Defense Department's most successful honeypot sends its apex bureaucrat to reassure paranoid Europeans that they can still totally trust all this stuff, you guys. Everything's fine. We're on your side. Route all your traffic through us. It's for your own good.
Algorithmic Sovereignty and the state of community-driven open source development
Is there a radical interface pedagogy for algorithmic governementality[sic]?
A researcher would like the audience to consider what happens when government oppression is executed in a mode that allows blame to be shifted to ostensibly-unbiased computer programs, but the talk description suffered a transporter malfunction and was merged with every edition of Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. Those audience members with a sufficiently enhanced vocabulary will have to undertake the task of translating the meaning of this talk into emoji for wider dissemination.
Open Source at DuckDuckGo
Raising the Standard of Trust Online
A search engine programmer will deliver a sales talk.
Performance
Fine-grained Distributed Application Monitoring Using LTTng
The audience for this talk, whose topic is low-level systems diagnosis, will consist entirely of webshits who are under the delusion that "distributed" means it uses http as a core protocol. None of them will understand it, but understanding is not required to paste the relevant keywords into the end of their resumes.
eBPF powered Distributed Kubernetes performance analysis
Because Kubernetes, a clustered-application execution platform, was invented by Google, there is no way to usefully inspect any aspect of it. The speaker is one of a large class of poor sods who have to resort to injecting code at runtime into the kernel to make up for the absense of fundamental operational functionality. The talk will be well-attended, because injecting code at runtime into the operating system kernel is simpler than debugging Kubernetes.
Perl 11
The Future of Saint Larry's Language
A programmer will attempt to Fix All The Problems with perl by reimplementing all of the other projects created to Fix All The Problems with perl. This talk was primarily scheduled to keep the room available for people who couldn't get into the ChromeOS talk in the other room.
Storage
Better loop mounts with NBD
Take your loop mounts to the next level with nbdkit
A Red Hat drone thinks that the problem with local filesystems is they don't have enough of the network stack involved. This talk will explain how to rectify this omission, as well as some tips on how to make block storage as unreliable as everything else Red Hat pays to develop.
ELI5: ZFS Caching
Explain Like I'm 5: How the ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache works
A FreeBSD developer thinks that five-year-olds are interested in why storage software caches things into RAM and how that cache is managed. The only five-year-olds the speaker has ever met are bugs in the software being discussed. The word 'works' in the talk title is to be interpreted as an aspiration. We can reevaluate things after the FreeBSD project deletes all this shit and gets in line behind the Linux weenies.
Data services in a hybrid cloud world with Ceph
Making data as portable as your stateless microservices
Another sales talk designed to turn this weekend into a business expense. No apologies to this software's victims are promised. The sales talk highlights using the software as an abstraction layer for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Storage, without mentioning what a high-maintenance treadmill nightmare the solution is.
Square Kilometre Array and its Software Defined Supercomputer
... and a very fast parallel file system
An OpenStack refugee disguises a CV as a talk, using numbers that seem large to attract an audience. Most of the performance of the namedropped system comes from add-on 'accelerator' cards which are so unusably terrible that Intel discontinued the entire product line out of shame. If the OpenStack project had any dignity, it would follow suit. The talk description does not contain a reason the speaker would admit in public being involved with any of this.
FOSDEM: more boring shit (2018/01/28)
Let's take a look at my annotated copy of the FOSDEM 2018 main talk schedule, shall we?
Keynotes
Welcome to FOSDEM 2018
Twenty-five minutes you'll never get back.
Consensus as a Service
Twenty Years of OSI Stewardship
Some bureaucrats arrive to explain to everyone how important bureaucracy is. One of them takes credit for introducing Java and XML to IBM, as though that is a praiseworthy achievement instead of grounds for a war crimes tribunal. The talk description focuses heavily on namedropping corporations known for ramming code into production whether there is consensus or not.
Next Generation Internet Initiative
An opportunity to fix the internet
Some academics would like anyone at all to listen to them. Their thesis is that the European Union is the right organization to reinvent the internet, presumably based on the wild success experienced during the reinvention of Europe. Nobody involved appears to have actually done anything, either in the past or the present.
The Spectre of CPU Meltdown
Trade-offs between performance and security
A Red Hat employee who is good at ARM processors would like to lecture everyone about something. We don't get to know what, because the talk description is blank, but we can guess: the speaker's pet technologies are the solution to all our problems, assuming we can just ignore the crippling problems of those pet technologies. This is merely speculation, but it doesn't really matter which PR fluff Red Hat chooses to excrete; they paid a lot to be a "cornerstone sponsor" and by God they're going to get a keynote slot.
Closing FOSDEM 2018
Ten MORE minutes you'll never get back.
Community
OpenADx – xcelerate your Automated Driving development
Leveraging open collaboration and open source to accelerate development of Automated Driving
Bosch, an automotive manufacturer, sends a drone to ask that programmers line up behind Bosch. Bosch has decided to base their automated driving software on Eclipse, which allows us to infer some important facts: This software will never finish loading, much less begin to work. Your car will have the ask.com toolbar installed on every update. Very soon, nobody will ever hear of OpenADx ever again, but not before it makes the news for causing massive freeway-blocking traffic fatalities because someone's car crossed a time zone.
Why I forked my own project and my own company
ownCloud to Nextcloud
A programmer tells the harrowing tale of doing things other than programming, fucking them all up, and trying again. The talk description does not indicate that the speaker will present a solution to one of the oldest open problems in the software engineering discipline: "why anyone should trust software written by PHP programmers."
Sustainability of Open Source in International Development
A new approach from the United Nations Foundation
A bureaucratic parasite tries to convince the world that the United Nations should be taken seriously as a software project management organization. The talk describes the parasite's domain as "a multilateral participatory program" and "in collaboration with partners around the world," which is ancient United Nations code for "we are going to demand resources that we can use to demand further resources."
Love What You Do, Everyday!
Another bureaucrat arrives to teach us how to like our jobs, providing those jobs are "cloning Borland Delphi and giving it to the Apache Software Foundation" or "cloning Microsoft Office and giving it to the Apache Software Foundation." No advice is offered for "living with what you've done, everyday."
History
Unix Architecture Evolution from the 1970 PDP-7 to the 2017 FreeBSD
Important Milestones and Lessons Learned
An academic has spent some number of years shoving unix into a github repository, and now would like to read it aloud. Presumably some Greek student is furious that they had to pay money to attend this lecture last year.
The circuit less traveled
Investigating some alternate histories of computing.
A person nobody cares about will read the names of some software nobody cares about.
Digital Archaeology
Maintaining our digital heritage
A self-described "industry thought leader" invites you to "experience his musings." In fact it's another academic attempting to convince us of the importance of his job.
Reimagining EDSAC in open source
An valve computer reimplemented using FPGAs, Arduinos, 3D printing and discrete electronics
Some students recreate an ancient computer without any of the things that made it interesting.
Miscellaneous
Configuration Revolution
Why it Needed 13 Years and How it Will be Done
An Internet invites you to simplify your program's configuration file by importing a 130,000-line software grenade, over which you have no control. Wasteful and complicated constructs like "text files" can finally be discarded in favor of a globally-addressable nested key-value datastore which requires new software to be written for every type of configuration data.
IPC in 1-2-3
Everything you always wanted from a network, but were afraid to ask
Some academics arrive to pitch their latest invention: interprocess communications in the form of a packet-switched network. All you need to get started is a packet-switched network, on top of which they may pile untold complexity. Enthusiasts of doctoral thesis-defense trial runs will be sure to love this presentation.
Igniting the Open Hardware Ecosystem with RISC-V
SiFive's Freedom U500 is the World's First Linux-capable Open Source SoC Platform
A person who maintains software targeting hardware that does not in fact exist shows up to talk about the burgeoning field of hardware fanfiction. The speaker has successfully tricked several GNU projects into supporting this nonexistent architecture, which was a natural fit for their nonexistent Hurd operating system. This is the first time on record that a complete compute stack, from absent silicon to absent operating system to absent users, has ever been announced to be released Real Soon Now.
Terra Bruciata
where bugs cannot survive
Obviously the only place that bugs cannot survive is within software that is not ever run, so the presenter would like to discuss the many different approaches to ensuring that unused software is subjected to a mind-numbing array of bureaucratic oversight, outdated standards documents, and half-assed formal verification procedures.
Cyborg Teams
Training machines to be Open Source contributors
A webshit would like to brag about handing control of a software project over to a monte-carlo approximation of a project manager. The software project in question is webshit designed to expose root control of your computer to a web browser. This talk is the first multi-scale integrated model of terrible decision making and questionable practice.
Running Android on the Mainline Graphics Stack
Someone has shoved enough bullshit into the linux kernel, the Mesa graphical library, and the Android user space that they finally work together, if you break a lot of stuff and add a lot of otherwise-unneccesary software. The speaker is here to gloat about being involved with cramming so much garbage into so many disparate projects.
Re-structuring a giant, ancient code-base for new platforms
Making LibreOffice work well everywhere.
Glossing over the reasons they skipped "making LibreOffice work well anywhere", a company devoted to taking credit for other people's work is here to take credit for shoving a Microsoft Office clone into a web browser.
Performance
MySQL: Scaling & High Availability Production experience for the last decade
A comedy routine in which a professional database janitor pretends to honestly believe that MySQL is capable of doing anything quickly or scaling in a manner other than "run sixty of these and have fifty-nine of them lie to clients." After the talk, several spontaneous "how to migrate to PostgreSQL" talks will break out in the hallway outside, closely attended by sweating project managers who were not previously aware of what a trash pile MySQL and its advocates are.
Elasticsearch (R)Evolution
You Know, for Search...
Elasticsearch is a distributed customer-data exposure tool with a ransomware-friendly webshit interface. The company who charges money to clean up the mess has sent one of its less useful drones to drum up audience interest in the implementation details that make their product respond reliably and quickly to random internet assailants scanning AWS for data left unprotected by morons.
Optimizing Software Defined Storage for the Age of Flash
The Gluster team at Red Hat, bereft of customers, whiles away the hours by pretending it takes any work at all to reap performance benefits from faster hardware. The thesis seems to be that shitty software was acceptable when the hardware was shitty, but since storage platforms have improved, the bad programming and awful architecture of their project has become more obvious. Evidently it takes three people to apologize.
Python
Python 3: 10 years later
Looking back at Python evolutions of the last 10 years
A Python arrives to tell us that Python 2 is irretrievably fucked and everyone should switch to Python 3, just like they've been telling us for the past decade. The primary products of the speaker's own employer rely entirely on Python 2, just like they have for the past decade. The talk will include plans for replacing Python 3 with Python 4, by the team who fucked up the previous transition so badly that Python 2 has been "deprecated" longer than the release interval between 2.0 and 3.0.
Surviving in an Open Source Niche: the Pythran case
a compiler for scientific kernels written in Python, six years later
A monster uses a Python subset as a C++ templating language. The monster will be on hand to explain how to secure funding for similar monstrosities.
Lift your Speed Limits with Cython
Fast native code for Python
The speaker presents a horrible chimera of a programming language, wherein the drawbacks and limitations of Python are augmented by the drawbacks and limitations of C. The result is a language that introduces header files to Python and requires breathtaking amounts of boilerplate. The primary goal of Cython appears to be transforming the programming experience from "implementing a solution to a given problem" to "trying to guess when to turn off exception handling so that your code runs marginally faster."
Load testing web services at Mozilla with Molotov
http://molotov.readthedocs.io/
Since nobody uses the eighteen million web services that Mozilla starts, ignores, deprecates, and discontinues each month, Mozilla has devoted actual resources to creating software devoted to making themselves feel like they have users. The speaker is willing to educate the audience on how to replace market penetration with a few hundred lines of code. The talk is in the Python track because of an implementation detail and because there is no "software nobody wants" track.
Security and Encryption
Sancus 2.0: Open-Source Trusted Computing for the IoT
A buzzword enthusiast will talk about some software nobody will use, designed to run on hardware nobody wants. Another refugee from the "software nobody wants" track FOSDEM has once again failed to implement.
Using TPM 2.0 As a Secure Keystore on your Laptop
It's not as difficult as you think!
An IBM arrives to teach us how to use hardware he doesn't use. Lots of words will be expounded about integrating all kinds of software into this hardware chip, but a cursory glance at the speaker's own website reveals all this crap is such a pain in the ass that he just uses ssh-agent anyway.
Data integrity protection with cryptsetup tools
what is the Linux dm-integrity module and why we extended dm-crypt to use authenticated encryption
Red Hat explains how they're fixing all their previous fuckups with linux disk encryption.
Inside Monero
The world's first fungible cryptocurrency
An LDAP programmer arrives to explain why we should all give a shit about the Bitcoin knockoff whose primary use is chewing through your processor whenever you watch videos on Youtube.
Security Theatre
The (mostly) unknown OSI Layer 8
Someone has noticed that most of the problems with computers are caused by people.
Space
SatNOGS: Crowd-sourced satellite operations
Satellite Open Source Ground Station Network
The speaker seems to be confused regarding employment; he either works for Greenpeace or Mozilla, but since the software on which this talk focuses appears to function as intended, we can assume he does not work for Mozilla.
The story of UPSat
Building the first open source software and hardware satellite
This talk focuses on the only hardware project at FOSDEM that actually exists in the physical world. This speaker does work for Mozilla, but his title is "Community Architect." Apparently Mozilla has automated their user-ignoring toolkit sufficiently that the people in charge of it have time to reach orbit, where they can pretend people haven't been doing this since the Kennedy administration.