SIPB Cluedump Series 2016

Join us as Will Vahle and Thomas Delgado show off some inexpensive, commercially-available hardware (the RTL-SDR) and talk about the toolchain required to use it. They'll demonstrate using SDR to listen to aircraft, maritime, and police radio, as well as FM broadcast stations. Also included: Van Eck and TEMPEST side-channel attacks, as well as receiving (but not decoding) cellular signals.

This will be an interactive, question-driven talk. Audience interaction is highly encouraged, and snacks will be served!

Snacks will be served. Your taxes can wait.

How can you help?

I'd like the hive mind to help think through the privacy considerations in protecting the identities of drivers in future research, and to examine the ways that platforms can leverage user data (drivers and passengers) to create targeted prices and tiered wages. I'm also interested in issues of user design and deception (see this article I wrote for Motherboard about Uber's phantom cars), and the potential for automating inequities or automating power and knowledge symmetries between workers and platforms. There are broader questions I'd like to dig into as well, such as: When technology creates new efficiencies and reduces friction in transactions between demand (customers) and supply (workers), where do latent points of friction emerge? How do the rhetorics of marketplace efficiency clash with the goals of individual earners? (Example: tipping is "inefficient.")

To understand some key properties of the network, we will first cover the primitives used in Bitcoin and how they relate to various aspects of participating in the network. Given this background, patterns observed in the real world can be related to parts of the protocol. With an understanding of the current state of the network, we will explore the challenges facing Bitcoin today, and some proposed solutions.

Snacks will be served.

Provisioning CoreOS and Kubernetes on Hardware (Dalton Hubble)

Kubernetes is a powerful system for operating application containers across a cluster of machines. In this talk, we'll explore CoreOS cluster provisioning and Kubernetes setup on hardware. To start, we'll cover PXE network setup and Ignition, CoreOS's built-in early-boot provisioning tool. Then we'll discuss bootcfg, a service which matches machines to profiles to provision complete clusters. We'll walk through PXE booting machines, installation to disk, and automated provisioning of a multi-node etcd key-value store and multi-node Kubernetes cluster. We'll show how the approach extends across machines and to provisioning many different kinds of reference clusters we work on.

Kubernetes on AWS (Colin Hom)

Kubernetes and AWS go together like peanut butter and jelly - both are popular, and combining them just makes sense. The talk begins with an overview of how Kubernetes is deployed on and integrates with the AWS platform. We'll cover diverse topics including DNS zones, load-balancers, and route tables.

Building on Dalton's talk about deploying Kubernetes on physical hardware, we'll explore the challenges associated with extending the Kubernetes abstraction across datacenters and cloud platforms. We'll discuss cutting-edge features and design patterns emerging in the Kubernetes ecosystem. To conclude, I'll ask the audience to speculate on how the movement towards containerized applications and orchestration frameworks will change the industry.

Dalton Hubble is a software engineer at CoreOS. He builds services and apps for provisioning hardware into clusters and works on Tectonic, CoreOS' enterprise offering. He was formerly an engineer at Twitter and studied at MIT.

Colin Hom is an infrastructure engineer at CoreOS. CoreOS is the company delivering Google's Infrastructure for Everyone Else (#GIFEE) and running the world's containers securely on CoreOS Linux, Tectonic and Quay.

Bring your laptop so that you can create your own PGP keys. And bring your government ID if you'd like to participate in the mini key signing party happening right after the talk!

Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP, on why you need PGP.

In this this talk, I will discuss some of the finer points of LaTeX's syntax and macro system, how to write your own macros that generate macros that generate macros, and exciting things like \write18{}. I'll also discuss my personal macro package, texor, which contains some great examples of things that LaTeX should not be used for, such as dynamic font switching and procedural macro generation.

The texor package

It is often said that nature is irreplaceable and that without plants in particular, which provide food, clothing, medicine, shelter, clean air, clear water and more, the planet as we know it could not exist. Conservationists concerned with saving nature have historically come from the biological sciences where an interest in species diversity and related fields readily translates into applied conservation. Thus, conservationists tend to look at conservation challenges in similar ways, often through ecological principals and solutions. While being successful in many respects, conservation as currently practiced suffers from a form of "groupthink" where solutions can be limited by the predominantly biological perspective being applied. If experts in other field such as engineering and computer science were more involved in creating conservation solutions, we could conceivably change dramatically how conservation is practiced. A technological focus could increase our success in saving species and ecosystems, and also inspire new generations of tech-minded students to apply their interests and skills to conservation. Dr. John Clark, President and CEO of the Center for Plant Conservation and Director of Plant Conservation for San Diego Zoo Global, will discuss current challenges in saving nature with a focus on plants, and detail how technology continues to evolve as a primary tool in the conservationist's toolkit. The goal of this talk is to present challenges in plant conservation and provide an opportunity for brainstorming and discussion on how engineering, computer science, and other technology-driven fields can create and support conservation outcomes to build a better tomorrow.

"'Reproducible builds?'" you might ask in confusion, "Are you implying the compilation of software is not deterministic?" Turns out, yes!

"Reproducible Builds" is the umbrella term for the wide FOSS effort to make the build chain of all software deterministic and transparent. In this talk, I will give a brief history of the reproducible builds effort from Tor's original success to the ongoing work of the Debian community to create an entirely reproducible operating system. You will leave with a clear understanding of the nuances and challenges of achieving reproducible builds and a clear vision for the exciting future where reproducible builds are the norm.