Category: Linux.conf.au

Adventures in laptop battery hacking -Matthew Chapman

• Lenovo Thinkpad X230T
  • Bought Aug 2013
  • Ariginal capacity 62 KWh – 5hours and 12W
  • Capacity down to 1.9Wh – 10 minutes
• 45N1079 replacement bought
  • DRM on laptop claimed it was not genuine and refused to recharge it.
• Batteries talk SBS protocol to laptop
• SMBus port and SMClock port
  • sniffed the port with logic analyser
  • Using I2C protocol
  • Looked at spec to see what it means
  • Challenge-response authentication
• Options
  1. Throw Away
  2. Replace Cells
     • Easy to damage
     • Might not work
  3. Hack firmware on battery
     • Talk at DEFCON 19
     • But this is different model from that
     • Couldn’t work out how to get to firmware
  4. Added something in between
  5. Update the firmware on the machine
     • Embeded Controller (EC)
     • MEC1619
• Looking though the firmware for Battery Authentication
  • Found routine that look plausable
  • But other stuff was encrypted
• EC Update process
  • BIOS update puts EC update in spare flash memory area
  • After the BIOs grabs that and applies update
• Pulled apart the BIOs, found EcFwUpdateDxe.efi routine that updates the EC
  • Found that stuff send to the EC still encrypted.
  • Unencryption done by flasher program
• Flasher program
  • Encrypted itself (decrypted by the current fireware)
  • JTAG interface for flashing debug
• JTAG
  • Physically difficult to get to
  • Luckily Russian Hackers have already grabbed a copy
• The Decryption function in the Flasher program
  • Appears to be blowfish
  • Found the key (in expanded form) in the firmware
  • Enough for the encryption and decryption
• Checksums
  • Outer checksum checked by BIOs
  • Post-decryption sum – checked by the flasher (bricks EC if bad)
  • Section Echecksums (also bricks)
• Applying
  • noop the checks in code
  • noop another check that sometimes failer
  • Different error message
• Found a second authentication process
  • noop out the 2nd challenge in the BIOs
• Works!
• Posted writeup, posted to hacker news
  • 1 million page views
• Uploaded code to github
  • Other people doing stuff with the embedded controller
  • No longer works on latest laptops, EC firmware appears to be signed
• Anything can be broken with physical access and significant determination

Election Software – Vanessa Teague

• Australian Elections use a lot of software
  • Encoding and counting preferential votes
  • For voting in polling places
  • For voting over the internet
• How do we know this software is correct
• The Paper ballot box is engineered around a serious of problems
  • In the past people bought their own voting paper
  • The Australian Ballot used in many places (eg NZ)
  • Franch use different method with envelopes and glass boxes
  • The US has had lots of problems and different ways
• Four cases studies in Aus
• vVote: Victoria
  • Vic state election 2014
  • 1121 votes for overseas Australians voting in Embassies etc
  • Based on Pret a Voter
  • You can varify that what you voted was what went though
  • Source code on bitbucket
  • Crypto signed, varified, open source, etc
  • Not going forward
  • Didn’t get the electoral commissions input and buy-in.
  • A little hard to use
• iVote: NSW and WA
  • 280,000 votes over Internet in 2015 NSW state election ( around 5-6% of total votes)
  • Vote on a device of your choosing
  • Vote encrypted and send over Internet
  • Get receipt number
  • Exports to a varification service. You can telephone them, give them your number and they will read back you votes
  • Website used 3rd-party analytics provider with export-grade crypto
    • Vulnerable to injection of content, votes could be read or changed
    • Fixed (after 66k votes cast)
  • NSW iVote really wasn’t varifiable
  • About 5000 people called into service and successfully verified
  • How many tried to verify but failed?
  • Commission said 1.7% of electors verified and none identified any anomalies with their vote (Mar 2015)
  • How many tried and failed? “in the 10s” (Oct 2015)
  • Parliamentary said how many failed? Seven or 5 (Aug 2016)
  • How many failed to get any vote? 627 (Aug 2016)
  • This is a failure rate of about 10%
  • It is believed it was around 200 unique (later in 2016)
• Vote Counting software
• Errors in NSW counting
  • NSW legislative voting redistributed votes are selected at random
  • No source code for this
  • Use same source code for lots of other elections
  • Re-ran some of the votes, found randomness could change results. Found one most likely cost somebody a seat, but not till 4 years later.
• Recomended
  • Generate the random key publicly
  • Open up the source code
  • They electorial peopel didn’t want to do this.
• In the 2016 localgovt count we found 2 more bugs
  • One candidate should have won with 54% probability but didn’t
• The Australian Senate Count
• AEC consistent refuses to revel the source code
• The Senate Date is release, you can redo it yourself any bugs will become evident
• What about digitising the ballots?
  • How would we know if that wasn’t working?
  • Only by auditing the paper evidence
• Auditing
  • The Americas have a history or auditing the paper ballots
  • But the Australian vote is a lot more complex so everything not 100% yet
  • Stuff is online

 

Keeping Linux Great

• Previous Keynotes have posed question I’ll pose answers
• What is the free of open source software, it has no future
• FLOSS is yesterday’s gravy
  • Based on where the technology is today. How would FLOSS work with punch cards?
  • Other people have said similar things
  • Software, Linux and similar all going down in google trends
  • But “app” is going up
• Lithification
  • Small pieces losely joined
  • Linux used to be great could you could pipe stuff to little programs
  • That is what is happening to software
  • Example – share a page to another app in a mobile interface
  • All apps no longer need to send mail, they just have to talk to the mail app
• So What should you do?
  • Vendor all you dependencies, just copy everyone elses code into your repo (and list their names if it is BSD) so you can ship everything in one blob (eg Android)
    • Components must be 5> million or >20 LOC , only a handful or them
    • At the other end apps are smaller since they can depend on the OS or other Apps for lots of functionality so they don’t have to write it themselves.
    • Example node with thousands of dependencies
• App Freedom
  • “Advanced programming environments conflate the runtime with the devtime” – Bret Victor
  • Open Source software rarely does that
  • “It turns out that Object Orientation didn’t work out, it is another legacy with are stuck with”
  • Having the source code is nice but it is not a requirement. Access to the runtime is what you want. You need to get it where people are using it.
• Liberal Software
• But not everything wasn’t to be a programmer
  • 75% comes from 6 generic web applications ( collection, storage, reservation, etc)
• A lot of functionality requires big data or huge amounts of machines or is centralised so open sourcing the software doesn’t do anything useful
• If it was useful it could be patented, if it was not useful but literary then it was just copyright

Open Source Accelerating Innovation – Allison Randal

• Story of Stallman and the printer
• Don’t talk about the story of the context
  • Stallman was living in a free software domain, propriety software was creeping in
  • Software only became subject to copyright in early 80s
• First age of software – 1940s – 1960s
  • Software was low value
  • Software was all free and open, given away
• Precursor – The 1970s
• Middle Age of Software – 1980s
  • Start of Windows, Mac, Oracle and other big software companies
  • Also start of GNU and BSD
  • Who Leads?
    • Propritory software was seen as the innovator and always would be.
    • Free Software was seen to be always chasing after windows
• The 2000s
  • Free Software caught up with Propritory
  • Used by big companies
  • “Open Source” name adopted
  • dot-com bubble had burst
  • Web 2.0
  • Economic necessity, everyone else getting it for free
  • Collaborative Process – no silver bullet but a better chance
  • Innovations lead by open source
• Software Freedoms
  • About Control over our material enviroment
  • If you don’t other freedoms then you don’t have a free society
• Modern Age of Software
  • Accelerating
  • Cops in 2010 42% used OS software,  In 2015 78% using
  • Using Open Source is now just table stakes
  • Competitive edge for companies is participating is OS
  • Most participation pushes innovation even faster
• Now What?
  • The New innovative companies
    • Amazing experiences
    • Augment Workers
    • Deliver cool stuff to customers
    • Use Network effects, Brand names
  • Businesses making contribution to society
  • Need to look at software that just doesn’t cover commercial use cases.
• Next Phase
  • Diversity
  • Myopic monocultures – risk cause they miss the dangers
  • empowered to change the rule for the better

Surviving the Next 30 Years of Free Software – Karen M. Sandler

• We’re not getting any younger
• Software Relicensing
  • Need to get approval of authors to re-license
  • Has had to contact surviving spouse and get them to agree to re-license the code
  • One survivor wanted payment. Didn’t understand that code would be written out of the project.
• There are surely other issues that that we have no considered
• Copyright Assignment is a way around it
  • But not everybody likes that.
• Bequeathment doesn’t work
  • In some jurisdictions copyrights have to assessed for their value before being transferred. Taxes could be owed
• Who is your next of Kin?
  • They might share your OS values or even think of them
• Need perpetual care of copyrights
  • Debian Copyright Aggregation Projects
• A Trust
  • Assign copyrights today, will give you back the rights you want but these expire on your death
  • Would be a registry for free software
  • Companies could participate to
• Recognize the opportunity with age
  • A lot of people with a lot of spare time

 

Content as a driver of change: then and now – Lana Brindley

• Humans have always told stories
• Cave Drawings
  • Australian Indigenous art is the oldest continuous art in the world
  • Stories of extinct mega-fauna
  • Stories of morals but sometimes also funny
• Early Written Manuals
  • We remember the Eureka
• Religious Leaders
  • Gutenburg
  • Bible was only redistributed book, restricted to clergy
• Fairy Tales
  • Charles Perrault versions.
  • Brother Grim
  • Cautionary tales for adults
  • Very gruesome in the originals and many versions
  • Easiest and entertaining way for illiterate people to share moral stories
• Master and Apprentice
  • Cheap Labour and Learn a Trade
• Journals and Letters
  • In the early 19th century letter writing started happoning
  • Recipe Books

 

• Recently
• Paper Manuals
  • Traditionally the proper method for technical docs
• Whitepapers
  • Printed version will probably go away
  • Digital form may live on
• Training Courses
  • Face to face training has it’s benifits
  • Online is where techical stuff is moving
• Online Books
  • Online version of a printed book
  • Designed to be read from beginning to end, TOC, glossary, etc

 

• Today
• MOOCS
  • Quite common
• Data Typing (DITA)
  • Break down the content into logical pices
  • Store in a database
  • Mix on the fly
  • Doing this sort of the since 1960s and 1970s
• Single Sourcing
  • Walked away from old idea of telling a story
  • Look at how people consumed and learnt difficult concepts
  • Deliver the same content many ways (beginner user, advanced, reference)
  • Chunks of information we can deliver however we like
• User-Side Content Curation
  • Organised like a wikipedia article
  • Imagine a side listing lots of cars for sale, the filters curate the content
• What comes next?
  • Large datasets and let people filter
  • Power going from producers to consumers
  • Consumers want to filter themselves, not leave the producers to do this
• References and further reading for talk

I am your user. Why do you hate me? Donna Benjamin

• Free and open source software suffers from poor usability
• We’ve struggled with open source software, heard devs talk about users with contempt
• We define users by what they can’t do
• How do I hate thee let I count the ways
  • Why were we being made to feel stupid when we used free software
  • Software is “made by me for me”, just for brainiac me
  • Lots of stories about stupid users. Should we be calling our users stupid?
  • We often talk/draw about users as faceless icons
  • Take pride in having prickly attitudes
• Users
  • Whiney, entitled and demanding
  • We wouldn’t want some of them as friends
  • Not talk about those sort of users
• Lets Chat about chat
  • Slack – used by OS projects, not the freest, propritory
  • Better in many ways less friction, in many ways
• Steep Learning curves
  • How long to get to the level of (a) Stop hating it? (b) Are Kicking ass
  • How do we get people over that level as quickly as possible
  • They don’t want to be badass at using your tool. They want you to be badass at what using your tool allows them to do
  • Badass: Making Users Awesome – Kathy Sierra
• Perfect is the enemy of the good
• Understand who your users are; see them as people like your friends and colleagues; not faceless icons

 

The Vulkan Graphics API, what it means for Linux – David Airlie

• What is Vulkan
  • Not OpenGL++
  • From Scratch, Low Level, Open Graphics API
  • Stack
    • Loader (Mostly just picks the driver)
    • Layers (sometimes optional) – Seperate from the drivers.
      • Validation
      • Application Bug fixing
      • Tracing
      • Default GPU selection
    • Drivers (ICDs)
  • Open Source test Suite. ( “throw it over the wall Open Source”)
• Why a new 3D API
  • OpenGL is old, from 1992
  • OpenGL Design based on 1992 hardware model
  • State machine has grown a lot as hardware has changed
  • Lots of stuff in it that nobody uses anymore
  • Some ideas were not so good in retrospec
    • Single context makes multi-threading hard
    • Sharing context is not reliable
    • Orientated around windows, off-screen rendering is a bolt-on
    • GPU hardware has converged to just 3-5 vendors with similar hardware. Not as much need to hid things
  •  Vulkan moves a lot of stuff up to the application (or more likely the OS graphics layer like Unity)
  • Vulkan gives applications access to the queues if they want them.
  • Shading Language – SPIR-V
    • Binary formatted, seperate from Vulkan, also used by OpenGL
    • Write Shaders HSL or GLSL and they get converted to SPIR-V
  • Driver Development
    • Almost all Error checking needed since done on the validation layer
    • Simpler to explicitly build command stream and then submit
  • Linux Support
    • Closed source Drivers
      • Nvidia
      • AMD (amdgpu-pro) – promised open source “real soon now … a year ago”
    • Open Source
      • Intel Linux (anv) –
        • on release day. 3.5 people over 8 months
        • SPIR -> NIR
        • Vulkan X11/Wayland WSI
        • anv Vulkan <– Core driver, not sharable
        • NIR -> i965 gen
        • ISL Library (image layout/tiling)
      • radv (for AMD GPUs)
        • Dave has been working on it since early July 2016 with one other guy
        • End of September Doom worked.
        • One Benchmark faster than AMD Driver
        • Valve hired someone to work on the driver.
        • Similar model to Intel anv driver.
        • Works on the few Vulkan games, working on SteamVR

 

Building reliable Ceph clusters – Lars Marowsky-Brée

• Ceph
  • Storage Project
  • Multiple front ends (S3, Swift, Block IO, iSCSI, CephFS)
  • Built on RADOS data store
  • Software Defined Storage
    • Commodity servers + ceph + OS + Mngt (eg Open Attic)
    • Makes sense at 4+ servers with 10 drives each
    • metadata servce
    • CRUSH algorithm to speread out the data, no centralised table (client goes directly to data)
  • Access Methods
    • Use only what you need
    • RADOS Block devices   <– most stable
    • S3 (or Swift) via RadosGW  <– Mature
    • CephFS  <— New and pretty stable , avoid stuff non meta-data intensive
  • Introducing Dependability
    • Availability
    • Reliability
      • Duribility
    • Safety
    • Maintainability
  • Most outages are caused by Humans
  • At Scale everything fails
    • The Distributed systems are still vulnerable to correlated failures (eg same batch of hard drives)
    • Advantages of Heterogeneity – Everything is broken different
    • Homogeneity is non-sustainable
  • Failure is inevitable; suffering is optional
    • Prepare for downtime
    • Test if system meets your SLA when under load and when degraded and during recovery
  • How much available do you need?
    • An extra nine will double your price
• A Bag full of suggestions
  • Embrace diversity
    • Auto recovery requires a >50% majority
    • 3 suppliers?
    • Mix arch and stuff between racks/pods and geography
    • Maybe you just go with manually added recovery
  • Hardware Choices
    • Vendors have reference archetectures
    • Hard to get vendors to mix, they don’t like that and fewer docs.
    • Hardware certification reduces the risk
    • Small variations can have huge impact
      • Customer bought network card and switch one up from the ref architecture. 6 months of problems till firmware bug fixed.
  • How many monitors do I need?
    • Not performance critcal
    • 3 is usually enough as long as well distributed
    • Big envs maybe 5 or 7
    • Don’t coverge (VMs) these with other types of nodes
  • Storage
    • Avoid Desktop Disks and SSDs
  • Storage Node sizing
    • A single node should not be more than 10% of your capacity
    • You need space capacity at least as big as a single node (to recover after fail)
  • Durability
    • Erasure Encode more durabily and high percentage of disk used
    • But recovery a lot slower, high overhead, etc
    • Different strokes for different pools
  • Network cards, different types, cross connect, use last years cards
  • Gateways: tests okay under failure
  • Config drift: Use config mngt (puppet etc)
  • Monioring
    • Perf as system ages
    • SSD degradation
  • Updates
    • Latest software is always the best
    • Usually good to update
    • Can do rolling upgrades
    • But still test a little on a staging server first
    • Always test on your system
      • Don’t trust metrics from vendors
      • Test updates
      • test your processes
      • Use OS to avoid vendor lock in
  • Disaster will strike
    • Have backups and test them and recoveries
  • Avoid Complexity
    • Be aggressive in what you test
    • Be commiserative in what you deploy only what you need
  • Q: Minimum size?
  • A: Not if you can fit on a single server

 

Consider the Maintainer

• Is it alright to compromise or even deliberately ignore the happiness of maintainers so that we can enjoy free software?
• Huge growth in usage and downloads of Open Source software
• 2/3s of popular open source projects on github are maintained by one of two people
• Why so few?
  • Style has changed, lots of smaller projects
  • Being a maintainer isn’t glamorous of fun most of the time
  • 1% are creating the content that 99% of people consume
• “Rapid evolution [..] poses the risk of introducing errors faster than people can fix them”
• Consumption scales for most thing, not for open source because it creates more work for the maintainer
• “~80% of contributors on github don’t know how to solve a merge conflict”
• People see themselves as users of OS software, not potential maintainers – examples of rants by users against maintainers and the software
• “Need maintainers, not contributors”
• “Helping people over their first pull request, not helping them triage issues”
• Why are we not talking about this?
• Lets take a trip back in History
  • Originally Stallman said Free software was about freedom, not popularity. eg “as is” disclaimer of warranty
  • Some people create software sometimes.
  • Debian Social Contract, 4 freedoms, etc places [OS / Free] software and users first, maintainers often not mentioned.
  • Orientated around the user not the producer
• Four Freedoms of OS producers
  • Decide to participate
  • Say no to contributions or requests
  • Define the priorities and policies of the project
  • Step down or move on
• Other Issues maintainers need help with
  • Community best practices
  • Project analytics
  • Tools and bots for maintainers (especially for human coordination)
  • Conveying support status ( for contributors, not just user support )
  • Finding funding
• People have talked about this before, mostly they concentrated on a few big projects like Linux or Apache (and not much written since 2005)
  • Doesn’t reflect the ecosystem today, thousands of small projects, github, social media, etc
  • Open source today is not what open source was 20 years ago
• Q&A
  • Q: What do you see as responsibly and potential for orgs like Github?
  • A: Joined github to help with this. Hopes that github can help with tools.
  • Q: How can we get metrics on real projects, no just plaything on github
  • A: People are using stars on github, which is useless. One idea is to look at dependencies. libraries.io is looking. Hope for better metrics.
  • Q: Is it all agile programmings fault?
  • A: Possibly, people this days are learning to code but average level is lower and they don’t know what is under the hood. Pretty good in general but. “Under the hood it is not just a hammer, it is a human being”
  • Q: Your background is in funding, how does transiticion work when a project or some people on it start getting money?
  • A: It is complicated, need some guidelines. Some projects have made it work well ( “jsmobile” I think she said ). Need best practice and to keep things transparent
  • Q: How to we get out to the public (even programmers/tech people at tech companies) what OS is really like these days?
  • A: Example of Rust. Maybe some outreach and general material
  • Q: Is Patreon or other crowd-funding a good way to fund projects?
  • A: Needs a good target, requires a huge following which is hard to people who are not good at marketing. Better for one-time vs recurring. Hard to decide exactly what money should be used for

 

Handle Conflict, Like a Boss! – Deb Nicholson

• Conflict is natural
• “When they had no outfit for their conflict they turned into Reavers and ate people and stuff”
• People get caught up in their area not the overall goal for their organisation
• People associate with a role, don’t like when it gets changed or eliminated
• Need to go deep, people don’t actually tell you the problem straight away
• If things get too bad, then go to another project
• Identify the causes of conflict
• 3 Styles of handling conflict
  • Avoidance
    • Can let things fester
    • They come across as unconnected
    • Looks like support for the status quo
  • Accommodation
    • Compromise on everything
    • Looks like not taking seriously
  • Assertion
    • Going to wear down everyone else
    • People won’t tell you when things are wrong
• Going a little deeper
  • People don’t understand history (and why things are weird)
    • go to historical motivations and get buy-in for the strategy that reflects the new reality
  • People are acting to motivations you don’t see
    • Ask about the other persons motivations
  • Fear (often of change)
    • “What is the worse that could happen?”
  • Right Place, wrong time
    • Stuff is going to the wrong person or group
  • Help everyone get perspective
    • Don’t do the same forum, method, people all the time if it always has conflict.
• What do you do with the Info
  • Put yourself in other persons shoes
  • Find alignment
  • A Word about who is doing this conflict resolution
    • Shouldn’t be just a single person/role
    • Or only women
    • Should be everyone/anyone
    • But if it is within a big or then maybe hire someone
• Planning for future conflicts
  • Assuming the best
  • No ad hominem (hard to go back)
• Conflict resolution between groups
  • What could we accomplish if we worked together
  • Doesn’t look good to outsiders
  • More Face-to-Face between projects (towards a common goal)

 

Open Compute Project Down Under – Andrew Ruthven

• What is Open Compute
  • Vanity free Computing ( remove pretty bits )
  • Stripped Down – we don’t need, no video, minimum extra posts)
  • Efficient and easy
    • Maintenance, Air flow, Electricity
  • Came out of Facebook, now a foundation
  • 1/10th the number of techs/server
• Projects and Technologies
  • 9 main areas, over 4000 people working on it.
  • Design and Specs
• Recent Hardware
  • Some comes in 19″ racks
  • HPE, Microsoft Project Olympus
• In Aus / NZ
  • Telstra – 2 rack of OCP Decathleon, Open Networking using Hyper Scalers
  • Rackspace
  • Large Gaming site
  • Catalyst IT
• Why OCP for Catalyst
  • Very Open source software orientated company
  • Have a Cloud Operation
  • Looking at for a while
  • Finally ordered first unit in 2016 (Winterfell)
  • Cumulus Linux switches from Penguin computing, works of 12volt in Open Rack
• Issues for Aus / Nz
  • Very small scale, sometimes to small for vendors
  • Supply chain hard, ended up using an existing integrator
  • Hyper Scalers in Aus, will ship to NZ
  • Number of comapnies seee to NZ
• Lessons
  • Scale is an issue for failures aswell as supply
  • Have >1 power shelf
  • Have at least 2 racks with 4 power sheleves
  • Too small for vendors to get certification
  • Trust in new hardware
• Your Own deployment
  • Green field DC
    • Use DC Designs
    • Allow for 48U racks (2.5 metres tall)
    • 2x or 4x 3-phase circuits per rack
  • Existing DCs
    • Consider modifications
    • 19″ servers options
    • 48OU Open rack if you have enough height
    • 22OU is you don’t have enough height
    • Carefully check the specs
  • Open Networking
    • Run collectd etc directly on your switch
  • Supply Chain
  • Community Support
    • OCP has a Aus/NZ Mailing list (ocp-anz)
    • Discussion on what is a priority across Aus and NZ

400,000 ephemeral containers: testing entire ecosystems with Docker – Daniel Axtens

• A pretty interesting talk. It was largely a demo so I didn’t grab many notes

Community Building Beyond the Black Stump – Josh Simmons

• How to build communities when you don’t live in a big city
• Whats in a meetup?
• Santa Rosa County, north of San Franscisco
  • Not easy to get to SF
  • SF meetups not always relevant
• After meeting with one other person, created “North Bay web Professionals”, minimal existing groups
• Multidisciplinary community worked better
  • Designers, Marketers, Web Devs, writers, etc
  • Hired each other
  • Seemed to work better, fewer toxic dynamics
  • Safe space for beginners
• 23 People at first event (worked hard to tell people)
  • Told everyone that we knew even if not interested
  • Contacted the competitors
  • Contacting firms, schools
  • Co-working spaces (formal of de-facto like cafes)
  • Other meetup groups, even in unrelated areas.
• Adapting to the needs of the community
  • You might have a vision
  • But you must adapt to who turns up and what they want/need
• First meeting
  • Asked people to bring food
  • Fluffy start time so could greet people and mingle
  • Went round room and got people to introduce themselves
    • Intro ended up being a thing they always did
    • Helped people remember names
    • Got everyone to say a little
    • put people in a social mindset
  • Framework for events decided
  • Decided on next meeting date, some prep
  • Ended up going late
    • Format became. Social -> talk -> Social on each night.
• Tools
  • Used facebook and meetup
  • 1/3 of people came just from meetup promoting automatically
  • Go where people already are
• Renamed from “North Bay Web professions” to “North Bay Web and Interactive Media professionals”
• “Ask a person, not a search engine”
• Hosted over 169 events – Core was the monthly meeting
  • Tried to keep the topics a little broad
  • Often the talk was narrow but compensated with a broad Q&A afterwards
• Thinking of people as “members” not “attendees” , have to work at getting them come back
• Also hosted
  • Lunches, rotated all around the region so eventually near everywhere, Casual
  • Unconfernces
  • Topical meetups
  • Charity Hackathon, teamed up with students and non-profits to do website for non-profit. Student was an apprentice.
  • Hosted Ag+Tech mixers with local farmers groups
  • Helped local cities put out tech RFPs
• Q: Success measures? A: Survey of member, things like Job referrals, what have learnt

 

 

Servo Architecture: Safety and Performance – Jack Moffitt

• History
  • 1994 Netscape Navigator
  • 2002 Mozilla Release
  • 2008 multi-core CPU stuff not making firefox faster
  • 2016 CPUs now have on-chip GPUs
  • Very hard to write multi-threaded C++ to allow mozilla to take advantage of many cores
• How to make Servo Faster?
• Constellation
  • In the past – Monolithic browser engines
    • Single browser engine handling multiple tabs
    • Two processes – Pool Content processes vs Chrome process
      • If one process dies on a page doesn’t take out whole browser
    • Sanboxing lets webpage copies have less privs
  • Threads
    • Less overhead than whole processes
    • Thread per page
    • More responsive
    • Sandboxing
    • More robust to failure
  • Is this the best we can do?
    • Run Javascript and layout simultaniously
    • Pipeline splitting them up
    • Child pipelines for inner iframes (eg ads)
• Constellation
  • Rust can fail better
  • Most failures stop at thread boundaries
  • Still do sandbox and privledges
  • Option to still have some tabs in multiple processes
• Webrender
  • Using the GPU
    • Frees up main CPU
    • Are VERY fast at some stuff
    • Easiest place to start is rendering
  • Don’t browsers already use the GPU?
    • Only in a limited way for compositing
  • Key ideas
    • Retain mode not immediate mode (put things in optimal order first)
    • Designed to render CSS content (CSS is actually pretty simple)
    • Draw the whole frame every frame (things are fast enough, simpler to not try to optimise)
  • Pipeline
    • Chop screen into 256×256 tiles
    • Tile assignment
    • Create a big tree
    • merge and assign render targets
    • create and execute batches
  • Text
    • Rasterize on CPU and upload glyth to GPU
    • Paste and shadow usign the GPU
• Project Quantum
  •  Taking technology we made in servo and put it in gecko
• Research in progress
  • Pathfinder – GPU font rasterizer – Now faster than everything else
  • Magic DOM
    • Wins in JS/DOM intergration
    • Fusing reflectors and DOM objects
    • Self hosted JS
  • External colaborations: ML, Power Mngt, WebBluetooth, etc
• Get involved
  • Test nightlies
  • Curated bugs for new contributors
  • servo.org

In Case of Emergency: Break Glass – BCP, DRP, & Digital Legacy – David Bell

• Definitions
  • BCP = Business continuity Plan
  • A process to prevent and recover from business continuity plans
  • BIP = Business interuptions plan
  • BRP = Recovery plan
  • RPO = Recovery point objective, targetted recovery point (when you last backed up)
  • RTO = Recovery time objective
• Why?
  • Because things will go wrong
  • Because things should not go even more wrong
• Create your BCP
  • Brainstorm
  • Identify events that may interrupt, loss access to physical site, loss of staff
  • Backups
    • 3 copies
    • 2 different media/formats
    • 1 offsite and online
    • Check how long it will take to download or fetch
  • Test
  • Who has the Authority
  • Communication chains, phone trees, contact details
  • Practice Early, Practice often
    • Real-world scenarios
    • Measure, measure, measure
    • Record your results
    • Convert your into an action item
    • Have different people on the tests
  • Each Biz Unit or team should have their own BCP
  • Recovery can be expensive, make sure you know what your insurance will cover
• Breaking the Glass
  • Documentation is the Key
  • Secure credentials super important
  • Shamir secret sharing, need number of people to re-create the share
• Digital Legacy
  • Do the same for your personal data
  • Document
    • Credentials
    • Services
      • What uses them
      • billing arrangments
      • Credentials
    • What are your wishes for the above.
  • Talk to your family and friends
  • Backups
  • Document backups and backup your documentation
  • Secret sharing, offer to do the same for your friends
• Other / Questions
  • Think about 2-Facter devices
  • Google and some others companies can setup “Next of Kin” contacts

 

 

Designing for failure: On the decommissioning of Persona

• Worked for Mozilla on Persona
• Persona did authentication on the web
  • You would go to a website
  • Type in your email address
  • Redirects via login page by your email provider
  • You login and redirect back
• Started centralised, designed to be uncentralised as it is taken up
• Some sites were only offering login via social media
  • Some didn’t offer traditional logins for emails or local usernames
  • Imposes 3rd party between you and your user.
  • Those 3rd parties have their own rules, eg real name requirements
• Persona Failed
  • Traditional logins now more common
• Cave Diving
  • Equipment and procedures designed to let you still survive if something fails
  • Training review deaths and determines how can be prevented
  • “5 rules of accident analysis” for cave diving
• Three weeks ago switched off Persona
  • Encourage others to share mistakes

 

• Just having a free license is not enough to succeed
• Had a built in centralisation point
  • Protocol designed so browser could eventually natively implement but initially login.persona.com was using it.
  • Relay between provider and website went via Mozilla until browser natively implemented
  • No ability to fork the project
• Bits rot more quickly online
  • Stuff that is online must be continually maintain (especially security)
  • Need a way to have software maintained without experts
• Complexity Limits agency
  • Limits who can run project at all
  • Lots of work for those people who can run it
• A free license don’t further my feeedom if we can’t run the software

 

• Prolong Your Project’s Life
• Bad ideas
  • We used popups and people reflexively closed them
  • API wasn’t great
• Didn’t measure the right thing
  • Is persona product or infrastructure?
  • Treated like a product, not a good fit
• Explicitly define and communicate your scope
  • “Solves authentication” or “Authenticate email addresses”
  • Broke some sites
  • Got used by FireFoxOS which was not a good fit
• Ruthlessly oppose complexity
  • Tried to do too much mean’t it was overly complex
  • Complex hard to maintain and review and grow
  • Hard for newbies to join
  • If it is complex then it is hard to even test that is is working as expected
  • Focus and simplify
  • Almost no outside contributors, especially bad when mozilla dropped it.

 

• Plan for Your Projects Failure
• “Sometimes that [bus failure] is just a commuter bus that picks up that person and takes them to another job”
• If you know you are dead say it
  • 3 years after we pulled people off project till officially killed
  • Might work for local software but services cost money to run
  • Sooner you admit you are dead the sooner people can plan to your departure
• Ensure your users can recover without your involvement
  • Hard to do when you think your project is going to save the world
  • Example firefox sync has a copy of the data locally so even if it dies user will survive
• Use standard data formats
  • eg OPML for RSS providers
• Minimise the harm caused when your project goes away