In light of the Sonoma County fires today we won’t be holding an October general meeting. Stay safe everyone.

You’ve probably heard of the mythical “Year of the Linux Desktop” for quite some time by now with the year seemingly always just around the corner. With Linux just now crossing the 3% install base threshold we may not be “there” yet but that’s not to say there aren’t some great companies out there making Linux-specific hardware. Case in point is the topic of this talk - System76 (http://system76.com) ships laptops in a range of sizes and configurations with Linux preloaded.

In this talk, I’ll demonstrate a new System76 Oryx Pro laptop and show off the current Out-Of-Box experience as well as their plans for their own distribution named Pop!_OS which is now in development. I’ll talk about what works well with their current software loadout and areas that still need improvement. I’ll also give an overview of the current state of driver support and touch on how that support dictated the hardware build of the laptop. I’ll leave plenty of time at the end for everyone to get some hands-on time as some things (such as what the keyboard and button layout feels like) can’t be demonstrated well from a projector.

Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk? Here’s your chance. Talk about anything Linux related.

Hackfest: Bring your hardware to get help with it or just to show it off.

Have you ever wondered what is clogging your Internet connection? Or if you ever use (or get) the bandwidth you pay for? The best way to know is to measure.

This presentation will discuss how to retrieve data from sources ranging from Linux hosts to network and IoT devices using collectd, then storing and graphing the data using InfluxDB and Grafana. The intended audience is technically-inclined home users and system administrators.

Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk? Here’s your chance. Talk about anything Linux related.

Hackfest: Bring your hardware to get help with it or just to show it off.

Most of what we’ve been told over the years about what makes a good password has been wrong, so it’s no surprise most people pick bad passwords. This talk will cover the history of password policy and password cracking starting from the days when Richard Stallman hacked the passwords forced on his MIT computer lab because he considered passwords an authoritarian method of control. Next I’ll discuss the golden days of password guessing featured prominently in movies like Hackers and WarGames.

Then I’ll move to the tech boom and the introduction of draconian IT policies like password rotation and password complexity and the dirty little leet-speak password secrets they led to. As we get closer to the modern day I’ll discuss the “correct horse battery staple” password renaissance and more modern approaches to password cracking spawned by tools like oclhashcat and giant password databases dumps like the RockYou hack.

I’ll finish up with modern attempts to fix the password auth problem such as new approaches to secure password generation in password managers or schemes such as diceware as well as cover password auth reinforcements like the different forms of 2FA (including U2F) and Facebook’s new approach to “I forgot my password” workflows. By the end everyone should have plenty of ammunition to take back to their IT department and get rid of those horrible password policies.

Description: Let’s Encrypt is a way for anyone to enable TLS (as in, HTTPS) support to a webserver at no cost. However, there are many security considerations involved with everything from certificate renewal to safe handling of the various files involved. In this talk and live demo I’ll cover how to create a reverse proxy using the nginx webserver that simultaneously allows multiple webservers to exist at one IP address and show how isolating Let’s Encrypt to a different system increases security. The talk will also cover more secure (and less risky) methods of automatic key renewal than the official, somewhat invasive renewal tool.

ContinuingLogo is a recently written interpreter for the Logo programming language that is still in pre-alpha. It is mostly compatible with Brian Harvey’s UCBLogo interpreter and has some graphic and sound features inspired by Atari Logo for the Atari 800. Logo was created at MIT and BBN in the late 1960s as a language to support children in learning mathematical and logical thinking. Its most well known feature is turtle graphics, in which a “turtle” moves around on the screen as instructed, drawing a trail behind it.

This talk will consist of a brief tour of some of ContinuingLogo’s basic features, followed by demonstrations of several short example programs. Language demos will include an incredibly short pig Latin translator. Graphics demos will include spirals, fractals, line followers, and a traffic simulation. Sound demos will include the generation of music and sound effects, and illustrations of the relationship between sound frequencies and perceived musical notes. A few larger games will be demonstrated but not discussed line by line.

Working on an engineering project with more than one person is hard enough when everyone is in the same room. It’s more difficult when you have a team spread around the world and even more interesting if you’re working on a shared physical device. In this talk, I’ll discuss a remote engineering environment I created that allows contributors to connect to a standard Linux user account with a shared terminal (tmux), shared desktop (x2go with desktop sharing enabled), power and data control for a device under test (serial over USB), and even streaming video for viewing camera feeds (RTMP streaming from OBS Studio and viewed in VLC). This wide-ranging talk is appropriate for all levels of experience and will primarily be a series of live, remote demos.

Update: Allan has posted a video of the talk on YouTube.

Lightning Talks: Have something you would like to present, but don’t have enough material for a full talk? Here’s your chance. Talk about anything Linux related.

Elections: After the last lightning talk concludes we will hold our annual elections.

Hackfest: Bring your hardware or software project to get help with it or just to show it off.

The Epiphany is a processor that tries to combine the best attributes of a CPU and a GPU. The Parallella is a single-board computer that runs Ubuntu, originally designed as a showcase for the Epiphany chip. I backed the original Kickstarter campaign for the Parallella in 2012. I will talk about my experience with the fundraising campaign, how the Epiphany and the Parallella are different from their predecessors, and the strengths and weaknesses of the Epiphany in practice.

Update: William has posted his slides.

Capture the Flag tournaments have long been used to test hacker skills but they can also serve as effective security training for developers. This talk will feature a case study where I turned teams of developers with no prior security training against each other in a CTF arena featuring their own applications and watched them rack up points as they popped shells in each other’s applications.