The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit, North America 2018

The Open Source Summit, North America held in Vancouver BC, is presented by the Linux Foundation and features sponsors at various tiers: Diamond - IBM, Intel and Suse, Platinum - Red Hat, Gold - Amazon Web Services, CNCF, Google, Kenzan, Microsoft Canada, SAP, VMware, Silver - Datadog, Flexera, Influx Data, Linux Academy, Oracle, Storj.io, Synopsys along with bronze, community and media sponsors. The Linux Foundation kicked off this year's Summit with two days of security briefings and the main conference running August 29 - 31.

The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit connects the open source ecosystem under one roof. It’s a unique environment for cross-collaboration between developers, sysadmins, dev-ops, architects and others who are driving technology forward. Joining over 2,000 developers, technologists and industry experts to exchange ideas on the latest trends in open source and open collaboration, how to navigate the open source landscape, and how open source is shaping innovation.

Prior to the main conference we took time out to attend the Lightning talks and Diversity social sponsored by Google at Chewies Oyster Bar. The main conference opened with Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation welcoming attendees and kicking off the Keynote Talks. Jim shared the Linux Foundation key focus for 2018/2019: creating value and to achieve optimal continual upstream reinvestment and create infrastructure to make upstream open source projects great.

Big announcements were the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science initiative to create an open source co-development environment led by major film and production studios, Automotive Grade Linux, and updates on the Cloud Native Computing Foundation - one of the fastest growing projects in the open source ecosystem.

Sarah Novotny, Open Source Strategy Lead from Google announced they are committing a 9M grant of Google Cloud credits to cover all of the testing CI/CD infrastructure and Kubernetes and the Zowe Open Mainframe Project was unveiled.

The Linux Foundation welcomes 51 new members. Jim's closing comment was aspiration and inspiring: 'Lets go solve big problems: one person, one project, one industry at a time'.

Shawn Wilkinson, Founder & Ben Golub, Executive Chairman, Storj Labs delivered a keynote talk Open Source and the Decentralized Web. The talk compared Open Source and Web 1.0 with the new Decentralized Web and highlighted the 23 M open source developers who are the major drivers behind cloud computing, database, AI and machine learning development.

Shawn and Ben highlighted how Storj is creating the world’s largest cloud environment without building a single data centre. Their environment currently holds 150 PB of storage data and unlocks better privacy, security and availability of data.

Imad Sousou, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, Open Source Technology Center, at Intel delivered the next keynote: the Virtuous cycle of Open Source Systems. Imad provided insight about Clear Linux the Multi-OS safety critical project for Linux OS developed by Intel.

Imad touched on Internet as a Service (IaaS) performance metrics, how integrating Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) achieved a 7x performance improvement and Apache Spark achieved an 8x improvement. Imad also highlighted 4x improvements in R Benchmark and 2x improvements in TensorFlow.

In response to a question from Jim Zemlin around ensuring a safety first approach in these advanced systems, Imad closed on the importance of bringing hard work, improving documentation and creating more modules and components.

The third keynote was a conversation between Preethi Kasireddy, Founder & Chief Executive Officer, TruStory and Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation. Trustory is building solution to validate claims made online using the community network effect and token incentives - aka a truth layer for the web. TruStory is backed by Pantera Capital and Coinbase.

Jim asked Preethi her story about teaching herself how to code. She answered while she had an engineering degree, her journey was guided by self learning followed up by a boot camp. If you’re at the beginning of your coding journey she recommends freeCodeCamp for their bite size projects and most importantly hacking and practice.

The highlight of day two of the main conference was the boat cruise which took attendees through Coal Harbour. Day three came with a few surprises including an impromptu meeting with Linus Torvalds. You can find more about Adam’s conversation with Linus in an upcoming article.

The Linux Foundation has over 1,300 companies and tens of thousands of developers from around the world representing billions of dollars. The Linux Foundation focuses on creating innovation engines and was recently recognized by the SD Times in 2017 for fostering excellence in both the open source and general technology and business communities.

The future it seems, is bright and open.

Bitmain IPO Technical Challenges and Why Journalism Matters

Below is a link to an article translated and published by Samson Mow on his website The Lion’s Den.

Bitmain: IPO and Technical Challenges was originally written by Allen Guo from 2048 Capital and was translated with his permission.

One of the cornerstones of good journalism is presenting honest, unbiased and accurate reporting of the truth. We live in a world of op-ed which traditionally means ‘opposite the editorial page’ although we often use the term to mean ‘opinion editorial’. An opinion piece is different from a fact-based piece in that it borrows from the writer or editor’s viewpoint.

There’s nothing wrong with op-ed articles. But - when these are your only sources of truth - it becomes a slippery slope to censoring in only the high performing articles and censoring out articles which contain opposing points of view. The end result skews balanced journalism into an arcade of who can yell loudest and garner the most page views.

The endgame is an even more dangerous place and that is one of pure censorship. Writing an article presenting opposing facts to a popular point of view? Good luck publishing that. As news agencies become richer from advertisers pouring in money to feed the adrenaline based feedback loop of modern news cycles - do you think they’ll allow in even the tiniest risk to mess up their mighty and awesome news machine?

And so you get censorship, both implicit and explicit. You get totalitarian states where only accepted voices are heard. Even more insidious the dissenting voices become true outsiders as they are shunned, disenfranchised and left unable to exist, let alone compete, in society.

Do you remember journalism? Real journalism where you could tune in to a news station or pick up a paper and get a balanced view of what was going on in the world?

I do.

Breaking Down Black Hat USA 2018 and DEF CON 26

Advance Tech Media recently attended Black Hat USA 2018 one of the world’s premier cybersecurity conferences held August 3 - 9 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV. With an estimated 20,000 attendees this year Black Hat was arguably one of the largest gatherings of information security professionals and companies. Now in its 21st year, Black Hat USA provides attendees with the very latest in research, development and trends. The conference included four days of technical trainings (August 4 – 7) followed by the two-day main conference (August 8 – 9) featuring Briefings, Arsenal, the Business Hall, and much more.

Attendees could view the conference network operation centre and Mike from Kismet Wireless was kind enough to give us a run down on the mobile monitoring station aka the pineapple - an open source wireless network intrusion detection system. We met with a number of interesting vendors in the Business Hall and came back with a ton of cool swag - most of which we’ll be giving away at the next few Advance Tech Socials and other meetups here in Vancouver.

One of my personal highlights was meeting Kevin Mitnick during his live security demo, showing why privacy and guarding your data is important, and getting two signed copies of Kevin’s latest book The Art of Invisibility - thank you kindly Kevin!!

The coverage of Black Hat USA would not be complete without mentioning DEF CON 26. At the beginning of August, Las Vegas experiences a unique convergence of infosec and cybersecurity professionals, ethical hackers, hackers, engineers, and agents representing various governments, corporations, universities and communities. Combined with temperatures in the low 40s - celcius (each day was well over 100 degrees F) these groups mixed and co-mingled up and down the Las Vegas Strip and surrounding areas. Was it madness - a little. Mayhem? No.

Sure there were a few blue screens and depending on how well you understand securing your devices - you may not have wanted to hop on to any of the local or hotel wireless networks. There were also new hotel security checks and policies which were generally considered over-reaching regardless of how well intentioned they may have been when conceived. There were extraordinary numbers of blinking lights including the DEF CON 26 badges which - if solved - would lead to a coveted black badge which conveys lifetime conference access.

We went to the HackerOne h1-702, Hacker Holiday Event where there were over $450K in bounties paid out. While there was some socialising we were surprised to see groups of people focused on progressing successfully through bug bounties. As always, in Vegas the nightlife is pervasive but the general theme in middle of summer amidst the heat of the desert was that of people hacking on ideas and having fun. Without mentioning names we enjoyed the conversations and look forward to attending both conferences again in the future!

Off the Chain by Binary District, Berlin

I had the opportunity to attend Off The Chain an event exploring state channels and off chain scaling solutions as related to different cryptocurrencies. Off the Chain was sponsored by Binary District and held at Berliner Freiheit on June 30 and July 1 in Berlin, Germany.

Off the Chain explored the impact of state channels and second layer scaling solutions and featured an impressive array of speakers representing an equally impressive list of companies, organizations and engineering teams. Some of the featured speakers included:

• Christian Decker, Core Tech Engineer at Blockstream

• Iddo Bentov, Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University

• Gert-Jaap Glasbergen, Software Developer at MIT DCI

• Ethan Heilman, Co-founder of Commonwealthcrypto

• Liam Horne, Co-founder of Counterfactual

• Lefteris Karapetsas, Raiden Network Developer Team Lead

• Joshua Lind, PhD Researcher at Imperial College London

• Ian Miers, Postdoctoral Researcher at Cornell Tech and Co-founder of Zcash

• Christian Reitwiessner, Team Lead at Ethereum

• Stefanie Roos, Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Waterloo

• Jason Teutsch, Founder of TrueBit

Highlights from some of the sessions:

Gert-Jaap Glasbergen, Software Developer at MIT DCI spoke about private, scalable smart contracts using trusted oracle private keys.

Iddo Bentov, Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell gave some insight into P2P decentralized poker on Ethereum aka Virtue Poker. Jason Teutsch, Founder of TrueBit spoke about Doge-Ethereum and cool art projects in Vancouver.

Ethan Heilman, PhD student from Boston University’s Computer Science Department, Co-founder of Commonwealthcrypto and a member of the security research group BUSec spoke about Lightning and the 0xProject. Ethan researches novel attacks on hash functions, differential cryptanalysis, Intelligent Transit Systems and cache based side channel attacks and broke SHA3 contestant Spectral Hash.

Christian Reitwiessner, Team Lead at Ethereum had a great talk about ‘Where’s Waldo’ in resolving search problems - how to find what you’re looking for when verifying off chain computations.

Berlin - you lived up to your reputation as one of the major centres of the cryptocurrency universe with this event!

Review of DWX 2018 : Developer Week

By Alexandra

I recently spoke at DWX 2018 : Developer Week one of the largest Developer Events in Europe. DWX 2018 took place from June 25 - 28, at NürnbergMesse in Nuremberg, Germany. Developer Week 2018 hosted sessions from 138 speakers, workshops and special events covering the fields of .NET, Mobile and Web Development plus Maker, Softskills, Internet of Things, Trends and Machine Learning tracks. A well attended event Developer Week 2016 and 2017 drew over 1600 attendees each.

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DWX 2018 Speakers and Team, photographer: Kerstin Hartmann

My session AI: Beyond Good and Evil – the Mechanisms Involved in Human and Synthetic Intelligence was featured in the Machine Learning and Trends tracks. I explored the intersection of machine learning and consciousness, specifically how embodiment (via robotics) may be a necessary precondition to the emergence of mind. While some of the research in this area explores possible far future outcomes, this is a massively funded research area and outcomes grow by exponential bounds on an almost daily basis. Stay tuned the future, while unpredictable - may be closer than you think!

Conference highlights included sessions by Marco Heimeshoff and Roman Satchse on DDD and UI/UX, Janek Fellien and Sia Ghassemi presenting Cosmos DB and DDD, and Sia Ghassemi showing new use cases for advanced functions in MS Excel during open space. For the record Sia was easily the hardest working presenter, giving seven talks if you include his open space session and co-presentations.

Additional highlights were impromptu conversations and introductions in the speakers lounge, the beautiful venue, an 80’s themed video game arcade night and the World Cup Series Semi-final game between Germany and South Korea - easily the most well attended session!