hpr_transcripts/hpr1526.txt

Episode: 1526
Title: HPR1526: Penguicon 2014
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1526/hpr1526.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 04:40:06

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Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
of HPR.
And today what I want to do is talk about an event that I was involved in that happened
just a couple of weeks ago as I record this and that is something called Pengwicon.
Now I've been going to Pengwicon for a number of years, I've presented talks at Pengwicon
for a number of years, but this year was a little bit different and that's because I was
actually involved with helping to put on Pengwicon.
Now there's a little bit of backstory to this.
Some years back I was at Pengwicon and there was a talk being given by George Castro who
works for canonical and is a friend of mine.
He actually lives in the area, so I do get to see George fairly often.
And in this particular one, he was talking about how you can get help if you're using
Linux and I was in the room and I said, hey, you know, George, you're not mentioning
Linux users groups and I was president of a Linux users group at the time.
So I said, I think, you know, you ought to be mentioning these Linux users groups more
because that's a really good place for people to go and get some work done.
Now as it happens, there was a lady named Beth Lynn Eiker who was also there and when
I left the room, she kind of hit me up a little bit and said, hey, we could really use
someone working with Ohio Linux Fest and initially what she was talking about was being
the liaison with the Linux users groups and because I had spoken up about that in this
talk, she thought I'd be a good person for it.
So I said, fine, I would do that.
And then what happened is about a year later, I ended up taking over all of the publicity
for Ohio Linux Fest and did that for a few years and I had a great time doing it, learned
an awful lot.
But there was a point where I thought, okay, I've done this, it's time to move on and for
me that happened last fall.
We had the Ohio Linux Fest was in September and shortly after that, I informed them that
I would not be coming back.
I've got a lot of friends there, I wish them well.
I am very much looking forward to going back to Ohio Linux Fest again this coming fall
for the 2014 event.
And in fact, maybe looking forward to a little bit more because since I'm not working,
I might actually have time to enjoy the event and participate in a few more, listen to
a few more of the talks and things like that.
As well as, of course, the ever popular hallway track.
But anyway, that's coming up.
So with Pengwikon, because I had, it's something I'd been associated with for a long time, I
called a friend of mine named James Heiss and said, I'd like to help with the tech track.
Now, Pengwikon is a very interesting event because it combines technology, you know, the
part of the name comes from Penguin, which is, of course, the mascot of Linux.
So it combines a focus on Linux and, you know, computer and open source technology along
with what is a science fiction convention, with all of the things that science fiction
conventions do.
So you have literature and movies and music and costumes and all of that.
So the thing that's interesting is to me, I think, is that I don't know about anyone
else, but when we talk about a pure technology event, my wife is usually not interested.
But, you know, for the science fiction, she might be.
So there's a lot there for a wide variety of people, not being the sort of person I am.
Many times I've gone there and never got past anything but the tech track.
And it's just because I'd look at the schedule, you know, what am I most interested in right
now?
And it was usually going to be something having to do with computer technology because
that just is my interest.
So I was offering to help with that and went through a couple of meetings.
And then I'd say by February of this year, it was pretty clear to me that I was the guy.
I'm sure none of you have ever had that experience, but it was sort of like, you know, the call
for volunteers and everyone else steps backward.
So actually, I didn't mind that.
There were some things that I thought would be worth doing.
And in fact, I enjoyed it enough that I've already told them I'm going to stick around
for another year.
And I'm pretty excited about that because it looks like pretty much the whole team that
we had this year is continuing.
And I think we had a very successful event this year.
So I will no doubt have more to say on upcoming events.
And I'll be recording things for Hacker Public Radio about it.
But this is about reviewing 2014.
So my focus is on the tech track because that's what I was responsible for.
I attended as many of the talks as I could.
In fact, I only attended one talk that was outside of the tech track.
And it was one on the future of health care, which is also an interest for me.
So a lot of this is going to be recapping some of these tracks and just to give you a little
bit of a flavor of what goes on.
Now my recollection obviously does not cover everything that went on over the weekend,
therefore, and there were costume competitions and food events and music and one room where
I think they were running the Rocky Horror Picture Show on a continuous roll and everything
else.
So it was plenty to do.
And even with the tech track, we had about 70 hours worth of programming and there was
just no way I could attend every single talk as I did as many as I could.
And so I got complaints occasionally from people that they wanted to attend two talks that
were scheduled opposite each other and I could sympathize because it was very often what
I felt looking at the schedule was I can't be in two places at once.
Which one do I go to?
But I'll tell you, as the person who was mostly responsible for the programming, I'll take
that kind of problem any day of the week.
You know, I love hearing that because what that means is I'm putting on a lot of talks
that people want to go to.
You know, what you don't want to hear is, you know, I look at the schedule, it all sucked.
I didn't want to go to any of them.
Then you know, if you hear that from too many people that you've got a problem, one or
two people, you know, I got one friend who frankly, I just, I told him I'm going to apply
a correction factor to everything he says.
The other good problem that I had this weekend was that in many cases the rooms were packed.
Penguin Con in general had record attendance, which means we have to figure out how to
do better next year.
Host facility was excellent.
We were at the Weston Hotel in Southfield, Michigan.
When I talked to you had good things to say about them, I hope we can go back next year.
So this is located in Southfield as a suburb of Detroit in South Eastern Michigan in
the United States.
So if you happen to be within convenient travel distance, you know, you might want to
put it on the schedule to take a look at this and consider coming next year.
And I think this year was the best tech track in my memory at least.
And I'm going to give the credit to that to our con chair, who was Nuri Jose, because
he was really pushing, he was pushing that before I became involved.
He was saying we got to do more, we got to get more.
And every time I asked him how many talks he wanted, he kept saying you can't have too many.
So we had two days worth, if you add it up.
It started Friday afternoon and ran to Sunday afternoon.
And by the end, it was tricky just finding the rooms and equipment to make it happen.
But we mostly managed to do it.
And as I said, the result was about 70 hours of pretty good tech programming.
Now we had a focus.
This was, this past year was the year of Edward Snowden.
And I doubt that I'm the only tech programmer in the world that had this idea.
But I thought, you know, let's make a focus around that.
So we tried to program stuff on various aspects of security and privacy.
And I think did a pretty darn good job.
Now one of the first people I want to talk about is a fellow named Michael Lucas.
Now he is not only a security expert, but an author.
And he has written a number of books on these topics.
So he did several talks.
One was on the proper way to set up sudo with the subtitle you're doing it wrong.
And if you sat in on his talk, you would agree.
You probably are doing it wrong because he really dug into how that is supposed to work
and how you should set it up in order to have a secure server.
What you do on your own system is of course your own business.
Then he did one on DNS sec.
And that was very interesting as well, a different aspect of security.
And you know, it ties in with things like Heartbleed and SSL certs and all of that.
And DNS sec ends up being a part of that story as well.
And the fascinating talk on that.
And then he did one on SSH key authentication.
Now as I said, he is an author.
He's written books on all of these, which he sells from his site, which is the tilted
windmill press.
And I'll have a link in the show notes for this stuff.
And he offered a special deal to our attendees to buy a bundle of all three as ebooks for
$20 and I was more than happy to take advantage of that.
So I purchased all three of those books and I'm really hoping to have Michael back again
next year because he not only knows this stuff, but he gives a really good presentation.
Then friend of mine, Mark Stanislav, who works for a company called Duo Security, gave
us a talk on two factor authentication.
Mark is a great speaker.
I always learn something from his talks.
One of the things I appreciate about the talk that he gave, he works for a company that
provides a two factor authentication product, but it was not a sales pitch or a commercial
for his company.
It really was just to talk about essentially what is two factor authentication and what
does that mean.
And you know, Mark is, he was very careful to talk about things like if you have a
password and a pin, that is not two factor.
It's better than nothing, but it's not two factor authentication, you know, it's something
you know, something you have and at some point maybe something you are, you know.
So biometrics would be something you are, something you have could be a phone or some other
device, you know, a portable RSA key or what have you and then something you know, which
would be like a password or a pin.
So two factor is means that you've got to have at least one from each category.
Then we had a crypto party, Susan Sons, who works in a university in the security department
came and did the crypto party penguin con edition with help from Eric Raymond.
And I'm sure many people have heard of Eric Raymond from these most famous for writing
the cathedral in the bazaar, but what you may not know is that he's one of the people
who helped get penguin con going and has been involved right from the beginning.
So you can usually count on seeing him at penguin con every year.
Interesting fellow and one of those people I don't often agree with, but he always challenges
me and that's a good thing.
And then along with that Chris Naren and John Bell participated in that now.
John did a few other things.
He did some command line stuff for us and also geeks with guns.
So there were quite a few things going on.
So with the crypto party was basically a beginner's guide to using encryption and Susan was
a very methodical and patient in going through this.
There were some people in the room that were slow to catch on, let me say.
And she was very nice in handling that.
And in fact, as you might expect, I was also involved in a presentation.
I got together with my friend Tony Beamus from the Sunday morning Linux review.
And we did a talk on encryption, which was pretty well received and very similar to stuff
I've done for hacker public radio.
And you may think we not too long ago ran an interview that Tony and I, we got together
on the mumble server one day and just talked about the web of trust and key signing.
And if you're not following, subscribing, whatever to Sunday morning, Linux review, check
it out.
It's a really good podcast.
And in fact, I suspect next year I'm going to have all of the hosts of that because Matt
Enders and Mary Thomas have also told me that they want to do talks at PenguinCon next
year and they've got some ideas.
So another security thing, Chris Krieger, who is an old friend of mine, in fact, I met
Chris because we were singing together in a madrigal group and that's how I first met him.
But he is a security professional and works now for an international bank and is other
than that is fairly vague.
So I don't think he wants to get into the details of his job and I understand that.
My wife had an uncle who was very much that way and did I think communication security
for the federal government.
So Chris did one securing your home network with a hardware firewall and he focused on using
PF sense.
I was very interested and took some notes and don't be surprised if I end up doing something
for hacker public radio as part of my security and privacy series because I think it looked
like a really good thing to bring into this.
Next year we talked about maybe getting a presentation on snort, which is one of the things
you might use in conjunction with a hardware firewall.
Then there was a fellow named Mark Kickda and his presentation was Linux dorking, exploring
the basics of Linux from the eyes of an attacker and that was really good.
Again, we've got a professional and security industry and all of these people, Chris Krieger,
Mark Kickda, Mark Stanislaw, Michael Lucas, Susan Sons, you know, there were all professionals
and I think that's one of the reasons that makes the presentation.
So good, you know you're getting the information from the people who live this every day and
they know what they're talking about.
Now aside from the purely technical aspects, there were some policy questions.
One of our guests of honor this year was a lady named Eva Galperon from the Electronic
Frontier Foundation.
And then we were able, kind of at the last minute, it just happened to work out that we
could get Corey Doctoro, who came in as a featured guest and, you know, they did a number
of things but one of them was a panel that they did together called the NSA is watching
you.
The government, surveillance and you.
Now, of course, Corey is kind of a double hitter for something like Penguin Con.
He not only is very prominent in the security and technology area but he is a science fiction
author and I've talked about Corey before so we're just delighted to have him.
Then another guest of honor who covered multiple areas was a fellow named YT Cracker.
Now he was there primarily as a musical guest but he has a background in hacking so he
was able to join a few of panels that dealt with that.
And while I'm on guests of honor, I'll mention Ernie Klein who is the author of Ready Player
One, a book that I suspect quite a few people listening to hacker public radio have read
or at least have heard of and we had a fellow Ed Mason from Game Face Labs who showed off
a virtual reality headset throughout the weekend in addition to joining various panels.
And finally, last of our guests of honor was Erica Carlson who is a software developer
who created an organization called Girl Develop It, developed it, a Detroit area group that
focuses on helping girls to become coders.
So all in all, I thought we had an excellent group of guests of honor.
Now, the tech track wasn't all about that, in fact probably a little less than 50% of
the total went into the security and privacy.
So we had lots of other things.
George Castro from Canonical, I've mentioned, is usually there, in fact if you go back
far enough in Penguin Con history, I think he was saying that he once ran the tech track
back in the day.
So he's from this area and now works for Canonical.
He gave a presentation on Ubuntu, not surprisingly.
Now George is very involved with the cloud and server stuff and I've seen them do presentations
on Juju and so he used some of that and all of the initiatives that Canonical is making
to get Ubuntu into the cloud and they've been very successful there and they're really
a major player in that space.
But then for fun, George also did one on building a steam box and as you may know, the steam
game system has been ported to Linux and runs on Ubuntu and in fact we had a release
party on Saturday night put on by the Ubuntu Michigan logo and Craig Maloney, who's a friend
of mine, was is the head of that particular group and he also did one on getting things
done with Linux if you've heard of the infamous getting things done.
Then Sunday morning Linux review, you know, these are local people.
So you know, we love having them involved and they've done this for a few years now.
They did a live recording of their podcast.
And you know, we want that to be an annual event really.
So Tony and Mary and Matt recorded their show at Penguin Con.
Then it was open to anyone at the convention to drop by and be a part of the recording.
Then we had a couple of folks from Red Hat, Ruth Soule and Tom Calloway and they did a
couple of presentations.
Now one was on Raspberry Pi Hacks, which is the title of a book that they recently published
and O'Reilly is the publisher and O'Reilly is a really good publisher too.
So if you're interested in that sort of thing, check it out.
They gave a great presentation.
Then they did another one on 3D printing using Linux.
Now, there were more.
I was not at every single one of these.
As I said, I wish I could have, but there was just no way for me to get to all of them.
So we had several talks, you know, beginning and intermediate on HTML5.
We had a talk on Python, one on Pascal.
There was someone doing a presentation on the Watson computer from IBM.
Programming for total noobs was one of the ones.
There was one on, I guess what you call maybe open source firearms.
I'm not sure if that's exactly the right term, using 3D printers.
So lots of stuff going on.
So, you know, just reporting everything that went on would make this much longer than
it already is.
And I've focused on the stuff I attended because then I can really speak to what went on.
But again, as I say, it's a science fiction convention as well.
So you're going to have all of the stuff.
In fact, there was a contest for Best Costum and it was won by Ruth Soule from Red Hat.
So you know, just because you're a hardcore geek doesn't mean you can't let your hair
down and have a little bit of fun.
As I said, I did get out to the future of healthcare panel.
Now for me, that's a personal interest because I've worked for several hospitals in my career
on the technology side, but it gave me an interest in that.
So I'd encourage everyone to plan on attending Penguin Con in 2015.
As soon as the date is confirmed, I will certainly be posting about it.
And when we start the call for talks, I'm probably going to record something for Hacker
Public Radio.
And, you know, I think that with the team we have, it's going to be even bigger and better
than 2014 and it'll be plenty for everyone.
If you want to get an idea of for planning before we get a definite date, it will almost
certainly be the last weekend in April or the first weekend in May.
And that's really when they always do it.
It's always around that time of the year.
And if you know anything about programming, you know, part of it is what is available
with the facility and the other is what else is going on at the same time.
So you try and take those into account.
But that's what I, it's always been a spring event and I'm sure it will be again next
year.
So this is Ahuka signing off for Hacker Public Radio and reminding you as I always do to
support FreeSoftware.
Goodbye.
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