Program

Proprietary software earns sufficient amounts due to its hidden behavior. While it snatches the freedom away from the user, it earns money for the developer and helps them survive. We discuss the characteristics of free software, different business models that may or may not be compatible with it and find solutions to making free software survive independently.

The modern web is filled to the brim with complexity, no shortage of nonfree software, and malware. Many, many people have written and spoken at length on these issues and their implications and negative effects on users' freedom, privacy, and digital autonomy. With the advent of technologies like WebAssembly, the modern day Web browser has effectively become an operating system of its own, along with all the issues and complexities of operating systems and then some. Opening arbitrary websites with a typical Web browser amounts to downloading an executing [mostly nonfree] software on your machine. But is all of this complexity really necessary? Is all of this needed to achieve the web's original purpose, an information system for relaying documents (and now media)? What if there was a way to do away with all of these complexities and go back to the basics?

In this talk we will examine the Internet beyond the modern web, some possibilities of what that might look like with concrete examples from protocols like Gopher from time immemorial, and more recent experiments and reimaginations of it in today's world, such as Gemini and Spartan. The talk will give a brief tour of these protocols and their histories, what they have to offer, and why one might want to use them in the 21st century.

Replicant is an FSF certified 100% free software Android distribution. Android is very different from GNU/Linux. While Android reuses the Linux kernel (sometimes with huge modifications), it uses almost no other components from GNU/Linux and a lot of the Android code was written from scratch.

Since its creation in 2010, most of the work in Replicant consisted of reusing an existing Android distribution, and replacing or avoiding the nonfree hardware abstraction libraries that were shipped by the distribution it reused.

The Replicant project has now changed focus and wants more independence from the device manufacturers and from the Android distributions it's based on.

In order to be accessible to people with less technical background, this talk will first explain the hardware architecture of smartphones and Android (and what is an hardware abstraction library) and will then talk about the directions taken by the Replicant project.

There will also be time for questions.

One of the defining features of free software distributions in past years has been package management. Package managers, allowing the installation and removal of software with a single action, are undeniably convenient!

However, as package managers have entered the public consciousness as app stores, some question whether free software has lost its edge compared to proprietary systems. The truth is that existing solutions are only the tip of the iceberg, and package management has much more to offer for enhancing user freedom.

It is time to go deeper and explore the many ways that advanced package management can help users control their devices with greater ease and flexibility.

User freedom is directly linked to a free education. Student mobilization and struggle for more freedom in the classroom, especially after the pandemic event, shows how the school community must move to show the dangers and disadvantages of surveillance inside and outside the classroom.

The Time Zone Database (TZDB) is the primary technology for civil timekeeping conventions. It contains the complete history of the world’s civil time since 1970, and copies of it reside in most of the planet’s cell phones and computers. It has been developed in the open with no use restrictions. TZDB is an example of “long data”: data intended to be used for a long time. Its main challenges come from version and downstream skew, scope and format disagreements, standardization, intellectual property disputes, institutional backing, and politics. I will describe some of the these challenges in TZDB’s evolution.

Social media has become a staple of daily life, playing a mayor role in the lives of millions. However, it is highly centralized around a reduced number of platforms that trap their users. Over the years, alternative platforms, specifications and protocols have emerged, proposing a decentralized and federated approach to social media. Therefore, for my bachelor’s degree thesis, I decided to perform research on the matter.

I will try to show the results of this research. A brief history on the rise, fall, and rise (?) of decentralized social media, what the specialized literature says about user retention, critical views on the matter, and, most importantly, what the actual social media users have to say about it.

If you are interested in platforms like Mastodon or GNU social, the future of the Internet, or just think that Facebook is plain evil, this might just interest you.

I would like to explore and expose the history of my motivations as a free software hacktivist, especially what progressively led me to dedicate more time and energy to support free software in the public sector.

By explaining my approach, I hope many free software supporters will understand how critical it is to contribute to current efforts of the public sector, and I will suggest a few practical tips on how to do so in everyday life.

Designers brought up on conventional tools end up missing out on the arcane powers of the command line. Pipes, shells, scripts, converters and parsers can be an integral part of a graphic designer's workflow, requiring a shift in expectations from our tools. Likewise, seasoned shell hackers might appreciate ways to connect their flows to create graphic outputs.
As designers with 10+ years experience with free and libre software, we've gone through a good amount of hacks and experiments to go beyond GUIs when creating visible outcomes, and would like to share some pages out of our cookbook. Some of our proposed dishes are instant print-ready zines, typographic animation for video credits, font showcases, generative vector graphics and shell mannerisms for quick batch tasks. We'll be making the most of exotic ingredients like ImageMagick, PDFtk, FFmpeg, Makefiles or Git, with a dash of Python and Bash scripting to bind flavors together.

This presentation is about Haketilo, a browser extension that facilitates replacing Web sites' original bloated, privacy-invading, nonfree Javascript with free, community and user-controlled scripts.

In this presentation, Haketilo developer Nicholas Johnson summarizes the problems with the modern Web and the various approaches taken to address them. He discusses Haketilo's strategy for fixing the Web as compared to other Web extensions, its use cases, anticipated social hurdles, future plans, and the goal of creating a new, simplified Web standard where user freedom is guaranteed.

This presentation also serves as a call to arms. Developers experienced in HTML, CSS, or Javascript are encouraged to join the fight by submitting libre replacement scripts for their favorite Web sites. For Haketilo to achieve its goals, it needs many contributors.

1. The link for the Haketilo project wiki is https://hydrillabugs.koszko.org/projects/haketilo/wiki
2. As displayed on the Web site, it is also funded by nlnet.
3. Haketilo is working on becoming a GNU package.

GNU poke is an interactive editor for binary data. Not limited to editing basic entities such as bits and bytes, it provides a full-fledged procedural, interactive programming language designed to describe data structures and to operate on them. Once a user has defined a structure for binary data (usually matching some file format) she can search, inspect, create, shuffle and modify abstract entities such as ELF relocations, MP3 tags, DWARF expressions, partition table entries, and so on, with primitives resembling simple editing of bitsmand bytes. The program comes with a library of already written descriptions (or "pickles" in poke parlance) for many binary formats.

Usenet is a worldwide online discussion network that was established in 1980, a decade before the World Wide Web. Unlike Web forums, control of Usenet is not centralized, but is rather distributed across an open federation of independent service providers. This makes the system transparent, robust, resistant to censorship, and most importantly, respectful of users' digital freedoms.

This talk is presented on behalf of the recently reconstituted Big-8 Management Board, the committee that administers Usenet's original discussion hierarchies. I will (re)introduce Usenet, relate its history, and explain how this venerable but still lively network has much to offer over modern-day discussion forums and social media platforms.

File transfer between computers is considered by many as a solved problem. However in practice, people end up using third party servers, insecure programs, do tricks like emailing to themselves to access their own files from another computer. In some cases, they need to know IP addresses, account names and passwords to other computers. Here we look at a secure way to transfer information which uses a cryptography protocol called SPAKE2.

In a world in which we are surrounded by proprietary surveillance hardware and software, it's now called resistance to live in liberty. Not only the device manufacturers, but also people around us are forcing us to use proprietary software. Within these circumstances, we are trying to liberate every single device that we are using one by one. For one, we can free personal devices by setting up a home server (which is obviously running on free/libre hardware), we can host personal Web sites and run online services by ourselves. In this session, we will share our experiences on this process, discuss the benefits and the costs of this lifestyle, and share brief suggestions to attendees who want to liberate and self-host their tech.

Unfortunately many VR games are nonfree software that only runs on Windows or the Oculus Quest. As an owner of a Talos II, I want to play Libre VR games, so I started porting existing free software such as the SlimeVR-Server to POSIX and Monado. This was the beginning of the LibreVR Project.

Then I discovered the V-Sekai game which uses the Godot engine and the Meowality - CrossLink NX mixed reality hardware. I began porting Godot 4 to the POWER9 and thought about running the Libre-SOC gateware on the CrossLink NX FPGA.

An introductory dive into the state of the art of Virtual Reality and video game making tools in the free software world, and their potential as a tool for treatment of "lazy eye" and other visual conditions.

The classic version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4, supports only about 4.2 billion of the numeric addresses used to identify computers.

The Internet's success means we've now run out of new addresses. While we wait for more adoption of IPv6, there's huge demand for IPv4 addresses, especially from public Web services and their hosts. Old address blocks have been resold for millions of dollars, with prices approaching $50 per address.

Standards from the 1980s reserved several hundred million addresses for "future use" and other purposes, which are now going to waste. Reversing this is an involved task; software and devices have often deliberately rejected any use of reserved addresses.

The IPv4 Unicast Extensions Project is proposing software and standards changes to eventually make those reserved addresses usable. Some of our changes have been accepted in systems including GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. This presentation will describe what we've done and what still needs to happen.

In her keynote, Marleen will explain how Waag’s model of the Public Stack) proposes an alternative way of designing and developing technology. Public Stack advocates for a design of technology with the interests of the public in mind. She will show how the program has been developed over the course of the last four years, and how Waag and its partners apply the model and spread free software awareness in various sectors, including health, media, and government. From building the capacities of citizens, developing critical maker education and the development of data commons and ethical tech like Fairphone.

This presentation will argue for the moral necessity of the GNU Project's "four software freedoms." This piece will be predominantly philosophical, and will not contain much technical computer information.

I will argue for the universality of the four freedoms among humans. I will do this by explaining how the GNU four freedoms are justified in a compelling picture of human nature.

Darwin revolutionized our understanding of zoology in the 19th century. In his magnum opus, On the Origin of the Species, he demonstrated the process of "natural selection."

Sadly, much of his teachings have become distorted by a conception of natural selection, inspired by Herbert Spencer. Darwin did not merely admit to competitive behavior environmental adaptations. He also held that organisms are able to cooperate through "mutual aid."

In this piece, I will explain how software freedom suits human nature better than the destructive and competitive nature of that which is proprietary.

Many free projects use OpenPGP encryption or signatures for various important tasks, like defining membership, authenticating participation, asserting identity over a vote, etc. The Web-of-Trust upon which its operation is based is a model many of us hold dear, allowing for a decentralized way to assign trust to the identity of a given person.
But both the Web-of-Trust model and the software that serves as a basis for the above mentioned uses are at risk due to attacks on the key distribution protocol (not on the software itself!)
With this talk, I will try to bring awareness to this situation, to some possible mitigations, and present some proposals to allow for the decentralized model to continue to thrive towards the future.