PLUG's Upcoming Events

Security Meeting Topic for Thursday 9/20

Aaron Jones: Introduction To Secure Computing

Description:
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt, and Disinformation exists around the modern computer processor. Revelations brought about from leaks has left the technology community concerned about what is being integrated into their hardware and what kind of vulnerabilities exist. This discussion will introduce concepts such as Active Management Technology, Trusted Execution Environments, and Out-Of-Band system access.

About Aaron:
Aaron is an experienced Linux user with several years of teaching experience. He works in the industry as a software developer while also providing consultancy on cyber security related topics. His discussions are AZ Post certified for training credit for law enforcement and he prides himself on providing quality educational material that is relevant and topical. He has a Masters Degree in Intelligence Analysis with a focus in Cyber Security, is a life long learner, and prides himself on staying up to date with the ever changing field of cyber security.

Topic for the Thursday 9/13 meeting

This month der.hans will present "ActivityPub: Decentralized Social Networking" for us.

Description:
ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol for allowing various services to interact.
For instance, a long form blog engine can use an external microblogging service for comments.
ActivityPub is based on the ActivityStream 2.0 data format. It provides client to server APIs and server to server APIs for server to server federating.

Attendees will learn about:

• Why decentralized social networking is useful
• The history of ActivityPub
• The history of decentralized social networking
• Overview of some activities available through ActivityPub
• List of services implementing ActivityPub
• Now what?

Biography:
der.hans is a Free Software community veteran, presenter and author. He is the founder of the Free Software Stammtisch, BoF organizer for the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) and chairman of the Phoenix Linux User Group (PLUG).
As a technology and entrepreneurial veteran, roles have included director of engineering, engineering manager, IS manager, system administrator, community college instructor, developer and DBA.
He presents regularly at large community-led conferences (SCaLE, SeaGL, LibrePlanet, LFNW, Tübix) and many local groups. 

Security Meeting Topic for Thursday 8/16

Topics for the August 9th meeting

We'll be having 2 presentations this month from Ed Nicholson and der.hans.

Ed Nicholson - Technical Debts and Digital Assets

Description
Exploring the analogy of debt and real world financial obligations, as
a context for a software's or system's life cycle.
Debt and Software are both fundamentally types of Intangible Assets.
This talk is an exploration of how the much older asset class, Debt,
may be usefully applied in understanding the relative newcomers,
Software and Systems.

About Ed:
I support Free Software and how people, organizations and populations use, create and experience information. I enjoy The Prescott National Forest as my "office" and The Valley of The Sun as a home away from home. Personal systems run either Fedora, Project Atomic, Android or OpenBSD.



der.hans - Introduction to /etc/alterntives

Description:
/etc/alternatives allows choosing among many programs to provide a certain functionality.
For instance, editor can point the locally preferred text editor. alternatives will also make sure man-pages also match.
Attendees will learn:

• What is /etc/alternatives
• Why is /etc/alternatives
• How to configure /etc/alternatives
• How to use helper scripts

About der.hans:
der.hans is a Free Software community veteran, presenter and author. He is the founder of the Free Software Stammtisch, BoF organizer for the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) and chairman of the Phoenix Linux User Group (PLUG).

As a technology and entrepreneurial veteran, roles have included director of engineering, engineering manager, IS manager, system administrator, community college instructor, developer and DBA.

He presents regularly at large community-led conferences (SCaLE, SeaGL, LibrePlanet, LFNW, Tübix) and many local groups.