MozFest for Engineers, 2018 Highlights

MozFest has always attracted some of the best and brightest creative projects from open source software and hardware communities, and our 2018 Festival is no exception. Whether you’ve been coding for decades or days, our annual celebration of the open web has unique sessions and experiences for you. Here are just eight of our favorites — for more, browse our full weekend schedule on Guidebook.

Get your tickets for Mozilla Festival Weekend, October 26–28, now!

1. Join a thriving sociotechnical space, an emerging branch of the internet that’s is radically different from the current mega platforms. In “Offgrid connections: from the South Pacific to Mars” presented by Mix Irving and Andre Stalz, you’ll learn how communities can use Scuttlebutt, a peer-to-peer open protocol for social networks to host themselves and each other, and communicate securely by default.
2. Check out the session “Build ‘Privacy By Design’ Webthings” and use Mozilla’s IoT Web Thing framework and tools to deploy your own connected things local network. Technologists from the Samsung Open Source Group will demo the IoT.js framework on Tizen:RT OS for microcontrollers, and help you kickstart your own IoT project by replicating minimal recipes.
3. Join Sean O’Brien from Yale Privacy Lab for “Tracking Mobile Trackers” and learn how to detect the mobile trackers — from simple crash reporters to analytics platforms to ultrasonic beacons — that permeate the ecosystems of Android and iOS. Discover tracker-busting and jamming technologies like the Exodus Privacy scanner, “PiRogue”, and PilferShush
4. In “Detect Internet Censorship with OONI Probe” with Elio Qoshi from The Tor Project, you’ll explore how a free software, global observation network can detect censorship, surveillance and traffic manipulation on the internet. Try out the OONI (short for Open Observatory of Network Interference) Probe on Desktop, Android and iOS, and learn to detect censorship events in your own communities.
5. Get a quick intro to Machine Learning from Anant Jain, see how Machine Learning applications identify objects in real-time. Jain’s session is titled “Let’s fool modern AI systems with physical stickers!” so you’ll get a sneak peek into an emerging area of research in this field, known as “adversarial attacks,” and discuss the implications for emerging automated systems.
6. From AmazonEcho to GoogleHome, voice-based systems and voice-based authentication is on the rise — as well as audio-editing and generating software for spoofing voices. Explore the security threats and possible solutions in “Is Your Voice Your Own? — The Fallible Recognition System” facilitated by Tanzeel Khan and Nabeela Rizvi.
7. Join members of the SecureDrop team for a crash course in basic operational security and threat modeling. OpSec is not a one-size-fits-all discipline, so “Personal Security: Fundamentals of Threat Modeling” explores concrete cases of applied security and uses them as instructional exercises. Participants will learn to think critically on their own and combat the “security nihilism” that often comes with learning how to protect oneself.
8. In “Let’s Play with Rust: A Friendly Introduction” with Mehu Patel from Mozilla India, you’ll dive in and learn to write fast and trustworthy code in the programming language Rust. This session is especially designed for newbies and early-stage users, and will help connect you with the vibrant, growing Rust community worldwide.

See you at MozFest!

Note: a previous version of this post listed a session “Queering and Hacking Your Fashion” which has unfortunately been cancelled due to travel difficulties.