Tom Hacohen

Starting your own startup can be both very similar and very different to starting your own business, or even starting an open source project. It provides you the opportunity to be your own boss and control your destiny, while working on something that you are passionate about that can make a positive impact on the world. A startup, however, is different in that it's expected to grow rapidly and reach a high level of revenue, often raising money from investors to expedite this growth. There are many ways to start successful businesses, and a rapid growth startup is only one of them.

Open source startups are great for the open source community, and we will all benefit from having more of them started. They bring in more contributors, and enable more people to work on open source software full time, making for more quality open source software. Successful open source startups also tend to contribute to upstream projects, both financially and with code contributions, making the whole ecosystem better. While there is a lot of information online about starting your own startup, there is much less information about starting open source ones.

In this talk Tom will talk about why you should or should not start an open source startup, and what you need to consider when building an open source startup, covering topics such as fundraising, business model, product, and more. Tom will draw examples from his experience building two successful open source businesses, one of which has raised over $10m in venture capital, and the experiences of fellow founders of other successful open source startups.

Etebase is a software development kit and backend for building end-to-end encrypted applications. Think Firebase, but encrypted in a way that only end-users can access their data.

This is in contrast to how things are done today where the data is only encrypted while in-transit or at-rest, and is therefore accessible by anyone with access to the server, including service providers, rogue employees, hackers, and malicious governments to name a few.

This is not a theoretical threat. We live in an increasingly hostile digital world where out data is used to track, analyze and manipulate us all. With data breaches and privacy violations becoming a common occurrence, it's now more clear than even that our data is not safe.

Our goal with Etebase is to make it easy for developers to build encrypted applications, so that everyone's data can be encrypted and safe.

Etebase already powers the popular EteSync encrypted applications, and is also used in GNOME (Evolution) and KDE (KDE-PIM) among other projects. There are libraries for Rust, JavaScript (TypeScript), Java/Kotlin, Python, C/C++, and C#, with a few others in the works. Which means you can already use it in a variety of projects.

In this talk Tom will introduce the Etebase project, will show developers how to easily build encrypted and privacy respecting applications, and will discuss the project's design goals and future plans.

The work on Etebase has been made possible with financial support from NLnet Foundation, courtesy of NGI0 Discovery and the European Commission DG CNECT's Next Generation Internet programme.

Building end-to-end applications is not easy, or at the very least, it comes with its own unique set of challenges.

There are the often talked about challenges, like making sure you use battle tested encryption primitives and use them correctly, and striking the balance between security and usability. Unfortunately, there are many more challenges that are not often talked about, like the significantly decreased development speed due to all the code being implemented on the client side, the increased difficulty and complexity in upgrading the protocol and many others.

In this talk Tom will use EteSync as an example for a secure application to show some of the more interesting challenges he faced while creating it, and new challenges that he encountered as the user-base grew and the protocol evolved. Tom will also cover some of the issues that affect EteSync today, how they will be addressed in the future, where EteSync is going, and what's currently holding it back. By the end of this talk, attendees will be made familiar with some of the unique challenges that come with building end-to-end encrypted applications and some alternatives for solving them.

Audience:

• People interested in the inner workings of EteSync
• Developers interested in, or actively designing secure applications and protocols
• People interested in the future of the EteSync

Servers can't be trusted! Whether it's because of a malicious company, a rogue employee, a government agency, a random hacker or malware, your data is not safe if it's just sitting there exposed on a server.

Luckily, there are ways to mitigate some of the threats, for example by making your server more secure, using a server you trust (self-host) and using end-to-end encryption, so the server doesn't have access to this information. While these are great, the server can still successfully manipulate your data, this is where tamper-proof journals come into play and help reducing even that.

In this talk Tom will show some of the threats your data is facing on servers even when self-hosting and using end-to-end encryption, explain what tamper-proof journals are, how they can mitigate these threats, and how they are used by EteSync to better secure your data.

Audience:

• People interested in securing their personal data, especially address books and calendar events.
• People interested in learning about the limitations of some of the widely used approaches for securing data.
• Developers creating, maintaining or developing secure solutions who will benefit by exposing themselves to more potential privacy issues and how to solve them.

The Enlightenment project started over 15 years ago, and while it has evolved a lot over the years, its object system has not; this is quite surprising given that almost everything in Enlightenment is represented by objects. Tom, later joined by other Enlightenment developers, has taken upon himself to redesign it, and called the new system Eo. In this talk Tom will describe the main goals they had for Eo, what (and how) they have achieved, how it was received by fellow developers and how it impacted the Enlightenment project as a whole. Tom will also briefly review other C object systems, some of Eo's unique features, and several related projects that were either created to support Eo, had undergone major improvements enabled by it, or owe they existence to Eo.

Designing an application with a good user interface and user experience is hard. Many people get it wrong which results in a degraded user experience, satisfaction and retention. In this talk, Tom will demonstrate some good design patterns, review the current design landscape in the desktop and touch friendly worlds and will give his notes and ideas as a developer of the EFL graphical toolkit and applications. Tom will also offer some easy tips for making your applications better.

Clouseau is a good tool for inspecting EFL based UI elements. We will introduce Clouseau, demonstrate what it solves, explain how it should be used by developers and users, and talk about the future.