Wednesday, February 6th, 2019

Time	Event
3:13p	[$] Mozilla's initiatives for non-creepy deep learning Jack Moffitt started off his 2019 linux.conf.au talk by calling attention to Facebook's "Portal" device. It is, he said, a cool product, but raises an important question: why would anybody in their right mind put a surveillance device made by Facebook in their kitchen? There are a lot of devices out there — including the Portal — using deep-learning techniques; they offer useful functionality, but also bring a lot of problems. We as a community need to figure out a way to solve those problems; he was there to highlight a set of Mozilla projects working toward that goal. (Comment on this)
3:46p	Security updates for Wednesday Security updates have been issued by Debian (dovecot and libav), openSUSE (kernel and krb5), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), SUSE (curl, lua53, python3, and spice), and Ubuntu (dovecot). (Comment on this)
5:26p	[$] Saving birds with technology Two members of the Cacophony Project came to linux.conf.au 2019 to give an overview of what the project is doing to increase the amount of bird life in New Zealand. The idea is to use computer vision and machine learning to identify and eventually eliminate predators in order to help bird populations; one measure of success will be the volume and variety of bird song throughout the islands. The endemic avian species in New Zealand evolved without the presence of predatory mammals, so many of them have been decimated by the predation of birds and their eggs. The Cacophony Project is looking at ways to reverse that. (Comment on this)
9:30p	Lots of stable kernel updates The 4.20.7, 4.19.20, 4.14.98, 4.9.155, 4.4.173, and 3.18.134 stable kernels have all been released. The usual drill applies: each contains a number of important fixes and upgrading is recommended. (Comment on this)

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