Presentations

Millions of financial events. Zero room for error. Learn how template-driven prompt engineering turns noisy cloud transaction streams into explainable, policy-safe automation, faster incident triage, smarter anomaly detection, instant schema-drift recovery, and audit-ready trails.

Imagine transferring data and software from one computer to another in the 1970s, before the Internet.  What media could one use, and how did transfers occur?  This talk provides a glimpse into the technology of that world, and highlights how it affected the process of software transfer.

The advent of the Internet completely changed software transfer and enabled the open source movement.  The increased speed of transfer only forms part of the story.  The talk will outline significant advances that the Internet introduced, and describe how they enable the efficient software distribution scheme that we now enjoy.

In this session, we will share the methodology, toolchains, and collaborative workflows that make this possible, including the use of simulation platforms, pre-silicon verification environments, and CI/CD integration for early kernel testing. Attendees will learn how these efforts accelerate software-hardware co-design, reduce bring-up cycles, and ensure that by the time silicon arrives, the kernel is already upstream-ready.

Many cloud products have security as an afterthought.  What if you put security first?  From hand-held to stored data?  And did it all with Open Source? And made it quantum proof?

Ever want to dig into Tailscale but haven't had time? If that's you, then join us in this workshop where you will learn the basics of Tailscale and get some hands-on experience deploying Tailscale into cloud resources on AWS. Participants will learn how to deploy Tailscale locally and into an AWS environment using infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, OpenTofu, etc.).  You will also learn how to configure Tailscale for various use cases like Subnet Routing and Exit Nodes, as well as implement fine-grained access controls with Tailscale ACLs and Grants, and lastly learn how to integrate Tailscale with AWS services (like RDS databases) for secure private access over the public internet by leveraging WireGuard under the hood, powered by Tailscale.

“Taxonomy for Agent Systems (T4AS)” introduces a simple but powerful way to tame today’s chaotic landscape of AI agents. Steve Vitka presents T4AS as a reference architecture that cleanly separates three roles: the Agent (“strategist” that plans but never acts), the Workflow (“general” that orchestrates tools), and the Workspace (“battlefield” where certified tools and APIs actually run). By enforcing these boundaries, T4AS turns ad‑hoc agent stacks into secure, auditable, and composable systems rather than brittle prompt‑spaghetti.
 

The recent open sourcing of Apple Containerization Framework and container Tooling projects enable developers to create and run Linux container images directly on their Mac in a way that focuses on security and privacy. In this talk we’ll talk about the container CLI tool and how it utilizes Containerization to provide simple yet powerful functionality to build, run and deploy Linux containers on Mac. We’ll talk about the architecture, why we wrote the framework and tool in Swift, what future development looks like for Kubernetes use cases, and how the community can get involved.

As recently as 2015, Alex Balashov was on record saying that SS7 and TDM steadfastly remain as the essential building blocks of a reliable PSTN, and that the triumphant proclamations of IP peering were something of a laughingstock, or at least premature.  Well, the much-vaunted move to IP peering in the core of the PSTN itself has finally happened, and has been rapidly gaining steam in the last 5-10 years. The ILEC tandems do not play the role they once did, and the landscape is shifting rapidly.

AI is changing how we communicate with technology. We're moving away from old-school IVR systems and toward smart, context-aware voice conversations. This session will explore how modern AI models make natural, real-time conversations possible, automate high-volume calling workflows, and improve the customer experience—all with a human-like touch.
You'll leave with a clear understanding of the underlying technology, its current industry applications, and the practical challenges organizations face when adopting AI-driven voice systems. We'll also discuss the ethical considerations and best practices for deploying these technologies responsibly and at scale.

Ever wondered how MySQL and MariaDB handle the myriad internal temporary tables they create to process your queries? This session pulls back the curtain on this often-overlooked aspect of database performance. 

Prepare to have your assumptions challenged as we delve into the baffling behavior of MySQL's TempTable storage engine. We'll analyze the key configuration variables and internal mechanisms that influence this crucial decision.

Through practical examples and insightful explanations, you'll gain a deeper understanding of:

- When are internal temporary tables used
- How MySQL and MariaDB choose the storage engine
- The specific triggers and thresholds that cause MySQL engine to move data to disk and the performance impact
- Practical tips and configuration adjustments to optimize temporary table usage and avoid unexpected disk I/O.

Whether you're a seasoned DBA, a curious developer, or anyone interested in the inner workings of MySQL and MariaDB, this session will equip you with valuable knowledge to better understand and optimize your database performance.

Attendees will learn about the history of censorship evasion throughout the development of the internet, the current state of internet censorship and evasion tactics around the world, and the future of evasion methods to protect the free and open Internet.

“If it were measured as a country, then cybercrime — which is predicted to inflict damages totaling $6 trillion USD globally in 2021 — would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China.” – Steve Morgan, Editor-in-Chief of Cybercrime magazine

 On average, companies experience about 21 to 24 days of downtime after a ransomware attack, highlighting the significant impact of such incidents on business operations. Everyday technology is advancing at a faster rate than we can educate the general population. If a HongKong bank can be convinced to wire transfer 35 million dollars by a deep fake how do we protect grandma? Most people under 35 get their news and information from TikTok and social media platforms. How do we educate and safe guard the future?

“The Path to Robust deAGI” asks what it would take to build artificial general intelligence that is both powerful and structurally aligned with human flourishing—not just steered by after‑the‑fact safety patches. Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNET and a founding member of the Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) Alliance, will outline how a decentralized, token‑coordinated ecosystem—combining ASI:Chain, Hyperon AGI, and community‑owned GPU clouds—can prevent AGI from being captured by any single corporation or state.
 

I got tired of babysitting my AI coding assistant. Every five minutes: "Should I continue?" So I built the "Ralph Wiggum Loop," named after a Simpsons character. It's a loop that feeds a PROMPT.md file to Claude Code until everything works as defined. Failure becomes feedback. Each crash teaches the next iteration.

Using this technique, I built a complete serverless URL shortener on AWS by letting AI iterate against Pulumi's pass/fail deployment criteria. 

I'll share how this autonomous loops work and how you can use it too.

There has been a lot of confusion about the role of open source in generative AI, as the focus has been mainly on Large Language Models (LLMs) and whether or not those models meet the definition of "open source".

But like most emerging technology in the past twenty years, open source software will form the basis for getting the most value out of generative AI. From vector databases to inference engines to the "chunking" of data for consumption by Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), the role of open source can not be overstated.

This talk will present some interesting open source projects that exist in tandem with LLMs to extract the most value from LLMs and giving users greater control over their data.

AI can now listen to your keyboard and guess what you're typing. This session shows how deep learning models can reconstruct text from keystroke sounds, then breaks down how these attacks work and how to defend against them. It's a live, hands-on look at the thin line between innovation and exploitation in modern AI security. Bring your curiosity and maybe a little paranoia.

Linux has evolved a lot over the past 30 years. Distributions were created as opinionated starting points for general usage, but the advent of containers changed what was required and expected. CoreOS pushed the limits of what a server distribution should be, and those limits continue to be refined with more special purpose options.

While many of these next generation distros have similar characteristics they're not all the same. Justin will provide an overview of the current landscape of immutable distributions and what sets each one apart, and what they have in common.

A deep dive into the Iceberg open table format, examining the rationale for its creation, internal mechanics, and advanced capabilities. Drawing from years of production experience, this talk offers both theoretical foundations and practical insights for engineers considering adopting Iceberg.

We will discuss ACE’s (Analytics Center of Excellence) framework for government transparency, detailing how they use tools like Python for shared analysis, GitHub for collaborative code and methodology sharing, and the Justice Hub for public data dissemination. This commitment to open-source not only fosters trust but also directly enables reproducible, high-impact policy analyses, offering a replicable model for other large-scale government data initiatives. The Analytics Center of Excellence (ACE) within the Los Angeles County CEO’s office maintains partnerships with local criminal justice agencies, making information and methodology publicly accessible. This model is underpinned by an open-source mindset. 

The Postgres write-ahead log, or WAL, is basically a change-log for the database.  It enables several important Postgres features:  crash recovery, point-in-time recovery, and binary and logical replication.  This talk explains what is stored in the WAL, how binary and logical replication work, and how replication slots track replication progress.
 

Running infrastructure for the Python community means monitoring millions of requests. See how we leverage self-hosted infrastructure to minimize cost while obtaining real benefit into our applications.

Calculators are intuitive, right? Punch in some numbers on the number pad, choose an operation, and the answer appears. But it wasn't always this way. One hundred years ago, an antique mechanical calculator's UI was completely different depending on what company made it. Calculators directly exposed the mechanical mechanisms underneath, with few abstractions and little regard to ease-of-use. If you sat in front of one today and I asked you to perform basic arithmetic, you'd probably couldn't do it without a manual, and that knowledge probably wouldn't transfer to a different calculator.

If you've ever introduced someone to Linux for the first time, this might sound familiar. Fragmented, inconsistent UI, and applications that only barely hide their underlying code structure behind their interfaces mean a steep learning curve for new users. In this talk I will dive into the rich history of mechanical calculator UI, and draw parallels with modern Linux applications. The past, present, and future of calculator UI provides a roadmap FOSS would be wise to follow.

Asterisk is a powerful and flexible communications engine—but how well does it perform under pressure? In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into the performance characteristics of Asterisk from a deep technical perspective, exploring how it handles real-world workloads, what bottlenecks can arise, and how to identify and resolve them. You’ll learn about key metrics to monitor, implementation suggestions, and configuration strategies that can help when you hit a wall and want to try to improve performance.

Software Freedom Conservancy  (SFC) recently complete the most significant trial in copyleft enforcement history. In Orange County, California, USA, SFC sued Vizio — a manufacturer of ARM-based televisions — for long-standing violations of the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1. 

This talk will explain what's going on with the case (and, possibly, what happened at trial, as it may have occurred in full by the time of SCALE 2026!), why it is significant to every Linux user and every consumer who buys electronic devices, and what is next for copyleft.

Unlocking the full potential of AI starts with your data, but real-world documents come in countless formats and levels of complexity. This session introduces Docling, an open-source Python library designed to convert complex documents into AI-ready formats. Learn how Docling simplifies document processing, enabling you to efficiently harness all your data for downstream AI and analytics applications.