The Right to rm -rf: Building a Global, Self-Hosted Backup and Restore Platform
The cloud is just someone else's computer but you data is your own. In this talk I will discuss common misconceptions about today's Internet that leave people unknowingly giving up their right to privacy, like Third Party Doctrine and Social Media, how to protect their data at home with self hosted infrastructure using ZFS and Samba 3 and how to keep access to your things secure even when crossing borders.
I work in cybersecurity and travel with my devices. I've been through countless border crossings, airport inspections and in insecure work environments where I must protect my data while maintaining minimal downtime. In this talk, I will demonstrate my self hosted infrastructure that allows me to travel in peace knowing that my network is secure, my data is intact, my privacy is maintained and my downtime is minimal.
I started tinkering with computers when I was 11 with Ubuntu's Wubi installer alongside Windows XP. 3 years later I started an IT consulting business providing managed networking and virtualization services to small and medium business. That took me to Kenya to deploy Raspberry Pis on car batteries for hospitals and the African Great Lakes region to develop custom communications systems for peace keeping teams. After selling that business to pay for college, I got my degree and have worked in a variety of jobs including lead engineer migrating a large research university's internal tooling from Perl on Solaris to Python on all platforms, principal engineer for a Nebula communications platform for threat detection and deep packet inspection at scale and now as the Vice President of Engineering for a platform hardening tool. With any luck, I can spend the next many years sharing my knowledge and following my passion for educating other about digital privacy and delivering tools to help other protect themselves.