Qubes virtual mini-summit 2021! https://www.qubes-os.org/news/ | Qubes OS📢

Qubes virtual mini-summit 2021!
https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2021/07/30/minisummit-agenda/

We are pleased to announce the third annual Qubes mini-summit co-hosted by
3mdeb (https://3mdeb.com/) and the Qubes OS Project. (For prior year
summaries, agendas, and slides, see
2019 (https://3mdeb.com/events/#Qubes-OS-and-3mdeb-minisummit) and
2020 (https://3mdeb.com/events/#Qubes-OS-and-3mdeb-minisummit2020).) This
year’s event will take place across two virtual sessions on August 3 and 10.
Each day, there will be four talks, intermixed with Q&A time. An abstract for
each talk is provided below. The discussion section will be a live meeting on
Jitsi, with details to follow. The whole event will be also streamed on
3mdeb’s YouTube
channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_djHbyjuJvhVjfT18nyqmQ), where we
will also accept questions. We invite everyone interested to join!

Agenda for August 3




Time (UTC)
Event description




18:00 – 18:15
Welcome and introduction by Piotr Król


18:15 – 19:00
“Qubes OS 4.1 highlights” by Marek Marczykowski-Górecki


19:00 – 19:45
“First Impressions Count: Onboarding Qubes Users Through an Integrated Tutorial” by deeplow


19:45 – 20:15
Break


20:15 – 21:00
“Wyng-backups: revertible local and remote known safe Qubes OS states (including dom0)” by Thierry Laurion


21:00 – 21:45
“SRTM and Secure Boot for VMs” by Piotr Król


21:45
vPub, informal afterparty




Agenda for August 10




Time (UTC)
Event description




18:00 – 18:15
Welcome and introduction by Piotr Król


18:15 – 19:00
“Usability Within A Reasonably Secure, Multi-Environment System” by Nina Alter


19:00 – 19:45
“Qubes OS Native App Menu: UX Design and Implementation” by Marta Marczykowska-Górecka and Nina Alter


19:45 – 20:15
Break


20:15 – 21:00
“A brief history of USB camera support in Qubes OS” by Piotr Król


21:00 – 21:45
“How to setup BTC and XMR cold storage in Qubes OS” by Piotr Król


21:45
vPub, informal afterparty




Abstracts of the talks

“Qubes OS 4.1 highlights” by Marek Marczykowski-Górecki

The upcoming Qubes OS 4.1 release is full of new exciting features, ranging
from a technology preview of the GUI domain to subtle, yet important, Qrexec
improvements. In this talk I will give a brief overview of them and demo a
select few.

“First Impressions Count: Onboarding Qubes Users Through an Integrated Tutorial” by deeplow

We may all relate to having a rough time when starting using Qubes — be that
because we’re coming from Windows and everything is different or because we
come from Linux and many things don’t work like we expect them to. Apart from
the usual challenges of going into a different system, Qubes has the additional
one of requiring a fundamentally different way of thinking about your computer
(a hypervisor mental-model). Smoothing out this transition is particularly
important as Qubes aims to target vulnerable populations that are less
technically inclined and have less time to explore and read the documentation.

The solution proposed by deeplow is to implement an integrated onboarding
tutorial. The idea is that a short tutorial (with optional extra parts) that
guides the user through the essential mechanics of Qubes will make the
transition simpler. That’s what deeplow’s been working on for his master’s
dissertation. In this talk he’ll introduce the idea and give an update on the
current progress and challenges.

“Wyng-backups: revertible local and remote known safe Qubes OS states (including dom0)” by Thierry Laurion

Wyng-backups (https://github.com/tasket/wyng-backup) is an incremental
backup/restore tool for LVMs. For Qubes OS, this means even dom0 can be