Ubuntu Wiki

About Me

Hi! I work for Canonical as an Ubuntu Security Engineer. My work is to stay alert, curious, and creative while keeping one step ahead of the bad guys. When I'm not working, I've been known to play with MythTV and generally poke around at video formats.

Community

I've only recently become involved in the Ubuntu community, but have been using Ubuntu since Hoary. (I had been a Debian user for a few years prior to Ubuntu.) As the lead sysadmin at [http://www.osdl.org/ OSDL], I chose Ubuntu as the default distro for all new servers, replaced most of the aging RedHat systems, and kept the visitor lobby stocked with fresh Ubuntu CDs. Nothing beats having a Debian system with a regular release cycle.

More recently, I have been involved in:

• IRC. I'm frequently on #ubuntu-devel, #ubuntu-motu, #ubuntu-bugs, and #ubuntu.

• Wiki updates. I've made a few small changes around [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/CommonTasks?action=diff&rev2=40&rev1=39 triage] and [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Backtrace?action=diff&rev2=15&rev1=13 debugging].

• Bug triage (and submission). I have [https://launchpad.net/people/keescook/+packagebugs adopted several packages] I have familiarity with. For fun, I hunted and solved all the crash bugs against the side-scroller "abuse", as well as sending patches [http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=338834 upstream].

• Packaging. I have uploaded two [http://revu.tauware.de/details.py?upid=3236 new] [http://revu.tauware.de/details.py?upid=3239 packages] to ["REVU"]. Additionally, I have [http://mentors.debian.net/cgi-bin/sponsor-pkglist started the process] of getting these packages into Debian directly.

• Security. I work with MartinPitt in the [https://launchpad.net/people/ubuntu-security Ubuntu Security Team], and already several security fixes I've [https://launchpad.net/people/keescook/+packages worked on] have been released (and others are pending).

Outside of Ubuntu, I'm involved in other communities. I am a [http://kernel.org/ kernel.org] admin, where I work on maintaining the mirror network for the Linux Kernel, as well as handling user accounts. I am a lurker/janitor for the [http://inkscape.org/ Inkscape] project, through which I'm also involved in the [http://openclipart.org/ Open Clip Art Library] and [http://creativecommonsopen.com/ Creative Commons]. I have [http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2006/view/e_sess/9252 presented] for two years running at [http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2006/ OSCON], and I attend [http://defcon.org/ DefCon] annually. This year, with the rest of my team, we won the [http://nopsr.us/ctf2006/ Capture The Flag] security competition.

Software

• Author of [http://sendpage.org/ Sendpage] alphanumeric paging daemon

• Maintainer of Perl Module [http://search.cpan.org/~cook/Device-SerialPort/SerialPort.pm Device::SerialPort]

• Author of [http://outflux.net/software/pkgs/mp3cd/ mp3cd] (as seen in the [http://tldp.org/HOWTO/MP3-CD-Burning/intro.html Linux MP3 CD Burning HOWTO])

• Author of [http://gopchop.org/ GOPchop] MPEG2-PS editor

• Contributor to [http://inkscape.org/ Inkscape]

• Fiddler with lots of [http://freshmeat.net/~kees/ other] [http://outflux.net/?see=software stuff]

Future

I have been an advocate of free software since I first understood what the GPL meant. I love tweaking and patching and helping make things better; I've always had a knack for getting software to behave in unexpected ways. I think finding security problems is fun, and I want to spend my time hunting down and squashing those problems where ever I can find them. Free software already has a strong security reputation, and I want to help keep it that way.

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