FOSDEM 2026 - The Hidden Life of Infrastructure: How Control Moves Through Code, Chips, and Nations
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Brussels / 31 January & 1 February 2026
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FOSDEM 2026<br>Schedule<br>Events<br>Main tracks<br>Main Track (K-building)<br>The Hidden Life of Infrastructure: How Control Moves Through Code, Chips, and Nations
The Hidden Life of Infrastructure: How Control Moves Through Code, Chips, and Nations
Track : Main Track (K-building)
Room : K.1.105 (La Fontaine)
Day : Sunday
Start (UTC+1) : 10:00
End (UTC+1) : 10:50
Chat :<br>Join the conversation!
This talk is about how risk and control moves through the computational stack, from transistors to firmware, from chip monopolies to satellite networks, from invisible maintainers to AI accelerators. We'll walk through the failures that mattered: Heartbleed. Log4Shell. Spectre. The Garmin ransomware attack. The XZ backdoor. Not because they broke things, but because they showed us where power actually lives, and how fragile those concentrations really are.
Every one of those failures revealed something: how physical constraints shape digital power, how a single unpaid maintainer can hold up half the internet, how optimization culture erodes resilience. They showed us that nations, economies, and individual freedom now depend on infrastructure most people will never see.
But here's the thing: Open Source built that infrastructure. And Open Source can reshape it.<br>This is about understanding where we are, how we got here, and what it means to build systems that distribute power instead of concentrating it. Because the people who write the code should be the ones who decide how it works, and who it works for.
Speakers
Sal Kimmich
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Video recording (AV1/WebM; preferred) - 331.9 MB
Video recording (MP4; for legacy systems) - 1.1 GB
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