YaC: Why it's important not to miss the main technology conference of Yandex in 2013

On October 2, Yandex will hold YaC for the fourth time. Yet another Conference is the largest technology conference in Europe. Well, if not in the whole of Europe, then in Eastern - for sure.



The last time I wrote a post on Habrahabr five years ago. And just five years ago, we conceived YaC. Then we clearly formulated for ourselves that we do not want to do another marketing conference about one particular Yandex company. We made an event that is not about Yandex at all. For us, YaC is a huge discussion platform.

We always tell the speakers the same thing: “Guys, leave as much time as possible for questions and answers.” One of the most important values ​​of this conference is that people who are so smart come here that after your presentation they can give you such ideas and ask questions that will then help you in your development.
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I don’t know if this was the case with all the speakers, but all those guys who spoke out from Yandex almost always came from this conference with new, correct, important thoughts. Therefore, we, for example, do not pay speakers for participation, although this is a common practice of large conferences. We do not need to actively invite famous speakers. They come themselves and, because they themselves burn with enthusiasm, charge them all around. YaC is an opportunity to see people who are really on fire.

We are holding this conference because it is important for us to grow an environment where techies can actively communicate. In general, YaC is a conference created by techies for techies. This is such a contagious idea that even our own designers are engaged in the design of the conference this year. Those guys who usually work on Yandex services.

What is especially surprising is that people who I have not seen in any other conference come to YaC.

Unfortunately, due to the fact that the possibilities of Yandex are not limitless, we can invite far from everyone to YaC. We have to select only those people who can really benefit at our event and who can benefit the rest. Since this is a platform for communication, it is really important that everyone helps everyone. Usually, YaC wants to get 3-4 times more people than we can accept. And so we have a very tough selection. Receiving an invitation to YaC is an act of recognition.

In addition to inviting very cool professionals, we definitely want to see on YaC those people for whom the conference is an opportunity to get a completely unreal amount of new knowledge per unit of time. YaC is basically held in one day - it is very important for us that people who come to us from the regions can come, sit at the conference and go back in the evening.



Many come to talk live with their idols, with people whose experience has become an example for them or is of particular interest. I think many people will come this year just to chat with Jason Rudolph from GitHub. He will talk about how his team is working on an API, which many of you may use every day. There will also be a few reports from the guys from the OpenStack community.



One of the most intense will be the security section. We are holding it for the second time. In itself, this is a very strange event, because people who are engaged in security are reluctant to share their knowledge at non-core conferences. This is really very special people, a very special area of ​​knowledge, and the fact that they are among us, for example, makes me very happy.

Here, for example, can tell about it to ivlad , who for many years was responsible for security in Yandex, and is now engaged in the development of infrastructure projects.

Security is such a thing that is not visible until all is well. And if you are doing well, there is only one incentive to do it better - a strong inner conviction that this is necessary. Those who share it will come to us.

There are two security conferences in Russia created by hackers for hackers, these are ZeroNights and PHDays . Some events organized by vendors for customers are taking place - this is completely uninteresting. There are no conferences devoted to the aspects of defense, but not attack. Probably, that’s why, for the last year’s YaC, our section became very popular. And I hope that this year it will be successful. We will have speakers from Yandex, Twitter, Facebook, Mozilla, Etsy, Coverity.

The guys from Twitter will have a very interesting report, in my opinion. They decided to systematically approach the organization’s methodology for protecting a large website. In the world, units have done such work. To a certain extent, we did it. Many other companies, which are essentially Internet services and are subject to all those potential threats that exist on the Internet, do not have such a methodology and may be vulnerable. Twitter will share just how to build your defense.

Facebook will talk about how they implemented two-factor authentication in themselves. Now many people again say that passwords have died and other ways to authenticate people are needed - stronger and stronger. And Facebook began to think about how to do this for its internal network. Surely they had difficulties with multiplatform. It will be interesting for us to hear what they tell.

A report by Michael Purzhinsky from Mozilla on how they analyze high-speed networks up to 10 GB and higher in real time. And since Mozilla is a non-profit organization, they filter traffic through various open source software in their data centers.

Coverity's story about XSS , in my opinion, will be very practical - this is a report on how a programmer can understand whether his code contains XSS vulnerability. XSS attack is the most common attack on web applications. At one time we put a lot of strength to defend against it. Testing for such vulnerabilities in code is part of the Security Development Lifecycle, an approach to creating web services and programs when the result of your programming is always safe.

The class report will be from our Yura Leonichev . He did a cool thing — he applied machine learning to virus detection. To do this, I took some number of malicious programs for Android, made a model for machine learning from them, and then applied it to recognize all the programs that are loaded into Yandex.Store . The result, which he tells, was very good. We tried an approach that differs from how antivirus labs work. Everything is very complicated there: you need to select malware, sample them, wait for the result of the work of analysts. Our way turned out to be surprisingly well working. It turned out "cloud" antivirus, which, I think, no one has.

And we have planned key signing party . Many different people from different places will come to YaC. We want to securely encrypt your mail, and a good way to make it safer is to distribute keys to the listeners of our section, check them and sign.

Those who have already been to YaC know that we have the “Internet Mathematics” section. This year, she grew up in the research section of the Research, moderated by Pavel Serdyukov - a person who is responsible for scientific work at Yandex.

In this section we will discuss not only those academic studies that have already led to the creation and improvement of some kind of service, but also those that have not yet been realized in the product. The reports are a little different, but they can be combined in three directions. The first two are devoted, relatively speaking, to alternative ways of understanding the user. Reports from the first direction will be about the problems of automatic search for answers to questions that were asked in free form in natural language, about speech recognition and fragments of musical compositions recorded with distortion on a mobile phone microphone. Reports from the second direction will focus on ways to understand the implicit user preferences that are not communicated directly to the system, by analyzing mouse movements on documents opened by the user and other user behavior in the browser.

And the third part of reports on how Yandex helps CERN to analyze the billions of events that occur in the hadron collider in order to detect precisely those that indicate the discovery of new particles. CERN representatives will talk about what a collider is, a detector, how events occur, and Andrey Ustyuzhanin from Yandex will share how Yandex uses its experience in finding several relevant documents among billions of documents on the Internet to solve the problem of finding several relevant events in the billions of changes which pass every second in the hadron collider.

We will also talk about our documentation for the first time and even organize a competition for documentaries . Of course, we also have a secret report, which is always of heightened interest. And really - this is very cool every time, and this year it is even more exciting.

At one time it was very interesting for me to collect feedback on the conference. Many of them were shared only in two or three weeks from the moment she passed. It turns out that everything that happened on YaC made such an impression on people that they then sat and for a long time and persistently wrote a detailed accounting text about how they went about all this. And this time YaC will be held in a not very usual place - in Sokolniki and with a not very usual design.

YaC has become one of the most hardcore general technology conferences. According to the Russian scale, it is absolutely gigantic. And if it turned out that you have not yet registered with YaC, register now . It will be somehow wrong if people who understand how much they can get from communicating at such an event and how much they can give to others do not get to the right place at the right time.