The conference, better known by its acronym of LCA, is scheduled to be held at the Australian National University in Canberra from January 28 to February 2.

Dr Huang holds a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University in the US, and is also well-known for his hacking on the Xbox. He has written a book on the subject, titled "Hacking the Xbox: An introduction to Reverse Engineering".

The Chumby is an embedded computer which provides internet and LAN access through a wi-fi connection. It can run various software widgets through this connection. The hardware is open source and is customisable by users.

Dr Huang is at present a research affiliate of the MIT Media Lab, a technical adviser to several hardware startups and MAKE magazine, and writes about his experiences on manufacturing hardware in China through his blog.

According to the LCA organisers, Dr Huang "takes what he calls a 'push-and-pull' approach to open hardware. He contributes original open designs, as well as liberating closed designs. He recently released an open implementation of a man-in-the-middle attack on high-bandwidth digital content protection (HDCP), a method of copy protection used by many media outlets, which enables overlays on encrypted video without circumventing copyright controls".

His keynote will be titled "Linux in the Flesh: Adventures Embedding Linux in Hardware" and it revolves around the idea that Linux is omnipresent in our lives.