| dc.description | I did not present at the conference. I was merely an attendee. The format of the conference was three rooms, and each room had a (usually) one hour presentation on a specific topic each hour from about 10AM to 10PM. Given the format, it was not possible to see all presentations. Let me say that I greatly appreciate the opportunity the A&PDF committee has provided me to attend this conference. The conference was educational, thought provoking, informative, and inspiring, if a little fear-inducing at times. The technical presentations that were most related to my job as a systems administrator at AU were "IPv6 Playground", and "Wireless Security" (one of the presenters of the wireless security talk, Renderman, who I spoke with, is from Edmonton). The keynote talk by Dan Kaminsky, who literally holds one of seven keys that secure the Internet’s domain name system, was also quite technical. The IPv6 discussion was illuminating in terms of how powerful a technology it is, how important, and how slow it’s adoption. I look forward to AU implementing IPv6. Wireless Security was also very interesting in terms of how difficult it would be to efficiently secure a wireless network. Kaminsky’s talk went over several items, starting from the concept that the Internet was never designed for authentication (e.g.. paraphrasing Kaminsky: “who cares about SVG resizing in the browser if we can’t securely handle authenticated sessions”) and that security considerations are brought too late into the design stage (”life is too short to defend broken code” says Kaminsky) to eventually flowing down into some innovative security concepts, such as using base64 to encode strings to avoid injection and the problems with escaping Unicode symbols. For better or worse, the theme of this years HOPE conference was less technical and more related to what could be considered techno-democracy. I don't know if the organizers of the conference realized it, or if any attendees would agree, but it certainly seemed that there was considerably less focus on hard technical issues and more of a focus on privacy, journalism (the failure of newspapers being a hot button topic), and freedom of information--what one could term "soft security" rather than hard, technical issues. Talks such as “Grand Theft Lazlow”, “Privacy is Dead”, “From Indymedia to Demand Media” and others concentrated on many of these themes. I believe these soft threads were more powerful than specific technology at the conference because of the paradigm shift that has been occurring in the area of privacy--and not just online privacy, but the rapid alteration--some would say “erosion”--of privacy norms worldwide, as well as related efforts to maintain privacy and anonymity anonymity (e.g. Tor, encryption, Trackmenot) while using the Internet. There was a lot of democracy at work here. Google was a discussion point for several presenters, mostly regarding online privacy. For example, the talk “Privacy is Dead - Get over it” (the speaker is a working, highly regarded private detective) endearingly termed Google as “the mothership,” meaning that whenever an Internet user does something on the Internet (often but not always) using a google service, personal information is “beamed back up to the mothership.” Humorous but also accurate. Google, Facebook, etc, store and cross-reference a stunning amount of information about their users. Because computing is very good at cross referencing data, for example with Google’s in-house technology MapReduce and Facebook using Hadoop, it is relatively easy to learn a lot about a single person through the knitting together of many separate pieces of information. That information is worth billions and billions of dollars for targeted advertising (e.g. Google has a market capitalization of 160 billion dollars, and most of that value is based on a single Google product: Adwords). These are extremely valuable companies simply because of their user data. Probably the most interesting part of the conference was the Wikileaks keynote speech. Politically, this was a very timely happening. Regardless of what one thinks of Wikileaks and their politics, news-wise this was quite the event. Julian Assange, the most visible Wikileaks member, was scheduled to give a talk regarding Wikileaks. However, given recent happenings the US government--which was in attendance through representatives of Homeland Security and the FBI, among others--had indicated that they would like to “speak” with Mr. Assange, and it was generally felt that should Mr. Assange step into US territory he would be detained by said agencies. Thus Mr. Assange did not show up to do his talk, instead another Wikileaks member gave the presentation. Interestingly, as much as the conference regarded soft security issues, hard technical systems, such as Tor, public key encryption, etc, are very important to creating security and anonymity for Wikileaks--which heavily relies on advanced technology to acquire and maintain anonymous leaks. Life and death literally hangs on the use and implementation of these technologies. I believe the biggest thing to take away from a conference such as this is that there are many dedicated people independently researching security and privacy issues and that the knowledge they posses is still only circulating in rather small circles. The Internet has brought large scale, rapid change to many areas of humanity, some for better and some for worse, and many of the attendees are attempting--often on their own, often utilizing technology--to reconcile, understand, and communicate that change. It was good to be a part of the discussion. | en |
| dc.description.abstract | The main visual theme of the conference is visions of the future from the past, so things that reference The World’s Fairs, The Jetsons, flying cars, DaVinci, Asimov, and so forth would be very appropriate. However, projects are not required to carry the central theme in any way. Some projects, such as OpenAMD, are already being planned to be simply visions of the future from the present, rather than referencing any futurist thoughts from antiquity. Some projects already in the works include… The Attendee Meta-Data Project (“OpenAMD”) An expansion of the RFID crowd tracking project from The Last Hope. Needs programmers and hardware hackers, and is prime for spinoff projects. Many possibilities exist for the development of games, data mining, and visualizations. Ask about the OpenAMD API. HYPERLINK "http://amd.hope.net/" \t "_blank" http://amd.hope.net/ contact: HYPERLINK "mailto:amd@hope.net" amd@hope.net Radio Statler! Streaming 24 hours a day live from the expo floor. Needs people to do shows, experienced engineers, reporters, and people with interesting audio gear. Needs a large isolation booth. HYPERLINK "http://radio.hope.net/" \t "_blank" http://radio.hope.net/ contact: HYPERLINK "mailto:radio@hope.net" radio@hope.net Art Space The Next HOPE invites artists, local and beyond, who have a vision of the future expressed as installation art. Installations must be technology-based. They can range from electrical experiments to computer-controlled machines, to data and information processing visualizations, they can be static or interactive, and they could be visual or musical, this is a very open field. This is an unpaid exhibition, but the selected installation artists will be given free admission to the conference, and an online gallery with artist biographies will be set up for promotional purposes. What are your space, power, time, and data connection requirements? contact the curator: HYPERLINK "mailto:artspace@hope.net" artspace@hope.net The Hackerspace and Hardware Hacking Village A 24 hour gathering point for the hackerspace community, a hardware hacking workshop area, and a supply post for hardware hacking tools and expendables. Are you involved with a hackerspace? Reserve a special area for your group to chill and show off projects! Looking for hardware hackers and hackerspaces from all around the world to come together and share ideas. | en |
