Oblomovka

2004-06-15»

LayerOne was great: in the same way as NotCon was intended to be a scaled down, more social version of commercial technical conferences like Emerging Tech, LayerOne was a scaled-down, more talky version of hacker cons lke DefCon.

As I said in the intro to NotCon, the real secret intent behind a lot of what we've done with NTK live events is to "cross the streams" - introduce disparate geek groups who are doing eminently combinable things, but who don't usually meet. LayerOne was a fantastic example of that kind of crossover. (Justin Mason has already picked up a few potential anti-spam approaches from chatting to white hat computer underground types).

I didn't get to see as much of the talks as I wanted, but what I did see was very, very good: Dan Kaminsky did his usual "pile one crazy but conceivable idea on top of another until you end up with something that's impossible yet implemented" magic. You really don't want to know what he's been doing with DNS (especially if you're a sysadmin) - but if you do, here's the PowerPoint. David Hulton and Lance James showed just how professional ad hoc security audits are getting these days: David reverse-engineered a smartcard parking meter to show the potential exploits, and Lance did some serious cryptoanalysis on Trillian's secure IM features, including a fascinating digression on how man-in-the-middle-attacks are eminently possible on cable-modem networks.

I'm looking forward to next year!

2004-06-11»

If you're in Los Angeles, come along to the Westin LAX LayerOne this weekend for a fantastic-looking conference. It should be fun. It will be for me, for I get to go to someone else's con and imbibe like an overclocked imbibamatic-o-mat. As the invite says: free beer!

This will also (barring being boo-ed off stage) be the canonical version of the Life Hacks talk. I will try very hard to not handwave arbitrary statistics when in full flow. Nor will I guilelessly slander/fawn over prominent Net celebrities in the search of a good joke. Consecutive Life Hack talks have featured me describing one correspondent as a "genius" and inventing a fictional mano e mano fist-fight between us in the next. Neither are strictly true, as this canonical version will make clear.

It also means that I'll finally slap up the MP3 and PowerPoint of the complete presentation, ending the mystery of the eight or so words that Cory has failed to meticulously transcribe in his notes.

Not that I'm unhappy he's so detailed. Lacking any memory of what I say on stage, I reconstructed my original talk for NotCon from Cory's Etech notes. I'm now adding bits from his NotCon coverage for the LayerOne talk. He's the Boswell to my Mr Pooter!

Doctorow isn't here for this rendition, which should hopefully stop us getting into a screeching feedback loop. But that's all irrelevant anyway. Come tomorrow, there will only be one Life Hacks talk. All the rest were imaginary stories taking place on alternate worlds - which never happened. Excelsior!

2004-06-10»

Andover Consulting in San Francisco is liquidating its operations and auctioning off all its stuff.

Before it shut down, its core business was liquidating dotcom companies and auctioning off all their stuff.

Is this a good or bad economic sign? I can't tell. Will it become clearer if the company running this auction goes bust too?

So, somebody from Andover has mailed to say that they're not going out of business. They do appear to be selling off a lot of their San Francisco offices, though. And you'd think they'd use their own liquidation company to do the liquidating, in a sort of anti-bootstrapping move, wouldn't you? I'll look into it some more when I'm not travelling.

Update: Mike from Andover writes: "We are moving to more of a broker model as selling individual computers, etc. is just not profitable when new P4s are selling for $300." Basically, I think they're closing their warehouse.