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!

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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!

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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.

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2004-06-06»

It is the special privilege of con organisers (which I barely am) to not have any idea how the damn thing went. I really only saw Yoz and Sean’s report from the set of the Hitchhiker’s movie, and the launch, finally, of TheyWorkForYou. Everyone I spoke to seem to enjoy themselves, despite the trademark chaos.

Now. Need. Sleep.

P.S. We launched TheyWorkForYou, a *huge* effort by all the usual suspects to revamp Hansard, the official record of the UK parliament, in a more Web-a-like form. Help us beta test it! Subscribe to the RSS feeds of your local MP! Subscribe to our infrequent site updates! Play around with search! Still. Need. Sleep!

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2004-05-19»

Lee, NTK’s chief moral compass, wonders about mail he sends that ends up with a third-party *cough Gmail cough*. He suggests that if Google was trying to be truly not evil, it should perhaps work on a “Disposition-Notification” header that would optionally the original sender know what’s happening to their mail.

This reminds me of mails from Boogah, who is organising Layer One, and whose .sig reads, in part.

this email is: [x] bloggable [ ] ask first [ ] private

My second thought, which is playing on me a lot these days, is how openness is viral. When one lives or works with someone who is more open or free with their own personal information, you find yourself become less able to maintain your own privacy. Your information is part of their information.

How can we maintain high levels of privacy – or indeed, maintain high levels of honesty – when our associates disagree on those levels?

This isn’t a new problem, of course. But something is changing. I have friends who dive out of the way of cameras to protect their privacy when they are with me. The time when there is somewhere to dive might end someday.

(In the meanwhile, if you send me something with X-No-Archive: in the headers, it won’t get forwarded to my Gmail account).

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“A revised version of the Pratimoksha (Buddhist Monastic Code) was released on Monday March 31, 2003 in Seoul, Korea, which is one of the Mahayana Buddhist countries of Asia. This version has been compiled by the venerable Thich Nhat Hanh in the International Buddhist Practice Center called Plum Village in France. Thich Nhat Hanh and his monastic delegation are currently on a teaching tour in this country.”

44. A bhikshu who has his private e-mail account with the result that he spends an inordinate amount of time in making unnecessary communications or communications which foster attachment commits an offence for which he must express regret.

…

46. A bhikshu who plays electronic games including those on the computer, commits an offence for which he must express regret.

So many new sins, so many regrets.

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2004-05-18»

Let’s see if this works. I’m writing a small piece for the New Scientist on RSS, and I wanted to chat with people who read more than 400 RSS feeds daily. So – Robert Scoble? Frank Arrigo? Jay McCarthy? George Kelly? Phil Wolff? Are you guys really reading this, along with hundreds of others? Would you like to talk briefly about it today? Get in touch!

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So here’s what I’m doing with my gmail account: I’ve set the filters to archive everything as soon as it comes in, and I’m now forwarding all my mail to it. So it’s not so much a mail reader, as google for my mail archive. That’s something I’ve been after for a while.

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2004-05-17»

My favourite emails these days are the ones from a lady reporting transmissions from the Virgin Mary who prophesies (sometimes with her son, Jesus) really quite specifically about the dangers of flag-burning, the Unholy Ray, and the devilish communist threat of Russia.

Do not be deceived, My children, Russia is not free. It is a cosmetic act to delude you. Lenin and Stalin used the same tactics, My children. Why do you not learn from your errors? For it is their plan to subdue you, once they get the billions that they need in aid, to bring up the economy and buy more armaments. (Our Lady, June 18, 1992).

How sneaky is that? The cc: list for the people who get this includes loads of bishops and cardinals. Good god, think how much crank mail you must get if you’re an bishop. And how do you write a spam filter that catches this stuff, but wouldn’t give a false positive if you actually received an email from Jesus? I hope the Christ worked out some sort of secret sign before he ascended, because this false prophet business is just going to get worse and worse pre-rapture. Spam; a sign of the end-times. Mail.app for Apple discards this stuff as junk; Spamassassin isn’t so sure.

As the prophecies go, I like this one:

CHASTISEMENT DELAYED

Veronica – Our Lady said that the Chastisement has been delayed

It’s sort of like a rail announcement, isn’t it?

I think that will be the new open threat in our house. “Your chastisement has been … delayed. This time.”

I’m currently delaying a fair bit of chastisement myself right now. I’ve been working through a lot of the Lifehacks stuff. It was all supposed to be very anthropological and objective, but now I realise that my position as hyper-disorganised person peering in isn’t going to work out. Mainly because I’m currently being far too disorganised to actually get this done.

My horrible dawning realisation is that to do lifehacks stuff justice, I’m going to have to experiment on myself.

Our Lady of the Postponement, have mercy on me!

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2004-05-02»

I have no idea why I haven’t mentioned this before: I’m speaking at two conferences in June: London’s NotCon and Los Angeles’ LayerOne. Both are shaping up to be pretty fantastic.

First up is NotCon, which is the mutant monster one-day convention that sprang out of our post-Emerging Technology ‘ConCon’ summaries. I’m going to toss a coin about what I’ll be speaking about here. If I’m chicken, I’ll do an updated reworking of my Emerging Tech talk “Lifehacks”. If feel braver, I’m going to dredge through four years of trying to mentally inhabit Silicon Valley and the UK tech scene simultaneously, and see what horrors emerge. ConCon is on Sunday, June 6th at Imperial College Union. Price at the door, but it should be pretty cheap.

The Lifehacks stuff will be at the core of my LayerOne talk. This convention looks to be shaping up really well. Two of the smartest and most lateral-thinking security folk I’ve meant, Dan Kaminsky and David Hulton are speaking on their current secret projects. There’s presentations on at least four of my current and/or long term obsessions – emergency broadcast networks, the EFF’s current take on the DMCA, geek sub-culture viability, and Eldritch Global Banking Conspiracies. All for $40. I hope I can live up to the standards of the rest of the line-up.

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