Earlier this week, the Ninth Workshop on Economics and Information Security (WEIS 2010) was held at Harvard. As always, it was a great workshop with some very interesting papers. Ross Anderson liveblogged the event.
EDITED TO ADD (6/10): The papers are all on the conference website.
Clive Robinson. • June 10, 2010 4:45 PM
Ross Andersons bloging was interesting but…
I guess we are going to have to wait a while for all the content to be available (such is the problem with many conferences still).
The problem with live bloging is unless you are a stenographa you cannot get all of what was said down. Then there is the “mental perception filter” of what the bloger favours.
So you are kind of twice removed and a lot can get lost in the translation.
For instance Davi’s point above (about Microsoft) did not come across as such.
Bruce Schneier • June 10, 2010 6:08 PM
“I guess we are going to have to wait a while for all the content to be available (such is the problem with many conferences still).”
Wait for what? The papers are all up on the conference website.
http://weis2010.econinfosec.org/program.html
B
Russell Thomas • June 10, 2010 9:55 PM
I believe that the presentation slides will also be posted on the same web page, in perhaps one or two weeks. Compared to other such conferences, WEIS is pretty good about posting both slides and papers.
As for capturing discussion, Ross does a as good a job as anyone. This year there was only one session where there was much group discussion or extensive Q&A, and Ross was on the panel. So I’ll excuse him for not capturing all of it.
Clive Robinson • June 10, 2010 11:56 PM
@ Russell,
“Ross does a as good a job as anyone”
Agh, excuse me whilst I open my mouth to change feet…
Sorry the comment I made was not ment to be disparaging against Ross or anybody else. I was pointing out that live bloging is a narrow communication channel, thus not all information comes across that even the bloger is party to. Further that the bloger will thus have a perspective that colours what they think is significant or not.
As an example I used Davi’s comment about the confrence being Microsoft heavy, I did not get this impression from what I had read over on the CambLabs site.
As a general case I personaly look forward to a time where a lot of confrences become partialy “virtual” (ie audio/video feeds/recordings) for several reasons.
Firstly attendance in many cases is limited by several factors, and not every body wants to be a full participant or attend all the conferance. Some just would like to observe the proceadings at a later time/date (students / non academics etc)
Secondly for some travel to a venue (picturesque or otherwise) is problematic for many reasons some for health reasons other for work or family reasons.
Thirdly some confrences have multiple streams thus you have to make a choice as to which stream you are in at any given time.
Fourthly the historical record, although most of us don’t consider or daily lives as being significant enough even for personal diaries. Historians amongst others would disagree when it comes to “meetings of mind” at confrences etc. Whilst I’m not sugesting the informal asspects of a confrence be recorded the formal aspects such as the sesions presenting papers etc and Q&A rumps may be seen in future times as significant points in time and thus a much more detailed record be desirable.
We know that all of this is possible because various other events do get recorded and put up on the likes of UTube etc, and we are starting to see virtual classrooms with distance learning as a norm not an exception.
I think some of the smaller less comercial confrences would actually benifit from putting up either live feeds or recordings of confrence sessions. As for the big thousand dollar+ / attendee confrences no doubt they would find a way to turn it into additional revenue in similar ways they currently do with the conference papers etc.
I didn’t see a microsoft overrepresentation (they are actually doing some research on economics – google is as well – HalVarian and his group). however one of the speakers said at some point ‘two-factor authentication is great’ — it seems some people have not read ACM 2005 and are still focusing not on yesterday’s problems but on 15-years-ago-problems.
I think Bruce’s point has been vindicated once again five years later – if there was ever any need to ?
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/03/the_failure_of.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/hacking_two-fac.html
http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2005/040405faceoff-counterpane.html
some people are also apparently unaware of gentry’s homomorphic encryption algorithm, and I don’t mean its real-world practicality:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/homomorphic_enc.html
BF Skinner • June 11, 2010 5:56 AM
@Cllive “unless you are a stenographa you cannot get all of what was said down”
“live bloging is a narrow communication channel, …not all information comes across …”
Well that’s not really possible. You’d have to have more than one blogger to cover concurrent sessions. And it is nicer when they allow us to virtually attend.
But I think that misses the point. ALL reportage is a necessary fiction. It’s fiction in that it’s goal is to reduce the complexity of reality into a form that can be more easily conveyed.
I like what Shmoocon does with posting thier sessions video’s for free. This allows non-attendees to benifit from the talk (even non-attendees cause there is always another talk you want to attend.
Subscribe to comments on this entry
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
Davi Ottenheimer • June 10, 2010 2:43 PM
Looks like a lot of Microsoft representation. Only noticed one other company name.