Category Archives: Talks & Conferences

Bad Debts

Posted on December 28, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Orin Kerr says he's going to the AALS January Meeting in New York.

That's good. As it happens, I'm going too and I seem to recall that I owe Orin a beer.

Posted in Talks & Conferences | 5 Comments

Drat.

Posted on September 19, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

I've been offered a chance to go to something really interesting far, far away at someone else's expense.

And it looks like I won't be able to do it: it's happening the same long weekend as the AALS hiring conference, and I'm married to the chair of our committee. She has to be there, so I have to be here — although our kids are amazingly large to look at, they're not big enough to be left alone for a night, much less for four days in a row.

Posted in Personal, Talks & Conferences | 4 Comments

DEFCON Badges

Posted on August 3, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

I'm not at YearlyKOS (although I wish I were); and I'm not at Defcon either. I've never been able to justify going to Defcon, although it sounds fun. This year in addition to the program, the Defcon ID badge looks really interesting.

Last year's badge was a fine piece of round circuit board with the DEFCON SmileSkull and Crossbones cut into it, a bunch of circuitry, two lit LED eyes, a single watch battery, and a toggle switch to make the eyes blink in sequence. If you were really clever, you could hack the code in the badge to blink out your own secret messages …

…The sucker has a Freescale MC9S08QG8 microcontroller and contains a 5 column by 19 row matrix of LEDs to allow user-customizable scrolling text messages. The default message is I (heart) DEFCON 15. Power source is a pair of lithium coin cell batteries.

Touch the top SmileSkull icon and it turns things on. It’s not a clicky switch, it’s a touch switch – major improvement from last year. A second touch control under the rotary dial symbol (and there’s one to explain to your kids about) allows one to type in a customized message.

If that wasn’t enough, the LEDs are also programmed to deliver a persistence-of-vision (POV) secret message if you trigger the proper mode then wave it around in front of your eyes in one direction, kinda like those hand-held trick LED signs people were having fun with a few years ago.

So many conferences, so little time (& money…)

Posted in Talks & Conferences | 1 Comment

Off to Bologna

Posted on May 26, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

By the time you read this, if all goes according to plan I'll be somewhere over the Atlantic, off to Bologna for what promises to be an unusually interesting workshop organized by Ian Kerr and the the other wonderful people at “On the Identity Trail”.

A short description of the event is at On the Identity Trail in Bologna, Italy for International Workshop on Anonymity.

I've done something a bit scary for this conference: I've written a paper that showcases my ignorance about something that I care about in the hopes that the high-powered (and geographically diverse) participants will educate me.

The key question which motivates the paper is this: why are people in common law countries like the US and the UK so much more bothered about ID cards than the people in Western Europe? It's a puzzle — we fear them, they domesticated them. They had abuses (Nazi Germany and occupied Europe), we had far fewer. Why the difference? Attitudes to authority? Different conceptions of liberty, or citizenship? Counter-balancing aspects of the legal system? None of the above?

[Incidentally, one of the many flaws of the current draft paper is that it pretends Eastern Europe doesn't exist — mostly because I don't know enough about contemporary attitudes to ID cards in post-communist Europe.]

Posted in ID Cards and Identification, Talks & Conferences | 3 Comments

Wireless-less in Italy

Posted on May 22, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

Saturday I'm leaving for a conference in Bologna. I don't know much about what sort of internet access I'll have — but I just read about the frustration of finding a wireless connection in Italy so who knows.

Posted in Talks & Conferences | 5 Comments

Chicken!

Posted on May 14, 2007 by Michael Froomkin

It is clear that I don't go the the right conferences. No one at any conference I've attended has ever given a presentation even remotely like Chicken, Chicken, Chicken, presented by Doug Zongker at the AAAS humor session, February 16, 2007.

Posted in Talks & Conferences | Comments Off on Chicken!