The Last Hope Talks

I have spent the last few days listening to some of the presentations and talks given at the Hacker On Planet Earth conference (HOPE) This year's event was probably going to be the last due to plans to demolish the venue in New York, hence the event tag "The Last HOPE" however it seems those plans may have changed.

The speakers are wide ranging, with interesting and thought provoking topics.

Some highlights are the talks by Kevin Mitnick, a 3 hour marathon talk by Steven Rambam about privacy and the lack of it and the ominous threats posed by new technologies such as Google, the iPhone and social networking sites, well worth a listen. Also Renderman's presentation "How Do I Pwn Thee? Let Me Count The Ways" highlights the security dangers of mobile technology.

Of special interest to me was Travis Goodspeed's "Introduction to MCU Firmware Analysis and Modification with MSP430static" the slides and information are available from Travis' website. In this talk Travis gives a wonderful account of the basic principals of reverse engineering.

All the talks are available here for free download in low and high quality versions.

The Real Deal Podcast

While reading the webware.com news feed I saw mention of a podcast about cloud computing produced by The Real Deal for the CNet.com network.

Cloud computing seems to be the latest buzzword/technology, I heard mention of it in the BBC Digital Planet podcast only yesterday. It is fairly amusing to hear some people referring to the similarity between this 'virtual/shared technology' and the old time-sharing mainframe systems of the 1970s. Further proof that things come in cycles, be it that they are slightly metamorphosed on each iteration.

But I digress, this podcast is a fresh of breath air and I've listened to a couple of other episodes and what strikes me is the simple, layman like explanations and enlightening discussions of all these new buzzwords and technologies. The presenters are Tom Merritt and Rafe Needleman, Rafe is also the editor of webware.com which is a pretty good synopsis of all that is new in the Web2.0 world.