Gnomedex first panel
Elle and I are over at Gnomedex in Tahoe. Absolutely beautiful out here. I would be happy to be here just on vacation, and having the conf is just a nice bonus. Last night was the welcome dinner, and I spent a bunch of time talking to Bill Flitter and Eric Rice, and I think we’re going to try to get together a bunch of people for a microcontent BOF at some point. During lunch or in the evening at some point. So if you’re interested in something of the sort either snag me directly and let me know (if you don’t know me already, there’s a picture up on Flickr, and I still look like that, except now I have short hair), or leave a comment here, or send an email.
The first panel is pretty interesting. IT Conversations is casting the talks, and they’ll have them available for download, so I’m not going to provide too much detail. There are some interesting points in here. Chris DiBona is moderating, and talking about functionality migrating from the desktop up to servers. Ties together this conversation with service based computing in general. That was off towards the front. Another good point from Grifter was that switching platforms is just a temporary solution. Windows gets owned cause there are lots of Windows systems and very few Linux boxes, and hackers want to get as many boxes as they can without extra effort so they focus on Windows. If everyone switched to Linux it would get owned instead.
A good general overview, but if you work in or with security there probably isn’t anything new. It’s the “how do we make users aware of security or make it so that they don’t need to be aware” conversation, which is a good one to have, but probably familiar to most who are already practitioners.