Capricious Me

Best quote ever regarding cloud computing (from Oakland 2009 conference, not necessarily verbatim):

It should be called swamp computing. It’s dark and grimy and you don’t know what’s going to bite you.

The other good moment was the proposal for a “West Oakland Conference.”

I met three other alums from Wellesley who are now doing graduate programs.

Looking forward to exploring Seattle today, rain and all. And the end to my 3-hours of sleep nights!

So I’m here in Seattle in the Marriott Waterfront Hotel for the CRA-W Grad Cohort. Woo. Leeching wireless. Perilous, I suppose. Maybe the person owning the router is reading everything I send via plaintext online. Or maybe they’re setting up the router to do pharming… But paranoia aside, I need the Internet!! So let them read my google searches for the papers I need to cite in my write-up…

Hopefully I’ll be done soon to enjoy dinner somewhere goooood. Not that I’m too worried about seeing all the sights since I’m moving here in a month.

The highlight of this conference, or any conference by far, was my chance encounter last night. I was returning to my hotel room to drop off my backpack, and then I heard something familiar on the piano… sounded like Tom Lehrer but I was sure that I was wrong. I got closer and sure enough… a Tom Lehrer songbook being played by Peter Neumann (yes. THE Peter Neumann). Normally I would have scurried off and left the pianist in peace, but it was Tom Lehrer and my delight could not be contained. ^_^ Peter Neumann was incredibly kind and invited me to sing some of the favorites… from Poisoning Pigeons in the Park to Masochism Tango and that’s how I passed the next hour.

Amazing.

The day was filled with interesting stuff. I attended a panel on which my advisor was speaking about cellular security. I may be biased, but I thought of course that his portion was the most interesting. Isn’t it amazing that as security researchers, we are lauded and encouraged to be devious and think of malevolent schemes for the good of humanity? How do people pass that up for other areas??

I am attending USENIX Security ’07 in Boston this year. I’m staying at the Sheraton, which is smack dab in the Prudential Center set of buildings. So much shopping… so close by!

For a hotel that’s supposed to be upscale and reputable, the rooms are disappointing and the usual amenities I’m used to in hotels are missing… no hair dryer, no fridge. Boo. Still, it’s a free stay, thanks to the student grants.

This conference has sooo many interesting talks and presentations. I hope they put the invited speakers’ talks online in mp3 format like they did last year. Markus Jacobsson gave a really good talk about the “Human Factor in Online Fraud” which, obviously, I thought was fascinating. The keynote was interesting, but had nothing to do with security. Hm… oh well. Fun anecdotes about ipod and other mp3 players did suffice nicely.

Yesterday was a day off, as I’d just arrived and hadn’t signed up for workshops. I hung out with Anita for pretty much the entire day until we met up with M&M for dinner at (where else?) Penang. Today I was supposed to meet with M&M to watch “Becoming Jane” but we were too late… oh Green Line… as unreliable as ever. Instead, we went to get pho. Yum.

In a way, I vicariously indulge my desire to travel the world through conferences.

This time, my destination is the ever-so exotic city of Oakland for the annual IEEE Security Symposium. I suppose there is comfort in the familiar… and it says something about the quality of the conference if one holds it in Oakland year after year and everyone still shows up.

I started playing Counterstrike, mostly with Mike. It sucks starting out because I have no reflexes and he enjoys shooting me. Still, it’s pretty fun. We were playing with bots yesterday, as the terrorists (because being counter terrorist means you have to shoot people AND defuse a bomb, where as being a terrorist winning is much easier since you just have to shoot all the counter terrorists). So bots being bots, they weren’t all intelligent… and once I managed to get my paws on a shield it was pretty funny. The counter terrorist bots would just shoot, and since I had one of their shields they couldn’t really hurt me at all… so I’d wait till they had to reload and then shoot them. Or, Mike would follow me and I’d be in front with the shield. I dunno, for some reason I found that extremely amusing…

WWW has come to an end. The day began with a plenary talk about Identity, and how one should be able to port real-life identity into the world wide web without too much trouble and fear of insecurities. I’m not sure that I like the idea… in many cases, anonymity is very much desired. I went to just one paper session, focusing on phishing, and thoroughly enjoyed it. (Though I did have reservations about believing that one of the presented systems could be so accurate…) I had time to grab lunch and look at some of the posters before running for the airporter. Once again, I fell asleep and missed seeing the nature around Banff. Oh well… one mountain looks pretty much the same as any other.

Now I’m back in Davis… Going off to see the Whole Earth Festival tomorrow.

I do wish I could travel a lot more…

This morning did not start quite as well as the others. I suppose the primary reason was the woman sitting next to me, who clearly subscribed to the school of “Bathe in Perfume.” Bill Buxton spoke ranted today about the power of society to force trends in building more specialized technologies and less generalized, more mediocre all-in-one devices.

I went around to the 8th and 9th floors to take pictures. Banff is absolutely gorgeous this time of year. At the afternoon session, I bumped into Ming, my co-author on two papers thus far, who I’ve never met. As a further addition to these “It’s a small world” scenarios, I met one of Hao’s classmates from his grad student days.

The most interesting session, keeping in mind my biases, was the security session. Very real-world attacks and practical defenses… It makes me very excited about Oakland, which is coming up soon.

Tonight is my last night in Banff. I walked downtown once again and had dinner in Sushi House Banff, which was named as one of six best sushi restaurants in the Canadian mountain resorts. They serve sushi in a Sushi Train. So very cute. It was pretty cheap for sushi, and SO yummy…

And now, for the lovers of books and art (Taline, this is especially for you) : FromOldBooks.org. I ran into Liam Quin, who runs this site as a hobby. He wore a colorful hat, in the style of court jesters from the days of yore, and walked barefoot everywhere – even over paths of pebbles. I’d seen him walk about barefoot throughout the hotel, but I thought it was because he was indoors and trying to be comfortable. With nearly a thousand people here, at least one has to be interesting, eh?

Today began with announcements regarding WWW2008, which will be held in Beijing next year. The theme is “One World, One Web” which excites me because it seems there’s more room for security papers to sneak in. (Am I guilty of a one-track mind? Security is amazingly relevant to just about every field though…)

In lieu of attending presentations, I went to an industry talk given by a Yahoo guy who basically gave an overview of Yahoo’s Web 2.0 tools and services. Yahoo’s been busy with tagging. I heard the word so many times from Yahoo presenters. :) They do, after all, own Flickr and Del.icio.us. There’s a lot of emphasis on Web2.0′s dynamic nature turning everyone into editor, publisher, developers, etc.

There are countless trends where history repeats itself. It’s like a manifestation of the first law of thermodynamics (ah ha, I still remember high school chem!) where energy is neither destroyed nor created but rather converted. The tagging phenomenon, for example, is a revamp of the old days’ user-submitted descriptions of links/images under the appropriate categories. The major difference is the keyword focus and the use of search rather than hiearchical categories.

In the afternoon I saw Yi-Min present our paper. I think it’s safe to say that our paper was the most sensational, and of course Yi-Min is a very intense presenter. After that I debated whether to attend a panel about web search privacy vs. presentations of ranking algorithms. Privacy won. I’m not sure if I regret it. Some interesting points…

The BBQ at Brewster’s later was pretty good, and I took lots of pics of people line dancing. After I got back to the hotel, I went ghost-hunting with a guy whom I’d met through my conference roommate. There are reportedly two ghosts – a bride who fell off the stairs and died, and a bellhop named Sam. I found neither, but we took some nice pictures of the hotel in the semi-dark. It’s modeled after a Scottish castle. At one point, there was a man playing the piano as we walked through one of the mezzanines, which was decked out to look like the great hall of a castle, with armor and all. Lovely.

The day started with a keynote by Sir TBL, who is an Apple user. I was gleefully excited when he said that one should keep security in mind at all times and devoted not one, but TWO slides to it. (Yay security!) Preceding his talk were some cute animations detailing how the logos for the previous 3 years were created. I thought the animation for Banff, which morbidly included skiers crashing into pine trees was incredibly cute.

The paper presentations started today. Some of the presentations felt very ad-hoc and not practiced, which is really a shame, because the topics being presented are fascinating. Tomorrow my paper gets presented. (Though not by me, thankfully.)

I was trying to muster up the courage to network throughout the day. In my head I heard Hao telling me the true, hidden purpose of conferences, which is to network. Thus, tonight I talked to a few more people, mostly because I found my roommate for the conference, a 1/940 chance. ^_^ That somehow started the talking to strangers = less scary feeling. Hopefully I will still have courage tomorrow.

After tonight’s banquet, I went with a group of people to the wine bar for fondue. Dark chocolate fondue. It was delicious, but I couldn’t eat much of it because I’m a bit chocolated out by all the desserts they’ve been serving during breaks and after meals. You know, it’s really nice being around geeks.