I’m at the 4th annual Gikii conference, kindly hosted by ivir in Amsterdam. Not presenting this year, but thinking I should have. This is my 4/4 conferences, though I did miss SoGikii earlier this year. Thanks again to Joris and everyone at Ivir , and Lilian, Andres, and Ian for setting up such a great conference.
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Bernt Hugenholtz intro to the confernece
Coming at you from the Heart of the Dutch East India company (VOC) and in many ways the heart of capitalism’s birth — conference hosted in the room where sent Henry Hudson from this room to North America and New Amsterdam for his search for the northwest passage. Amsterdam has a history of geeks and a natural place for geeks to meet. Tidbit that VOC was first company to buy publicly traded stocks in the world.
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PGP and the web of trust
Clive Feather
Hacking trust networks — how to take them down. Trust networks don’t have a few key points to attack — you have to take apart a big chunk of the network. His method was to take the most connected node and remove it each time.
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Strangelove and Salami: An illustration of the unintended consequences of technical solutions
Mathias Klang
Human rights: vulnerable to the salami attack – slice by slice it erodes away (with a reference and clip to Yes, Prime Minister). Small scale attacks are happening and how Human Rights are being eroded more and more.
In the context of technical solutions of social and legal problems — often the architects of the technical solutions ignore the social and legal consequences.
Example of university email.
University of Gothenburg was late to the game in provided university email — 2003. They had technical and user adoption problems, so in 2008 migrated to Gmail — it’s free, it’s familiar (user friendly as a curse word), no outward change (still looked like university’s email).
But Gmail means data sent abroad and thus less privacy (privacy a human right). Means that under Swedish FRA law (equivalent of FISA, RIPA that allows for monitoring of communications) this communications/email can be monitored, which means that government monitors email that they otherwise wouldn’t
TJ McIntyre brought up the contrasting position in Ireland that the US had more protection for email than Ireland did, and so there are incentives for the Irish to use US based webmail providers.
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My comments
On the human rights / privacy side, I think that this ties into some things I’ve been seeing about the You Own Your Own Data meme that has been floating around in the linked data / semantic web community, with more discussion in a future post.
(liveblog disclaimer, so may be updates to the post as I review, apologies for spelling / grammar)
