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Backstage is supporting the Thinking Digital conference in Gateshead/Newcastle. Its a new conference along the lines of TED/Pop!Tech but based in the North of England and not exclusive to the in crowd.The conference has great wireless and so we're able to upload videos straight from the conference only a few moments after the speaker was on stage.
Day one
Session 1: The Future of Media
– Matt Locke
– Eric Lindstrom & Steve Jelley
– Jeremy Silver
Session 2: United We Stand
– Darren Thwaites
– Ian Kennedy
– Tara Hunt
An Entrepreneur's Story
– Sean Phelan
Thinking Digital Tech Demo
– Steve Clayton
– Q&A
Session 3: Happiness
– Helen Fisher
– Caspar Berry
– Jonathan Harris
Session 4: The Singularity
– Ian Neild
– Ray Kurzweil (via Teleportec)
Almost every talk is special but all the talks about happiness which I have to say were the best of the day.
Wow what a difference…. I only just found out Dopplr now supports Carbon Footprint estimations via the AMEE. Very cool feature and good to see people doing worth while parnerships.
Technorati Tags: carbonfoorprint, carbon, backnetwork
So after the London Geekdinner with Doctor Richard Clayton from Cambridge University, (you can watch the videos here 1, 2, 3, q&a or listen to the audio in total here.) I had a little wonder around the net to see what I've been missing out on since I moved to GNU/Linux.
And as expected the battle over adware, spyware and trojans has grown into something extremely serious. A friend at work keeps talking about the problems she has with her windows machine. The things she describes sounds like trojan activity but I can never be sure, so I'm not quite at the point of saying to her reinstall Windows fresh again. (We actually rebuilt her machine over the Christmas period already, because things were so bad she couldn't login). However after hearing about this banking trojan on Security Now recently. I'm reconsidering my advice.
Not only does it Trojan.Silentbanker steal your passwords, but it can perform a man in the middle attack on SSL connections, rendering the secure nature of SSL totally useless. It can also modify HTTP and HTML, meaning when you log into your bank and try and pay your bills it will replace your bill details with ones of the trojans chooses. Yes click that button to transfer funds looks legitmate but it will go to a off shorebank you've never heard of. It can steal cookies, certificates, cache passwords and change your DNS settings on the fly. So type in your banks url and the browser gets sent to a site which looks like the banks site but actually its not. To finish off it automaticlly updates its self and for some reason can install it a midi driver which screws around with your sound. Maybe to play the sound “kuchhing” when you finish that hijacked transation?
Technorati Tags: trojan, windows, geekdinner, londongeekdinner, Trojan.Silentbanker, securitynow, security, privicy
Ok I have to be honest and say when I first heard this story I laughed and said 7 double expresso's is nothing.
A teenager was taken to hospital after overdosing on espresso coffee.
Jasmine Willis, 17, developed a fever and began hyperventilating after drinking seven double espressos while working at her family's sandwich shop.
Now to be fair it was a teenage girl who 17 and shes maybe not use to drinking a lot of coffee anyway. But I got to say when I worked in Starbucks in Victoria. I use to drink about 4-5 double expresso's a shift. But then again I was also drinking about 4-6 cans of redbull on a weekend too.
I found this great site about caffeine via DL.TV a while back. Death by Caffeine allows you to put in your current weight and it will work out how much cups of coffee, tea, insert name of energy drink here it will take to kill you. This might sound all in bad taste following this teenagers near death experience but you got to look on the light side. Oh and drink less caffeine.
Some slighly shocking findings.
It would take over 200 cans of redbull to kill me by caffeine alone but only 150 expresso's. Actually a double shot of Starbucks Coffee has double the caffeine of Redbull when you look at it per ounce and a expresso 5 times more.
At the top end of the list is Fixx Energy which has 500mg (85ml per 100ml) of caffeine in a bottle, which just beats a Starbucks Grande Coffee which has 372mg but 79mg per 100ml. But if your deadly serious about your caffeine in take you need to look at the pills and mints. No-Doz, Maximum Strength and Dexatrim has 200mg per pill! No wonder I was still very wired at 8am in the morning after going out clubbing when I was younger. Luckly I never experienced what Jasmine did.
Me and Sarah this time get to grips with the very difficult subject of religion in this 1 hour podcast. This might be a little shocking if your not aware of me and Sarah's position on the religion debate. And yes its not going to be as clean and as well thought out as Dave Slusher's podcast about the same subject but its just me and sarah talking like we usually do. Nothing more, nothing less.
In the vein of the cluetrain manfesto, Devanshu posted a great post with 95 points about geek activism. Honestly there pretty awesome, but here's my favorate…
- Violating a license agreement is not theft.
- All corporations are not on your side.
- Everything will enter the public domain some day- even Mickey Mouse.
- Trusted computers must not be trusted.
- Proprietary data formats must never store public information.
- Fair use is a good thing.
- Use multiple operating systems regularly so you truly understand interoperability.
- Data mining will not stop terror.
- Express your opinion in public
- Blog
- Security is a trade-off- what are you willing to give up?
- Use Creative Commons
- Understand the difference between civil disobedience and breaking the law.
- Support the free, public domain archives of information.
- Undermine censorship by publishing information censored in oppressive countries.
- Voicing your views in a Slashdot comment thread is good, in your own blog is better, but in places that non-geeks frequent is best.
- Have a global perspective in ideas of geek civil liberties, intellectual property rights and so forth. Do you like your country’s policies in this respect? Can you help people from another country?
- Read more
- Make sure that if a vendor locks you in, you lock them out.
- Linux is no longer a philosophy- it is a good piece of software. Use it if it fits your needs.
- More information available to the most number of people is a good thing.
- Vote
- Read our modern geek philosophers- read Bruce Perens, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling and even Richard Stallman. Read Schneier to find practical reasons why stupid security mechanisms are stupid. Read them even if you disagree with them- it will help frame your point of view.
- DRM only keeps an honest user honest.
- Be proud of being a geek, a gamer, a privacy advocate, promoter of free speech and an innovator without fear of litigation, of government or restrictions on liberties- a geek activist.
My lecture notes from todays lecture at Ravensbourne College are now online for all to view and take apart. Enjoy!
I was listening to the excellent Pop!Tech live stream over the weekend and one of the things I heard which I need to blog at least was the thought by (i'm sure) Edward Castronova that Lost takes most of its queues and ideas from games? The example he gave was the trend setting Myst and Riven games. And honestly when he said that I instantly started thinking about screenshots like this type of thing. But Edward was more getting at the depth and interactivity (yes you heard me right) than anything else. One of the points included the numbers which keep appearing throughout the series, something which encorages extra thought and people to do things like this and this. This type of behavour tends to be more common with games. When IT Conversations puts the audio online I'll put a link to it and it will all make a hell lot more sense, than me trying to do it from memory.
Without indulging my Lost thoughts, I find this all pretty interesting when you read Lost Boy's blog post about Lost: the game. The linkage between games and lost is all there and when you think about it more it makes more and more sense.
I was listening to Barry Schwartz's Less is more presentation at poptech today on the train in to work. Oh my goodness this is great listening. And honestly sums up alot of what I've been thinking recently.
The [clip] idea of closing some doors to walk through others is a nightmare that I have alot. And dont even go there about working [clip]. Theres so much to do and I keep getting new ideas and projects to consider working on. And all while trying to balance equally or more important parts of my life. I would hate to be a mono person because theres so much to learn and be engergised by. But if the massive amount of choice is doing more damage than good, maybe I need to strike even more balance.
But lets not get too far ahead of ourselves here, some choice is good. Just not 500 ice cream's worth of choices. I learned recently that everything made in nature is made of 92 different types of atoms only. Yep from Whales to Humans to a single ant, all the same 92 atoms. And it gets better than that, the same 92 atoms are used across the whole universe. Whats this got to do with choice and having it all? well in constraints comes creativity and innovation. Stewart Butterfield did a great presentation along time ago explaining the almost endless possiblies there are in 5k. If that is mindboggling alone, over choice is a pain in the ass and does make for a difficult life.
I was reading a article in wired with Craig Newark from the Craigslist fame. Anyhow something got my head thinking…
You've also had a couple dozen buyout offers for craigslist. Aren't you tempted to cash out, move from your foggy neighborhood, and buy an island somewhere?
I admit that when I think of the money one could make from all this, I get a little twinge. But I'm pretty happy with nerd values: Get yourself a comfortable living, then do a little something to change the world.
And in last part of the quote, lies everything. In work I've been having this ongoing discussion about not wanting to be rich and famous just making the world a little bit better a place to live. Its easy to be singled minded and follow the money where it leads, but the harder thing is to live in your means and try and make the world a little better.
I was listening to Syndication Nation Panel at this years Supernova conference. Liz Lawley made the point not every single blogger wants a large audience, not every blogger wants to be ongoing or Scobleizer. And I totally agree, simple as cubicgarden is hosted on my single broadband line. I do not want a massive audience, couldnt cope with a huge audience. At the moment I get a lot of traffic but the traffic is mainly through RSS and search engines cutting through my blog hierachy (which i have no problem with at all). End of the day I am that of many millions of bloggers and to stay in the middle region is fine for me
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/whatamilike/index.shtml
Your answers I picked suggest I'm a Strategist…
Summary of Strategists
Quiet, easy-going and intellectually curious. Use logical, objective thinking to find original solutions to problems. Think of themselves as bright, logical and individualistic. May be impractical, forgetting practical issues, such as paying bills or doing the shopping
Dont usually follow these personality testers but Sarah sent me it and the guardian covered it today. But one question why does it not work in Opera but its fine in the Mozilla family?
I felt really honoured last year when Nick, Richard and others interviewed me for there dissertations. And once again I'm glad to help in my own way my ex-students on there dissertations. I encouraged them all this year to use the power of the internet and more specificly blogging to build up there dissertations. Well unfortually a couple of them have embrased the idea but none of them have used the blog format to build up sections.
Kelvin – kelchashock wins an award for the most un-google-friendly site to search for. Anyway Kelvins synopsis is actually quite good and sells it to me for sure, bearing in mind I've only read the first paragraph so far.
Ben – Bens design doesnt seem to be up at the moment but he's got quite a few comments to his ideas right from the start. Its just a crying shame he doesnt put up more content for people to get there teeth into.
Some credit has to go to Harry, Ben and JC for getting in touch via IM or/and Email to ask me questions about there subjects. Lets hope they get there blogs sorted soon…
Yeah its official were fcuked. Most of the power supply in England will come from northern europe or/and russia by 2010, says the BBC docu-drama. Been reading up about this anyway before the programme and I seriously thought we might be ok. However were not, wind power needs backup, which leads to gas. Coal burning is too much money because you need to put huge expensive filters on the pipes. To quote It would be like putting a level3 catylistic converter on a clapped out car.
. While Nuclear power stations are being shutdown more and more, and could take as long as 15 years to turn back on. More facts here. Once again, we need to do something about it now, but people are too focused on other issues, kind of reminds me of the lack of media coverage to the EUCD. Even though IF
was on BBC2, it was well advertised, on at primetime 9pm and had a good talk afterwards chaired by paxman. If only this was true of other issues…
