I’ve attended 4 Perl Conferences in the past 2 years. This year’s Pittsburgh Perl Workshop is the first that I’ve presented at. My talk was titled Security through Detection, Prevention, and Introspection. I have slides available.
I originally wanted to present a bunch of code, but I couldn’t really find a way to make the code very interesting. I wanted to teach people that security is part of all of their jobs. I made it a point to reveal some of the idiocy of the Federal Government Mandates in relation to IT Security. I also gave an overview of the security system I’m building with Perl at work.
There were laughs, smiles, and a lot of people woke up. All in all, I’d say it went very well. I’d like to refine the presentation and possibly resubmit for YAPC::NA this year. Bigger audience, and an opportunity for me to conquer a large slice of my stage fright.
If anyone out there reading this saw the presentation and has feedback, please comment on this post!
UPDATE: If you enjoyed the content of my talk on security, please check out these articles I’ve written:
- Trust – Paradoxical Structure of Trust in Employers
- Eating Your Own Dog Food – Hypocritical IT Security Policies In the Real World
- Full Disk Encryption – In Theory and Practice
- Is Security Theatre Good Enough? Frustrating observations into poor Risk Analysis in the general populace.
{ 2 } Comments
I only saw bits and pieces as I was in and out, but I heard great reviews.
-Dan
Brad,
I thought your talk was great. I missed the end because of my conference-organizer duties, but what I saw impressed me. You took an interesting topic and presented it in a way that *kept* it interesting. That’s the way to do it.
The way you piled up the real-world constraints until they crushed the perfect-world security models that people carry around in their heads was particularly instructive: it helped the audience *see* that real-world security is messy and must accommodate stuff that nobody can anticipate. That’s why the sane approach is to be nimble, monitor what’s going on, and be prepared to solve problems as they reveal themselves.
Very cool talk.
Cheers,
Tom
BTW, I will be sorely disappointed if you don’t submit a talk for next year’s PPW. ;-)