There are a few conferences from 2019 that I didn’t manage to get to last year (notably CCS, SOCC, and NeurIPS) which are still on my plate. And then I’ve pulled together this initial ‘watch list’ for the coming year.

I’m not a newbie when it comes to conferences—I’ve attended many over the years, big and small, and my day job includes an element of regular conference attendance. But I’ve never attended an event quite like VCF East, the long-running computer festival that brings out so many old computers out of the woodwork that it’s not even funny. (It also brings out their fans, a distinct breed of human that isn’t afraid to futz around on something old for a while.) This past weekend, I got a chance to head up to New Jersey to check out the world of vintage, and I got to set my eyes on some fascinating old tech. It was my first go-around, and perhaps it won’t be my last. When I go to events like this, I tend to focus less on reporting and more on inspiration, tone, and taking something back with me—and with that in mind, I wanted to speak to a few things at VCF East that inspired me. Let me nerd out for a little bit in today’s Tedium. I promise you won’t get bored!

One fun example was when a couple of people tried to explain the history and operation of the Internet Worm to me. Another fun time was had at a booth when a sales guy tried to dismiss my comments about his product with my “The only secure computer is one encased in concrete…” meme without knowing it was my original quote or who I was; I first uttered that years before he was born!

On display this year was connectivity and integration for consumers based on about 10 years of incremental and sometimes hardly noticed baby steps. There are three big developments that are enabling the vast majority of scenarios on display at CES 2019:

Any screen/speaker can play any streaming media.

Any device can be turned on/off/controlled by voice.

Any device can have a radio and connect to any other device with a radio.

Fun times ahead.

Lots of pictures.

source: DF

Happening now.

source: Dfly

January 9-11, 2019

San Jose Marriott, San Jose, USA

In one hour, our fall meeting will begin. I’ll still write a trip report at the end with the results of the meeting, but because this is an unusually (and historically) large meeting we’ve had to make a few adjustments.

This post is combined from a couple of administrative emails I sent to the committee over the past few weeks. Note that they’re written with that audience in mind, so they end with guidance about how to work effectively in the new subgroups, but I thought that others who follow C++ standardization would find them interesting and useful too.

Watch how the sausage is made.

Fact: the actor Daniel Radcliffe is currently starring in the Broadway show “The Lifespan of a Fact,” as a magazine fact checker with an aviation inspector’s zeal for accuracy. The play is drawn from a real-life skirmish: in 2005, Jim Fingal, an intern at The Believer, was tasked with fact-checking an essay by John D’Agata (played by Bobby Cannavale), about a teen suicide in Las Vegas. D’Agata had more of a watercolorist’s approach to the truth. When Fingal tried to correct his claim that Las Vegas had thirty-four licensed strip clubs—a source indicated that it was thirty-one—D’Agata said that he liked the “rhythm” of thirty-four. Their epistolary tussle was expanded into a book in 2012.

REcon is a computer security conference with a focus on reverse engineering and advanced exploitation techniques. REcon will be held for the second time in Brussels, Belgium. It offers a single track of presentations over the span of three days with a focus on reverse engineering and advanced exploitation techniques.

Conference: February 2 - 4, 2018

Training: January 29 to February 1 2018

source: grugq

The LLVM Foundation announces the 11th annual US LLVM Developers’ Meeting will be held October 18th and 19th in San Jose, California.

Program is posted now.

The next biennial Symposium on Cryptologic History will take place October 19 - 20, 2017 at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory’s Kossiakoff Center in Laurel, Maryland.

Slides from 2014, 2015, 2016 conferences. 2017 this fall.

https://github.com/CppCon

Slides and other materials now up.

If you’re gonna go, go all the way.

source: grugq

BSDCan happened.

21-24 September, Paris, France