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The Daily Doings of Steph

I’m in San Francisco at RSA 2008. Ironically, this year’s conference theme is Turing Lives. My post on the Dilbert-Turing cartoon of a few weeks ago was almost prescient.

RSA is one of the heavy hitter tech conferences. It’s quite large and the geek quotient is through the roof. If you think developers are geeky, wait ’till you’re around security geeks. But, even though geekery abounds, this conference runs the gamut from uber-technical to societal presentatation and speakers - such as Michael Chertoff - Secretary of Homeland Security. I don’t agree with Chertoff’s “Maginot Line” approach to security, but unlike several other Bush Cabinet members, Chertoff actually seems intelligent, engaging, and interested in dialog.

I’m here for Identity Management stuff and the conference has been really rich on the IdMA front. Several excellent presentations and I’m going to spend a good part of the afternoon at the Interoperability Demo’s.

Yesterday, I got a chance to hear one of my favorites, Bruce Schneier speak on Reconceptualizing Security. It was excellent - not only is Schneier a brilliant crypto guy, he really gets Layer 8 (human behavior). He’s in the process of working through a new theory of how security relates to reality, feelings, and security models. He’s an excellent thinker and his theory is quite compelling. This CNET column provides a good overview of Schneier’s presentation.

I always enjoy observing conference demographics. Usually, particularly at geek conferences, the male to female ratio is about 25 to 1. This conference, very surprisingly is more like 10 to 1. The number of observant jewish men is also high - lots of yarmulkes. But my favorite new observed demographic is the number of pony tailed men. Very noticeable - I don’t know if the extra hair is correlated with the security field or academia - which is also well represented here. But there sure are lots of middle-aged guys with pony tails.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 11:10 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow responses via my RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.