23c3: day one

Too tired to comment on these now, but here are the talks we made it to today (I'm still pretty jet-lagged, and we had to locate the power converter for the laptop, so we missed some of today's sessions):

The Grim Meathook Future:
How The Tech Culture Can Maintain Relevance In The 21st Century
-Joshua Ellis

Amongst technology pundits and futurists, it seems to be a given that "progress" in the 21st century will be driven by technological advancements -- nanotechnology, biotechnology, networking technology, etc. However, recent global trends and events suggest that the course of human destiny can just as easily be driven by religious fanatics using weapons and tactics which are hardly on the technological cutting edge.

Meanwhile, the promise of a global Internet providing equality to all is still a pipe dream; the developing world's primary interface to our networks come in the way of 419 spam and data piracy. Not to mention, of course, the fact that we're rapidly approaching the end ofcheap, freely available energy sources and the likely beginning of massive climatic change.

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We Don't Trust Voting Computers:
The story of the Dutch campaign against black-box voting to date
-Rop Gonggrijp

This talk covers the Dutch campaign against unverifiable voting on computers, which is part of a growing movement world-wide to reject these computers. Successes in Ireland and (surprise) the US seem to indicate that media, law-makers and the general public are beginning to wake up.

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Revenge of the Female Nerds:
Busting Myths about Why Women Can't Be Technical
-Annalee Newitz

Why do media and industry lag behind reality when it comes to estimating women's technical and scientific abilities? That women have these abilities is obvious. The question is how to change social expectations about them. What are women doing, and what can they do, to combat pervasive myths about their inferiority as engineers and scientists?

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I particularly liked the latter two and will have a bit to say about them when I get a chance, especially the black-box voting hack job.

BTW, here's the abstract for our presentation, Culture Jamming & Discordianism: Illegal Art & Religious Bricolage, which is on Saturday. Turns out it's going to be in the large room, which has the capacity for several hundred. *gulp* ioerror, what did you get us into? ;D

A bit annoying that my bio got flubbed at the web site, but such is life.

one more photo:

I had to stitch two photos together to get the whole word... each of these letters is about eight feet high....