2 min read

DEFCON 19: Taking your ball and going home

[ DEFCON 19 logo UPDATE you can now view a video of my slides, along with the audio of my talk on the DC archive page (45 Megs)

Two weeks ago, at this year’s DEFCON conference in Las Vegas, I gave a talk covering privacy and security issues concerning Dropbox, which led into questions about how much we should trust ‘cloud’ services, and my solution, the open source project lipsync. The full title of the talk is, Taking yourball and going home; building your own secure storage space that mirrors Dropbox’s functionality, and shows what can be done when you use multiple open sources applications to make something with new functionality (or at least new functionality to to open source world). You can view it below, but you should also view it from the previous link, so you can see the ‘Speaker notes’ which give the details I covered during each slide. (visitors to my site will recognize the timeline, and as you see in the talk, this all started with a post I made here in September 2009 titled HOWTO build your own open source Dropbox clone. This drove initial discussions about the idea that eventually convinced that this would be a good thing to build a project around). Enjoy…



View more of my presentations at Slideshare.

Some pictures of me, during my talk in Track 2 at the Rio on Sunday:

Special thanks to my old friend Fern, and time traveler Dave for coming in town, enjoying the insanity and showing their support. DEFCON is the annual meetup that never disappoints, and I was really humbled to be part of it this year.

And a feel for what it looked like from the crowd; you’ll notice a bunch of people gathered around me at the table asking questions, and helping themselves to the free Tootsie Pops I brought for everyone! Ya, it was a big hit, and helped me distribute the simple (personal) business cards I printed at home (DIY FTW!)

The DEFCON conference this year was held at the Rio for the first, time, which was a huge improvement over the Riviera in terms of conference space, and amenities. While the crowd was recently estimated as being 11,500, there were very few lines, and none of the overcrowding that pervaded the prior years (I’ve been coming since DEFCON 14) we saw at the Riviera.