USENIX Annual Technical Conference Press Releases

July 11, 2001 | June 28, 2001 | May 4, 2001

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 11, 2001

For More Information contact:
Monica Ortiz, monica@usenix.org, 415-990-5513

Berkeley, CA -- July 11, 2001 -- The USENIX Association announced today that its signature conference suffered no change in attendance despite a sagging technical industry.

Shrinking training budgets and massive layoffs have depressed conference attendance industrywide, with many events reporting drops in registration anywhere from 15 to 30 percent from last year. However, the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, held late last month in Boston, reported only a five- percent decrease, bringing in over 1,750 technical professionals. International registration totaled nearly 14 percent, with 35 countries represented in attendance demographics.

"The strength of this conference is a very important factor," said Yoonho Park, USENIX Annual Tech 2001 Program Chair. "We were certainly in an area where USENIX makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. People have been coming to this conference for a long time and I'm sure they made a ruckus to their managers about attending this year."

"Not everyone was employed," added Carla Ellis, Annual Tech 2002 Program Chair. "They came regardless."

The conference provided an intellectually challenging program with two tracks of technical research presentation, including the popular FREENIX track, sessions dedicated to open source research and advances. Presenters included industry luminaries such as Keynote Daniel Frye, Director of IBM's Linux Technology Center, Security gurus Steven Bellovin and Avi Rubin, and Compaq's James Gettys. Longtime USENIX members, Avi Rubin, Margo Seltzer, and Keith Bostic also announced the release of their new books at this conference.

"We orchestrated it so that my book signing would be right after my invited talk," said Avi Rubin, a member of USENIX Board of Directors. "I really think this is the right place to do promotions considering the combination of the size of the audience and the technical bent that they have."

The Annual Technical Conference is the first of USENIX's major annual events, which include the Security Symposium in Washington, DC in August; the Annual Linux Showcase and Conference in Oakland in November; and the unique conference LISA 2001, The Systems Administrator's conference.

"If you want to know what is going on in the industry in the next three to five years, go to a USENIX conference and hear what the argument is in any given year," said Clem Cole, FREENIX Program Chair for Annual Tech 2001. "This is where industry and research begin to come together."

Detailed information on upcoming USENIX events is available on the Web at www.usenix.org/events

About the USENIX Association
USENIX is the Advanced Computing Systems Association. For over 25 years, it has been the leading community for engineers, system administrators, scientists, and technician working on the cutting edge of the computing world. USENIX conferences are the essential meeting grounds for the presentation and discussion of technical advances in all aspects of computing systems. For more information about the USENIX Association, visit https://www.usenix.org

White-Hat Security Arsenal: Tackling the Threats by Aviel Rubin, published by Addison Wesley. For more information or to purchase the book, see www.white-hat.org

Berkeley DB by Sleepycat Software, Inc. (co-written by Margo Seltzer and Keith Bostic), published by New Riders, contact Mike Olson, mao@sleepycat.com or see www.sleepycat.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 28, 2001

For More Information contact:
Monica Ortiz, monica@usenix.org, 415-990-5513

Boston, MA -- The USENIX Association today named the GNU Project and its contributors as recipients of its prestigious USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award. The announcement was made just before the keynote address at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference where the developers of Kerberos were also awarded the Software Tools User Group (STUG) award.

"The contributions of these two groups to the technical community have been incredible. The Lifetime Achievement and STUG awards are simply a way for the technical community to thank them for the invaluable tools and resources they have given us," said Andrew Hume, Vice President of the USENIX Association. "It's difficult to imagine how most of us could do systems work without using GNU Project derived tools."

The GNU Project was started in 1984 by Richard M. Stallman, taking up the challenge of developing a UNIX-like operating system that is completely Free Software -- freely redistributable, and modifiable by all of its users. Today, the GNU system is widely used as part of the GNU/Linux system. GNU/Linux is the integrated combination of the GNU operating system with the kernel, Linux, written by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Now that the core operating system is completed, the GNU Project continues to develop user-space software for GNU/Linux users.

"Software freedom succeeds. Without freedom, no one could have written the many utilities and other applications in GNU/Linux," said Robert J. Chassell, who accepted the award for the GNU Project. "But freedom needs to be defended; and the defense of freedom is expensive. There are those who want to limit what students may study, limit what programmers may write, and limit what you and others may share or purchase. We must continue to preserve and advance freedom for users and programmers."

Kerberos was developed in much the same fashion as the GNU system. Created by a team of contributors from Project Athena at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), it was made freely available and has since been incorporated into many operating system products, both commercial and non-commercial. Kerberos was the first widely deployed network authentication system to assume that security risks were higher from people inside a network rather than outside. The Kerberos authentication system uses cryptography to authenticate users to a server and exchanges encryption keys that can be used to encrypt subsequent communication, providing privacy and data integrity during the course of business.

"We made a decision very early on in the development of Kerberos to make the source code freely available and to allow royalty free integration with commercial and non-commercial systems," said Clifford Newman, who accepted the award for the Kerberos contributors. "This decision contributed significantly to the success of Kerberos. It's ironic that most users of Kerberos don't even know they are using it."

The awards kicked off USENIX Annual Technical Conference, now in its 26th consecutive year, included four best paper acknowledgments:

• "Virtualizing I/O Devices on VMware Workstation's Hosted Virtual Machine Monitor" by Jeremy Sugerman, Ganesh Venkitachalam, Beng-Hong Lim
• "A Toolkit for User-level Filesystems" by David Mazieres
• "Nickle: Language Principles and Pragmatics" by Bart Massey and Keith Packard
• "MEF: Malicious Email Filter" by Student Authors: Matthew G. Schultz and Eleazar Eskin, together with Erez Zadok and Manasi Bhattacharyya

"This is a conference that selected 48 excellent papers out of 138 submissions. Our program reflects the newest technology as well as the luminaries in the industry," said Yoonho Park, USENIX 2001 Program Chair. "Winning a best paper award amid such competition means your work is going to move technology forward. And that's what this conference is all about."

The USENIX Annual Technical Conference continues in Boston, Massachusetts from June 28–30, 2001. Information about USENIX Awards and Recipients is available online at www.usenix.org/directory/awards.html and www.usenix.org/directory/stug.html.

About the USENIX Association
USENIX is the Advanced Computing Systems Association. For over 25 years, it has been the leading community for engineers, system administrators, scientists, and technician working on the cutting edge of the computing world. USENIX conferences are the essential meeting grounds for the presentation and discussion of technical advances in all aspects of computing systems. For more information about the USENIX Association, visit https://www.usenix.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 4, 2001

For More Information contact:
Monica Ortiz, monica@usenix.org, 415-990-5513

Berkeley, CA -- The USENIX Association announced today the addition of Cynthia Breazeal, Researcher for MIT Media Labs, to its acclaimed USENIX Annual Technical Conference 2001 program, to be held on June 25–30, 2001 in the Boston Marriott Copley Place. Breazeal's groundbreaking work has created Kismet, a robot that can duplicate human facial expressions.

Such is the caliber of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference. USENIX 2001's program boasts an international flavor, attracting innovators such as Greg Lehey from Australia and Rik van Riel from Brazil, as well as researchers and visionaries from industry giants such as IBM, AT&T, Bell Labs, Compaq, Sun Microsystems, Harvard University, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon University. A six-day experience, USENIX 2001 offers 30 high-caliber tutorials and three days of technical session tracks with speakers at the leading edge of new development and high tech research.

"USENIX is a professional organization that as not only built a community, but has seeded an industry. When I look back at the best ideas the computer science community has produced in the last 25 years, its amazing how many of them were discussed and honed at USENIX conferences," says Clem Cole, FREENIX Track Chair for USENIX 2001. "It's exciting to help make a home for the next set of good ideas. It's a pretty good bet that at least a few of the new things we hear and read about at USENIX 2001 will become the building blocks of our next great technology."

USENIX 2001 General Sessions have always attracted a mix of systems researchers and developers. Daniel D. Frye, Director of IBM Linux Technology Center and conference Keynote Speaker, will deliver his often controversial views examining Linux and open source as a "Disruptive Technology" within the traditional computer industry and the ways in which these will redesign relationships between IT suppliers and customers. Jeff Bonwick of Sun Microsystems explains the workings of multiprocessors extensions on memory slab allocators located in Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Shym Technology's Don Davis delves into the cryptographic defects within popular protocols such as PGP and XML. Richard Neeves of ReefEdge, Inc will describe the software technology accelerating IBM Web servers. The Future of Virtual Machines, by Ed Bugnion of VMWare, Inc., presents technology that will streamline server farms by allowing multiple operating systems such as Linux and Windows to run concurrently. Security topics continue to buzz with a trio of presentations by luminaries Avi Rubin on the Security of E-Voting in Public Elections, Steven Bellovin on Security Aspects of Napster and Gnutella, and Lorrie Faith Cranor's discussion on Online Privacy issues.

The celebrated FREENIX track again assembles the gurus of Open Source computing including presentations from FreeBSD, NetBSD, IBM Linux Technology, Linuxcare, and VA Linux. Dedicated to all things open source, the FREENIX track features Keith Packard of SuSE and the Xfree86 Core Team, discussing Graphics and the X Render Extension. Timothy Fraser, Robert M. Watson, and Peter Loscocco discuss Linux system integrity, flexibility, and security through the use of LOMAC and TrustedBSD. The Kernel session touches on KQueue, a scalable notification system, offers tips on improving FreeBSD SMP Implementation, and discusses Linux 2.4/2.4 Virtual Memory Management.

"USENIX presents the rare opportunity to see inside the hearts and minds of the people at the foundations of open source computing. How designs are created and how software is built–even the messy parts–are presented for the community to share and grow together," says Keith Packard, who is part of three USENIX 2001 presentations. "USENIX talks will present open source technologies driving the Internet today, along with obscure research topics which may well become the TCP/IP of tomorrow."

The USENIX Annual Technical Conference is also notable for it intensive tutorial classes taught by industry gurus. Practical and immediately applicable, tutorials train professionals to master techniques and technologies in system administration, networking, security, cryptography, Perl, Sendmail, Solaris, Samba, LDAP, UNIX, Linux, wireless technology, and the Web.

Attendees have ample opportunities to meet the industry's movers and shakers. The conference's two-day exhibition showcases over 60 corporate leaders, including sponsors EMC, Inc and IBM, as well as Compaq, Microsoft, Microway, Addison-Wesley, Prentice Hall, Sendmail, and ActiveState, exhibiting their products and services in the two-day Exhibition. Evening receptions and informal sessions round out the conference experience and include the ever-popular Birds-of-a-Feather evening sessions, where attendees gather around topics of their choice and network with like-minded peers and experts. USENIX's unique, tongue-in-cheek Game Show is a hilarious look at the gathered community and a not-to-be-missed Thursday night event.

"The USENIX community represents everything that open source systems should: a collegial environment where ideas are discussed openly," says Keith Packard. "Personality and friendship are valued over corporate loyalty. Who you work for is much less relevant than what you've accomplished."

Again the USENIX Annual Technical Conference rises above gloomy industry predictions by simply demonstrating how rich the computing community continues to be and how far it can still go. If there is only one conference to attend, make it USENIX 2001. Detailed conference schedules and registration are available on the USENIX Web site: https://www.usenix.org/events/usenix01.

USENIX Annual Technical Conference
June 25–30, 2001
Boston, Massachusetts
https://www.usenix.org/events/usenix01

About the USENIX Association
USENIX is the Advanced Computing Systems Association. For over 25 years, it has been the leading community for engineers, system administrators, scientists, and technician working on the cutting edge of the computing world. USENIX conferences are the essential meeting grounds for the presentation and discussion of technical advances in all aspects of computing systems. For more information about the USENIX Association, visit https://www.usenix.org

Press Badges and Registrations
USENIX 2001 invites members of the press to register for a complimentary badge to our technical sessions. For more information on obtaining a press badge or to set up interviews with our coordinators and speakers, please contact Monica Ortiz at 415-990-5513 or email monica@usenix.org.