TECHNICAL SESSIONS

Complete Technical Sessions
By Day: Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday
By Session: General Sessions | FREENIX | SIGs | Guru Is In | WiPs

Locations: See the complete technical sessions.

Wednesday, June 30
9:00 a.m.–10:00 a.m.	Wednesday
Plenary Session Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Internet Security, Inc. Listen in MP3 format All security decisions involve trade-offs: how much security you get, and what you give up to get it. When we decide whether to walk down a dimly lit street, purchase a home burglar alarm system, or implement an airline passenger profiling system, we're making a security trade-off. Everyone makes these trade-offs all the time. It's intuitive and natural, and fundamental to being alive. But paradoxically, people are astonishingly bad at making rational decisions about these trade-offs. Security expert Bruce Schneier discusses this notion of security trade-offs and how we are all "security consumers." He makes use of a five-step process to explicate these intuitive trade-offs and shows how the process can be applied to decisions both small and large. Learn how security works in the real world, and what you can do to get the security you want . . . not the security that is forced upon you. Internationally renowned security expert Bruce Schneier has written eight books, including Beyond Fear and Secrets and Lies, as well as the Blowfish and Twofish encryption algorithms. Schneier has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, has testified before Congress, and is a frequent writer and lecturer on issues surrounding security and privacy.
10:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m.   Break
10:30 a.m.–12:00 p.m.	Wednesday
GENERAL SESSION PAPERS Unplugged Session Chair: Scott F. Kaplan, Amherst Awarded Best Paper! Energy Efficient Prefetching and Caching Athanasios E. Papathanasiou and Michael L. Scott, University of Rochester Time-based Fairness Improves Performance in Multi-Rate WLANs Godfrey Tan and John Guttag, MIT EmStar: A Software Environment for Developing and Deploying Wireless Sensor Networks Lewis Girod, Jeremy Elson, Alberto Cerpa, Thanos Stathopoulos, Nithya Ramanathan, and Deborah Estrin, University of California, Los Angeles
SIG SESSIONS Security SIG Panel: The Politicization of Security Moderator: Avi Rubin, Johns Hopkins University Panelists: Ed Felten, Princeton University; Jeff Grove, ACM; Gary McGraw, Cigital Like it or not, security has become political. Technologists once interested only in how security apparatus works and how it fails need to be cognizant of the ramifications of their activities. These days, announcing a security flaw can lead to personal and professional attack by corporate spin control. Pointing out that the emperor has no clothes can wind you up in jail. Demanding secure voting induces smear campaigns—even in a democracy. This panel is about what happens when security and politics collide. Using particular real world examples, we will discuss the politicization of security. Examples we will discuss include: The RIAA and the DMCA Electronic voting apparatus Compiler flaws and Microsoft security response We will debate the finer points of: Disclosure of security problems Civil liberty and security Fighting stupid security Come join us!
GURU SESSIONS High-Performance Linux Clusters Greg Bruno, San Diego Supercomputer Center Greg is a core developer for Rocks, a high-performance Linux cluster distribution developed at SDSC. "As we give this talk, we will build a new cluster on the fly and in front of the crowd." Participants in Greg's Guru session will walk away with an appreciation of how easy it can be to build and deploy high-performance parallel machines.
12:00 p.m.–1:30 p.m.   Lunch (on your own)
1:30 p.m.–3:00 p.m.	Wednesday
FREENIX SESSIONS
Opening Remarks & Awards Bart Massey, Portland State University, and Keith Packard, Hewlett-Packard Cambridge Research Lab
Invited Talk: The Technical Changes in Qt Version 4 Matthias Ettrich, Trolltech
SIG SESSIONS Security SIG Panel: Wireless Devices and Consumer Privacy Organizers: Ari Juels, RSA Laboratories; Richard Smith, Consultant Panelists: Markus Jakobsson, RSA Laboratories; Frank Schroth, Ulocate; Matthew Gray, Newbury Networks Location-based services, RFID, Bluetooth, and 802.11 promise a more seamless interface between the physical and virtual worlds. Like many information technologies, they have also ignited fears among privacy advocates, ranging from the legitimate and pressing to the fantastical. The goal of this panel is to adumbrate and compare the threats to individual privacy and civil liberties posed by several popular wireless technologies. Is RFID a greater threat to privacy than a GPS-enabled mobile phone? Is Bluetooth an emerging threat? How much do 802.11 devices reveal about you when used in public venues? More generally, the panelists will consider how technology itself can effectively combat the very privacy problems it is creating.
GURU SESSIONS Deploying Samba Gerald Carter, Samba Team Gerald Carter has been a member of the Samba Team since 1998. He is employed by Hewlett-Packard as a Software Engineer, where he works on Samba-based print appliances and acts as the release coordinator for the Samba project. He is currently working on a guide to LDAP for system administrators with O'Reilly Publishing and is the author of Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours from Sams Publishing. Gerald holds a master's degree in computer science from Auburn University, where he was also previously employed as a network and systems administrator.
3:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.   Break
3:30 p.m.–5:00 p.m.	Wednesday
FREENIX SESSIONS Server Migrating an MVS Mainframe Application to a PC Glenn S. Fowler, Andrew G. Hume, David G. Korn, Kiem-Phong Vo, AT&T Laboratories C-JDBC: Flexible Database Clustering Middleware Emmanuel Cecchet, INRIA; Julie Marguerite, ObjectWeb; Willy Zwaenepoel, EPFL Awarded Best Paper! Wayback: A User-level Versioning File System for Linux Brian Cornell, Peter A. Dinda, and Fabián E. Bustamante, Northwestern University
SIG SESSIONS Security SIG Debate: Is an Operating System Monoculture a Threat to Security? Dan Geer, Chief Scientist, Verdasys, Inc.; Scott Charney, Chief Trustworthy Computing Strategist, Microsoft Corporation Moderated by Avi Rubin, Johns Hopkins University Listen in MP3 format Dan Geer's Opening and Closing Remarks
GURU SESSIONS How to Talk with a VC Dan Slavin, Founder, Photolighting Dan is a serial entrepreneur who has built a number of successful startup companies. Many technologists think they have come up with the "next great new thing," but have no idea about the venture funding process. This discussion will focus on how to organize and present your ideas and what VCs look for when they invest.