Next Saturday, January 10th CCCKC will be holding a soldering workshop. We will be covering basic soldering techniques and will put together a project…a Minty Boost. This is a little gadget which can be used to recharge USB devices.
More information can be found at the CCCKC blog.
Last week I had the privilege of speaking at the LayerOne conference in Pasadena. Once again, it was a great time and I want to express my gratitude to all those involved in putting the conference on.
All of the presentations are now posted (noid is a DVD ripping machine) on YouTube and I encourage you to check a few out.
This is the first of a pretty decent run of talks I’ll be doing over the next few months. You’ll find some more information below:
This will be my first time speaking at Blackhat and I’m thrilled that they were able to give me an extended amount of time for me to cover my topic. I’ll have a whopping 150 minutes to cover the electronic discovery process from end to end. With so much more time available, I’ll be reworking my materials from the ground up.
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Needless to say I’ve been swamped with work (and usual spring activities) and not much has happened with CCCKC. I’ll be organizing a meeting next week.
It’s my distinct pleasure to reveal my newest project, the Cowtown Computer Congress (CCCKC). This idea has been floating around in my mind for quite some time and circumstances have emerged which will help make this a reality.
Background
Kansas City and the midwest in general doesn’t have the greatest reputation for being a center of technology. This is rather absurd considering the number of technology related companies and projects which are based in the area such as Cerner, Sprint, Embarq and Garmin just to name a few.
What is true is that the tech community lacks organization. There are a few active user groups like VMWare and MacCore but there are countless others which have struggled to get off the ground.
I’ve made some efforts to get a local DEFCON group off the ground, but unfortunately I got busy and things died out…a story which is all too familiar.
The Hacker Foundation’s hacker space initiative has always intrigued me, however lack of local organization and difficulty in finding space always stood in the way.
Opportunity Knocks
I happened to be at StartFest Kansas City a few weeks ago where I had the opportunity to meet a number of individuals who were based in Kansas City and doing some extremely cool things. I mentioned my idea for a hacker space to one of the organizers and he was very interested.
Last week we met and discussed the possibility of getting space within their new technology incubator which will be placed in North Kansas City. I’m thrilled with what I’ve heard so far and they have been very encouraging about the prospect of getting this off the ground.
Purpose and Structure
The purpose of CCCKC is simple:
- Provide a space for local technology user groups to use for meetings and projects
- Support user groups through joint promotion, organization and cooperation
- Improve awareness of the strong technology community in the Kansas City area
Right now I’m thinking that the best way to organize and govern the organization is to have a board of directors which (in addition to officers) is comprised of representatives from each affiliated organization. The board of directors shall have a say in all decisions regarding the CCCKC headquarters such as scheduling, usage of space and access.
Affiliated Organizations
Currently I am looking for organizations who would be interested in participating. I’ll be doing a one man road show of sorts over the next couple months and attending many local user group meetings.
I believe that the CCCKC should be as open as possible to just about any tech related organization, no matter how small.
If you find this first, and would like to be involved personally or if your organization would like to be involved please contact me via jur1st@cowtowncomputercongress.org .
More Information
More information can be found at the following locations:
http://cowtowncomputercongress.org : Wiki for the project
http://hackerfoundation.org : The Hacker Foundation
http://www.hackerfoundation.org/wiki/index.php/Hacker_Spaces_Initiative : The Hacker Space Initiative
I’ll be out and about at the Kansas City Hack Day, this Saturday. I had a great time at StartFest last week, met some great people and look forward to meeting some more this weekend.
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After a little incident with my MacBook Pro, I’ve had to abandon my former PGP key. There are currently some issues with the mail.app GPG plugin and I haven’t tried the beta. I certainly confirm that the latest version of GPG works fine on Leopard from the binary. If you want to get started using GPG on OS X, this is an excellent walkthrough.
My new private key can be found at the MIT keyserver as well as here.
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I just completed the rollover from the old webhost to my new one, Huevia with few issues. I think this host should be much better and work as a long term solution. If you notice any bumps in the road, shoot me an email and I’ll take a look.
Shmoocon was a tremendous experience. I had a great time, met some new people and ate some sushi. I’ve posted a handout to serve as a supplement to the talk itself. Those that attended (or view it online later on) will notice that the slides themselves aren’t worth much on their own so I’ve pulled this together which hits most of the high points.
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When I got to Dulles last Monday I received word from Evil that I’ve been selected to speak once again at LayerOne in Pasadena. For those who haven’t attended before, I highly recommend it. The venue is very nice and Pasadena always has excellent weather. I missed the GSM talk at Shmoo because I was finishing up my slides, but look forward to hearing David Hulton’s talk as well as David Bryan’s which I’ve already heard good things about.
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I’ve been neck deep at work from the firm and a design project that I’m completing for a dear friend of mine, Chris Benjamin, who is running for Missouri State Senate. He’s a great guy who shares many of my beliefs and know he’s going to be a tremendous senator.
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The comments should appear automatically now. I had Wordpress set to keep them all in a moderation queue, but wasn’t receiving any notification that I needed to clear some out.