John Benson dot com

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.

While the website doesn’t reflect it yet, I received word that I’ll be presenting at Shmoocon 2008.  I’ll be talking about how the e-discovery process works, how organizations can reduce the cost of litigation, and how truly frightening the security surrounding e-discovery is.If you’re going to be there and would like to get together for a beverage…drop me a line. ###On a theoretically related note, the video and audio for my talks at DEFCON 15 should be available in their RSS feed soon. 

A couple years ago my trusty Dell laptop started to take a turn for the worst. Like many Windows users I could see the telltale signs that things were up. Our old friend, the Blue Screen of Death, reared its ugly head a few times and the system felt unstable in general. This was well outside my reinstall cycle so I quickly ran a full backup to make sure I didn’t lose everything and within an hour there was a lovely clicking noise coming from the hard disc.

I quickly dispensed with a couple first level help desk personnel and eventually found a person with authority to authorize a replacement for me. The drive would arrive in a couple days and as long as I was comfortable with it, I could do the replacement myself. Expecting a long wait without a laptop, I was pretty pleased until I learned the catch. I had to mail the old drive back to Dell for remanufacturing. I wasn’t about to send my drive anywhere, let alone to have my data given to some future participant in a similar process.

I explained that I wasn’t going to have it because there was sensitive information on the drive. Explaining to the support guy that I was obligated to keep the information secret, he put me on hold to find a solution. The only way that Dell would allow me to keep the drive was to sign an affidavit…which was fine with me until I read the affidavit which read that I was a US Government Contractor with classified material on the drive. I had neither.

After some critical thinking by both of us, we came to the conclusion that since Dell was expecting a drive with a mechanical problem that it could be in any form imaginable. This was a great deal because

1. I got my first hands on experience with the inner workings of a laptop hard drive.
2. I found out how hard it is to actually smash platters.
3. Dell got a drive with some mechanical problems to salvage.

Fast forward to a couple months ago when the logic board on my Mac went out. It wouldn’t turn on so the girl at the Genius Bar went right into the paperwork. She explained that if the hard disc had to be replaced I wouldn’t be getting any of my old data back. I asked about receiving the old one for a while so I could try and retrieve the data in that case and she told me that couldn’t happen. I didn’t really sweat that since I had a week old backup at home. Then she brought the house down with this one..

What is your administrator password?

I looked at the other guy working the Genius Bar who knows my background a bit more and we both started to laugh. I needed a new logic board…there’s no reason for them to know any of my passwords…let alone the root. She said it was so they could test it to make sure it would boot. She was sympathetic and we both settled on something random to put on the form.

Is keeping hard drives a security issue as Dave Winer thinks? Not really.

Your machine belongs to the person at the keyboard whether it be you, the Geek Squad kid making $7 an hour and stealing all the porn he can find, or the guy who took your laptop out of the back seat of your Range Rover sporting that trendy Apple sticker.

This is one of the many reasons to use encryption. If I send my Mac to be serviced and the hard disc has to be replaced tomorrow I’m confident that the recipient has access to none of my information. While it’s true that Apple needs to take security more seriously and certainly shouldn’t be asking people for their passwords just keeping the drive is only a vulnerability if you make it so.

Something tells me that Bruce Schneier doesn’t lose sleep over this.