DivaBlog

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper and my new blog at http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog

Just listening to Cory Doctorow speaking at eTech.

"...We eTechers are the rich hummus on the floor of the technology rain forest...we're the tiny frogs in the bromeliads."

You gotta love those images!

Best sessions from yesterday (for me)...first was George Dyson on "Von Neumann's Universe" telling us about the earliest days of computing at Princeton Institute, when Von Neumann and Kurt Godel were leading literally pouring the foundations for what we call the tech industry today. I'm a sucker for historical pictures, and this talk is chocked full of pics of people from that time (including a very cute picture of George and Esther as tiny children) and wonderful pages from journals and logs which were consigned to the archive where George works now. If you get a chance to hear him, by all means GO!

My other favorite session from yesterday was "How Sex Laws Incite Technological Change" by Annalee Newirtz from the EFF. Really fun and thought provoking session. I was reminded of my time at Apple working on QuickTime Conferencing. We were sure that videoconferencing via IP would really take off as soon as the porn industry got onboard. I loved the conclusion of this talk, where Annalee exhorted all of us to begin to support annonymizing technologies such as Tor (which she thinks will be increasingly useful for safely obtaining legal sex content in appropriately private ways, but which is even more important for people working to overcome opressive information control regimes). If everyone starts running and using annonymizers, then it will be impossible or at least much more difficult to kill freedom of information on the web. So you can do well (for the free world) by doing (yourself) good (as in Good Vibrations)!

I'll try to post more about todays sessions at some point.