Archive for September, 2007

Refresh DC September follow-up

Friday, September 21st, 2007

I wasn’t able to attend the rescheduled CapSecDC last night because I was already booked for this month’s Refresh DC. I’ve already commented on the main presenation, but some other interesting bits came out of the evening:

Please check out the community and WidgetDevCamp if you’re interested in these things. It’s good to see the moment of BarCamp DC continuing on. And mark your calendars for November!

Wondering about Widgets

Friday, September 21st, 2007

Last night’s Refresh DC meeting was on the topic of “Web Widgets.” Will Meyer of Clearspring gave a good overview of “Web Widgets,”giving a rundown of the what/where/when/why/how of the web widget world today. Try saying that five times really fast!

One of the biggest issues with discussing this topic, seems to be that there really isn’t a good definition for “what is a widget?”

For the uninitiated, web widgets are tiny websites, bits of web code, or web applications, designed to be virally distributed among or on other websites. Widgets are more of a class of objects than an anything easily defined by a standard, and the reason why they are hard to define actually seems fairly clear to me after a little reflection, along with the staggering implications they have to the “next generation” of the web.

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CapSecDC Reminder — date change for September

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

For those of you interested in CapSecDC this month, a reminder it’s been moved up a week. CapSec DC for September of 2007 is going to be held on Thursday, September 20th this month.

CapSecDC
Thursday September 20th, 7:30 PM

The Brickskellar
1523 22nd St NW
Washington DC 20037

This is a deviation from our usual “Last Thursday” policy, but hopefully it will only be for this month. Please check or post to our current thread  on the citysec.org forums, and post if you think you can make it.

Also, I promise to try to have the official CapSecDC site up before October’s meeting.

CapSec follow up and more

Monday, September 3rd, 2007

So, last Thursday proved to be very fruitful — CapSec was great, and afterwards I made over to the nclud After After Party . . . Sort of a additional follow-on to BarCampDC and its after party. I really enjoy the facets of having a foot in both worlds now, both that of information security and application creation, and want to try to continue to bridge the gap between the two worlds. For most of their existence, the two camps have each viewed the other in an adversarial manner, when really they should be complimentary, and I think that evangelizing that is emerging as my new goal in life.

I get to play the catty blog-o-sphere game here and comment on an apparent incorrect observation of my intentions by some parties — during the course of the nclud event, someone who also frequents OWASP list stated loudly for the gathered throng that I had called developers “stupid” in a recent missive to the OWASP DC mailing list. So, to set the record straight, here is the exact statment from my email:

It is all to easy for security folks to dismiss developers as “stupid,” when in fact the world looks very different from their point of view, and often they are not stupid, just focusing on very different sets of priorities.

This also came in the midst of a paragraph discussing outreach from the security community to the development community, but I guess if you want to dig dirt, you’re going to ignore the context.

I’ll be pretty busy with work for the next few weeks, but if any of the CapSec folks wish to sound off, I’ll try to get a web site up before the next meeting so that we at least have somewhere to point to.