Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Symbol of Individual Rights

Individual-i.  [Friday, 2005-04-15] In Bruce Schneier's Luncheon speech to the ACM/CFP 2005 Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy today, there were only two slides.  The first simply presented the title of his talk: "Future of Privacy: Rethinking Security Trade-Offs."  He pulled together a number of themes that he's been developing in his writings.  At the end, he put up the second slide, introducing us to the individual-i symbol along with exhortation to check out the enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Voltaire on the rights of individuals.

In the discussion around the symbol being all of ours to use, John Gilmore chimed in that the answer to the question "Who made that symbol?" is "I made it," a wonderful multi-level response.  There's more.  This idea stands out on its own; I want to share it immediately from my hasty unproofed note:

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There was room at the conference, and I'm pleased to have Schneier's autograph on my sticky-noted copy of Secrets & Lies.  OHVI OEEL KBTO.  While in Danah Boyd's great morning session with the teen-agers, I was looking for Bruce, whom I've never met.  I had my eye on a fellow whose beard looked about right but seemed too pot-bellied to me.  I must have made him nervous because he moved.  Later, Schneier was mentioned and someone at the podium looked out to see if he was there.  A woman out the corner of my eye raised her hand and held it over the head of the fellow directly adjacent to me across the aisle where I was cozied up to one of the power strips.  It was one of those days.  Later, when he was introduced at lunch, the host mentioned that Schneier now has eight books.  Oh oh, that means I only have half of them, and I've barely cracked open Practical Cryptography.

One other small pleasure:  I stunned a Microsoft employee by having a Tablet PC there too and not being an employee myself. [;<).

posted by orcmid at 4/15/2005 11:56:00 PM