http://www.coolcleveland.com/index.php?n=Main.CoolClevelandPreviewNotacon3 [I'm headed out to Cleveland for Notacon 3 this weekend, and I'm hoping to see some InfoSec News subscribers in attendence! - WK] Cool Cleveland Preview - Notacon 3 Lee Batdorff 4.05-4.12.06 While Cleveland's business community struggles to find ways to attract technically advanced young people, for the third spring in a row a motley gang of hundreds of computer hackers are coming to Cleveland to attend Notacon. This is Cleveland's own computer hackers' conference and one of only a hand full of hackers' conferences (cons) nationwide. Notacon 3, to be held this April 7 through 9 at the Lakeside Holiday Inn in downtown, is directed by Jodie and Paul Schneider the mom-and-pop proprietors of FTS Conventures conference organizers operating from their Lakewood home. Attending Notacon is to gain snatches of graduate-level education on the cheap between snatches of laughter. The audience challenges some ideas in a humorous free-for-all that seems light years from grad school. At Notacon "class clowns" openly question some presenters and sometimes the presenters get the last laugh on the clowns. Tickets at the door are $100 for the Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon event. Last year at Notacon 2 Paul Schneider told the Saturday afternoon crowd of mostly of men in their 20s and 30s, "This is about bringing a world of people together to help each of us have a chance to be the center of attention." Richard Forno of Washington D.C. is the keynote speaker on Saturday and he has been the sole keynote speaker in three years of Notacon. He is an information assurance specialist who served as chief information security officer for Network Solutions and InterNIC, two entities that have been central to the operation of the Internet. Now a consultant to research organizations, he is author of the 2003 book "Weapons of Mass Delusion: America's Real National Emergency," among other more technical titles. In 2004 at Notacon 1 Forno described corporate digital security as "theaters of illusion." "The self-serving (security and anti-virus) industries are telling us what's best for our society, and us," he said. "It is not in a major software vendor's economic interest to improve systems." Forno is not the only industry-and-government-indicting presenter or attendee at Notacon. Even so the broad base of topics covered at Notacon provides little political dogma. Forum topics include art and music with presenters Laurence Gartel (aka the "father" of digital art) of Boca Raton Fla., and prominent digital musician Joe Canto (aka "Computo") of Los Angeles, plus Cleveland's Cascading Style Sheet guru Eric Meyer. A sample of forum titles: Ethics of the hacker; Brain-computer interfaces; Practical web based multimedia content management systems; How Microsoft is going to die; Building communities in self destructive environments; Computers without hardware, programming without coding; Patch management in a Windows environment; Why your computer guy sucks; Photography, a short skewed history; and presentations on various technical and political aspects of open source code, Linux, computer security and digital privacy. Attendees last year seemed to think that Notacom 2 provided useful connections. "I'm here to find talent," said Paul Bragiel, a video game developer from Chicago Ill. "We have small meetings of hackers with only 20 people in Chicago. There is no convention of hackers near this scale in Chicago." "Notacon has a good 'signal-to-noise' ratio," said Irish Masms an information manager for a defense contractor near Las Vegas. "Bigger conferences are so well known that many people go to be hip and they don't know what's going on. Most people here know something." "I'm too old and stupid to know when to quit," said 70-year-old Richard Baum a retired biomedical engineer from Parma and likely the oldest person at Notacon. "I don't like hanging out at a retirement home listening to people complain about their aches and pains." Mr. Schneider said a total of $10,000 was invested to kick-start Notacon three years ago. The show is produced with the help of 17 volunteers. Ms. Schneider said "when we founded the business we decided we wanted to call this new project 'NotACon' because we wanted to pull away from the technical focus of the standard 'Hacker Con' and instead showcase the social aspects of human networking and the artistic uses of computers." To the Notacon staff and many attendees the Schneiders are known by their online "handles": "Froggy" (Paul), and "Tyger" (Jodie). Both graduated from Case Western Reserve University where they now work. "Froggy" grew up "all over Greater Cleveland" and graduated from North Royalton High School. "Froggy" attracted "Tyger" to Cleveland. While a high school student in Traverse City Mich. Jodie joined the Traverse City FreeNet. This linked with Cleveland FreeNet (the granddaddy of all FreeNets, a prominent precursor to the direct Internet access we have now). In Internet Relay Chat in 1995 she met Paul. They maintained a long-distance relationship through the Internet and telephone calls until 1999 when, partly to find better employment and broaden her education options, she moved to Cleveland. Continuously throughout the conference the Notacon "midway" room features wall-sized video "shoot 'em up" interactive games while lines of hackers at tables ply laptop computers. A favorite Notacon attire are "con" T-shirts. Saturday night loosens up with a variety of entertainment including a techno audio and light show lead by a crew of DJs and musicians from around the East and Midwest. Last year this drew an evening crowd of stylishly dressed Clevelanders attired in something other than T-shirts. Sponsors include Internet services firm N2Net of downtown Cleveland, Rentech Solutions of Cleveland, Sybex technical publishers recently acquired by John Wiley & Sons Publishers of Hoboken N.J., the Hacker Foundation of Stanford Calif. and Bawls Guarana caffeine drink made by Hobarama Corp. of Miami Fla. After launching a mom and pop hackers' conference and staging a small number of other tech-intense events, the Schneider's are charged up to make more high tech connections happen. For more see http://www.notacon.org _________________________________ LayerOne 2006 : Pasadena Hilton : Pasadena, CA Infomation Security and Technology Conference http://layerone.info
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