[ISN] The HacKid Conference: A kid-friendly idea whose time has come

http://www.csoonline.com/article/592818/The_HacKid_Conference_A_kid_friendly_idea_whose_time_has_come

By Bill Brenner
Senior Editor
CSO
May 06, 2010 

I go to a lot of security conferences, almost always without my family 
in tow. The logistics and money involved with trekking them from one 
part of the country to the next is usually beyond my resources. But when 
a conference is local and there's something in it for the kids, I'm in 
100 percent.

Last month's SOURCE Boston and Security B-Sides conferences coincided 
with school vacation, which put me in a bind. Fortunately, the security 
community is very kid-friendly, and nobody minded when I brought Sean 
and Duncan to B-Sides. In fact, I think the hackers enjoyed their 
antics.

At B-Sides one of the first speakers was a young security practitioner 
talking about the challenges of people his age breaking into the 
industry and finding the right combination of employment and respect. 
While I was getting inspired to write "How young upstarts can get their 
big security break in 6 steps" during that talk, Cisco cloud security 
guru Chris Hoff was getting a blast of inspiration from his children's 
adventures at SOURCE a couple days before. The result is a concept any 
security practitioner-parent should embrace.

On the HacKid Conference website, Hoff explains the idea:

"The gist of the idea for HacKid (sounds like 'hacked,' get it) came 
about when I took my three daughters aged 6, 9 and 14 along with me to 
the Source Security conference in Boston. It was fantastic to have them 
engage with my friends, colleagues and audience members as well as ask 
all sorts of interesting questions regarding the conference. It was 
especially gratifying to have them in the audience when I spoke twice. 
There were times the iPad I gave them was more interesting, however."

The idea is to provide an interactive, hands-on experience for kids and 
their parents which includes things like:

[...]


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