w00t

Another new conference in the fold. WOOT, the Workshop On Offensive Technology is launching this summer in conjunction with USENIX. While WOOT sounds extremely cool and the advisory panel is made up of uber smart people, having six conferences on three continents in August makes for some serious competition for top speakers as well as attendee dollars. WOOT is invite only though, so they might win on leet factor.

Don't count Jeff Moss out though - looks like he is planning 8 (that's right, EIGHT) tracks at Black Hat Vegas this summer. So their cfp must be doing pretty well if they can project that much content with a straight face...

~Elphie

Do no evil. Unless its really profitable.

OEM's have long been known to install craplets that frustrate and annoy end users in order to beef up their razor thin hardware margins. These craplets are difficult to remove and generally not well tested or certified by (insert OS developer here), which leads to the potential for them to introduce security vulnerabilities. But now Google has teamed up with Dell to create Yet Another Miserable User Experience.

GOOG - for shame. You have forsaken users for your own avarice.

~Elphie

words of wisdom from the Frag Dolls

A couple weekends ago I was playing an online game with some friends (hi Vyxxen and Strix!) and we got to chatting about being a girl gamer. One of my friends had just that evening been chatted up by another player, and things started innocently enough. But before she knew it, he was describing himself and asking her for a description of herself, asking if she was hot, etc. This sucks for a girl. There you are, having fun in a game, chatting with someone who you might be able to trade items with or help out on a quest, and next thing you know he is telling you he has great pecs and likes rockclimbing. If you aren't interested in enabling the world of one-hand-typers, yet want to be friendly and not piss someone off who might trash talk you as a bitch in forums and the game, how do you politely get out of this discussion? Really, if you know, please tell me! I don't feel like I should have to pretend to be a guy online to avoid this sort of thing.

Valkerie over at the Frag Dolls has some words of wisdom, but they are more for the guys than helping the girls out of this situation. Check out The Top 10 Most UNORIGINAL Things You Can Say to a Girl Gamer.

~Elphie