Registration is open for the next O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, March 14-17 in San Diego. I’m doing a new talk called, All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites, about sanity in the spam-wars, but that’s just for starters. Check out the partial program grid (which I’m very proud to have had a hand in, as a conference committee member):
- Raffi “Tivo Hacks” Krikorian and NYU’s Tom Igoe doing a double-header tutorial on hardware hacking called Net Objects
- Damian Stolarz explaining how to Hack Sci-Fi Features Into Your Car in a half-day session covering “the basic workings of the automotive electric, audio, and diagnostic systems” and “radio head-ends, touch screen input devices, remote controls, and in car x86-based hardware and software all in the context of a working automobile”
- My cow-orkers Wendy “Chilling Effect” Seltzer and Jason “Patent Busting” Schulz on Endangered Devices and How We Can Save Them — a tour of all the cool crap you can buy today, which might be illegal tomorrow
- My pervy cow-orker Annalee “Techsploitation” Newitz’s talk on How Sex Laws Incite Technological Change which covers “how sex laws have enlarged the demand for technologies that provide anonymous, instant, mobile gratification while also stoking content-providers’ desires for soft/hardware that can control access and quickly identify users by age and geographical location.”
- The wildest researchers at BBC Radio: Tom “Plasticbag” Coates, Matt “Brain Hacks” Webb, Matt “No Nickname” Biddulph and Paul “Also No Nickname” Hammond talking on Reinventing Radio: Enriching Broadcast with Social Software in which they explain some deeply cool, deeply weird shit they’re doing with the BBC’s radio service
- Matt “Metafilter” Haughey on Remixing Culture with RDF: Running a Semantic Web Search in the Wild in which the Creative Commons’s secret search sauce will be unveiled and dissected
- Tom “The British Don’t Really Have Nicknames” Loosemore explains TheyWorkForYou.com, the best political advocacy site I’ve ever seen, in Forgiveness, Not Permission: Retro-fitting the Semantic Web onto British Democracy
- Natalie “Feral Robots” Jermijenko — my choice for real-world cyberpunk heroine — takes us beyond her genius feral robot dogs with Social Robotics, Scmocial Robotics: Feral Robotics and Some Other Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling (what would the opposite of feral be?) Robots: “Feral robots are roving packs of adapted open source robots that are released to investigate contaminated urban sites. Feral robots begin as domestic commercially available robotic dog toys.”
- Danny “NTK” O’Brien and Merlin “5ives” Mann will jointly present their Life Hacks Live work — a book-length version of Danny’s amazing hacker life-skills Life Hacks project, with “a whistle-stop tour through an amazing year in this exploding field: tracking apps that merge the geek’s command-line power with GUI ease-of-use; the expansion of RSS and wiki techniques into frontline organizing apps; the spread of search and script automation onto the desktop; how plain text files are the new rock and roll.”
- Finally, Lee “Jhai” Felsenstein, who pretty much invented the PC, will present on Tech That Helps the World, talking on the bicycle-charged ruggedized meshing WiFi networks he’s sending to Laos. I mean, seriously: LAOS.
Save up to $300 if you reg before Jan 31!
(Thanks, Rael!)