Imminent Death of BayLISA / July Board Meeting Invitation

[Mark C. Langston]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 12:09:41PM -0700, Strata R Chalup wrote:
> I got a verbal one-line blurb from our backup speaker via cellphone
> last night.  Not even an email, just a cellphone call.
> 
> In 2001 we celebrated BayLISA's 10th anniversary as the oldest sysadmin
> organization, predating the founding of even SAGE or New Jersey's
> venerable #group.  Here in 2004, we can't seem to even get speakers
> lined up more than a week in advance of the meeting.
> 


I've been horribly remiss in showing up to the various organizational
meetings I try to hit, most notably SVLUG and BayLISA.

I haven't given a talk in a long while, but since it looks like three of
the papers I was planning to present at upcoming conferences were passed
over, I could put something together for July.

The presentations were two separate approaches to backchannel
communications; one, working code demonstrating a difficult-to-detect,
difficult-to-block point-to-point covert communications mechanism; the
other, a conceptual approach to sending data through any firewall, even
one that blocks /everything/.  I had originally planned to have working
code for this as well, but various things have pulled me in other
directions, and I never got around to it.

I could speak on covert communications channels in general, focusing on
these two approaches.  I find that thinking about ccc's are a good way
to find nonobvious and/or novel approaches to problems.

Alternately, I could talk about an inter-host divergence tool I'm
working on.  There's working code, but it's rather rough at the moment,
and needs to be optimized.  I was planning on presenting it as a WIP at
LISA, since the paper submission didn't have enough detail for the
selection committee.  It'd give me a chance to present, flesh out, and
discuss the various metrics and what they'd mean for sysadmins.

The other two items I've got on tap (extraterrestrial hackers and
sysadmin documentation) are both accepted papers at conferences, and as
such I don't think I'm allowed to present them prior to their respective
conferences.

(P.S. to src:  I know you hit me up for one of these a few weeks back.
I was meaning to offer to speak since I finally gave up last week on
those papers being accepted, so now's as good a time as any, I suppose.)

-- 
Mark C. Langston                                    Sr. Unix SysAdmin
mark at bitshift.org                                       mark at seti.org
Systems & Network Admin                                SETI Institute
http://bitshift.org                               http://www.seti.org