(Image used under: Fair Use doctrine)

The CFP2008 conference is coming up in late May. They're not taking registrations yet, but their information page is up at least. I wasn't able to attend last year, but the 2006 session was very cool.

The conference is the perfect place for paranoid anti-government/business privacy invasion types to congregate and complain as a group. Besides that, there are useful technical sessions about privacy technologies and such. I particularly liked the session hosted by Public Citizen where they described the ways they protect people against companies trying to stifle their free speech online. In cases where a blogger was issued take-down notices by big companies that didn't like what the blogger was saying, Public Citizen took their case for free and defended them. Very cool.

Also of note was the session about RFID where an industry crony "debated" the author of the book spychips (though to call it a debate is laughable). When the crony was challenged about his company's use of privacy protections and he didn't have any good answers for the crowd, he bacame flustered and accused us of being "technophobes" (HA!). What an idiot. But it was very entertaining 🙂

Anyway, if you'd like to meet some of the people in all the various consumer groups who are protecting your rights every day, this is an awesome way to do it.

(Image used under: Creative Commons 3.0 [SRC])

Just spreading the news. But I was also very troubled by this:

"People have been scared out of their minds to speak out about Scientology," said Hill, Miscavige's niece, in an interview. "Nobody should have to be that scared to speak out about a church." Wiseman echoed the sentiment, adding that the Anonymous campaign had influenced her decision to reveal her identity last week. "The Internet is listening. If something happens to me, all of these people will know."