SecurityBSides in San Francisco on March 2nd and 3rd held at Parisoma was an experience that those in attendance will not soon forget. This is not for the reasons of Andrew Hay’s opening slide with his pink dress, but for a community of security professionals sharing and collaborating in a fresh new way from the vendor is king conference that was across town. What makes this conference so very different is the interaction at a granular level that the attendees can have with the speakers and sponsors. Not only are the actual talks much more interactive, but the sponsors who are in attendance can actually interface with the attendees and understand their needs as well as have the opportunity to convey their message in a conversation, not an expo-floor 5 minute pitch.

Some of the talks that were covered over the 2 days of the event are listed here.

Media coverage of SecurityBSides here.

Thank you to the vendors & volunteers that made this event possible!

Upcoming SecurityBSides Events:

March 13, 2010 - BSidesAustin – “Keep Security Weird” – Coinciding with SxSW Interactive

April 24-25, 2010 - BSidesBoston – weekend after SOURCE Boston.

July 29-30, 2010 - BSidesLasVegas – coinciding with Black Hat / Defcon

Here are some highlights from SecurityBSides San Francisco acquired using the ancient art of screen capture from the Flickr streams of Jack Daniel and Vissago.

Even though I see the resemblence to ‘Facebook’ meme’s in this, I think that Andrew Hay had a great idea with this! I’m going to keep mine a little more professional-ish related, but it’s a great way to learn oddities about people within my professional-social network.

Without further a due: The Andrew Hay “5 Things You Might Not Know About…” project.

The rules:

1. Create a blog post with the title “5 Things You Might Not Know About YOURNAME” (where YOURNAME is your first and last name).
2. List 5 things that people may or may not know about you (it can be anything really).
3. “Tag” 5 other people to do the same via the blog post, twitter, facebook, or all of the above.
4. See what happens.

So here are the 5 Things You Might Not Know About Erin ‘SecBarbie’ Jacobs:

1. I taught myself to read and type in HEX in college in order to talk about my professors while in class. (I’m not nearly as fluent as I used to be, but I should practice.)
2. I only function on 2 – 4 hours of sleep or 7-9 hours of sleep… anything in-between that and I’m worthless.
3. I used to write text files (stories <wink-wink>) to upload to BBS’s to gain DL credits. This was all well and good until my mother found some print-outs of them and told me after-school that she ‘disposed of some writings of mine’
4. I used to be a ballerina, took ballet, jazz, tap, and modern dance from age 3 until I was 15 (I hated it).
5. I don’t drink soda at all.

Hopefully this gets the ball rolling. I’m going to tag the following people in the hopes that they join in on the insanity: Damon Cortesi, Ed Bellis,  Zach Lanier, Nicolle Neulist, and Jack Daniel.