This month is an OSDClub month, where talks are language-agnostic and of general interest to most developers. Please share widely.
If you’re on Facebook and don’t mind making your attendance public knowledge, please find the event on our page (which will appear soon) and mark yourself as coming, so we have an idea of how many people to expect.
We’re kindly hosted by Inspire9, our lovely venue sponsors, so join us at about 6.30pm at Level 1, 41 Stewart Street, Richmond.
Security, Privacy and Anonymity; When a Little Information Becomes a Dangerous Thing by Ben Dechrai
Security is paramount when communicating online. Closely tied to authentication, we need to know that we’re talking with whom we intend to talk to, and that what we tell each other isn’t altered mid-transmission.
Privacy is required for sensitive transactions. We don’t want our online banking password shared, we might want to keep our current location confidential.
Anonymity is desirable in sensitive situations such as discussing health concerns and battling persecution of religious belief.
You can usually tell when you have one of these three. Secure servers offer security, encryption offers privacy, and relay services provide anonymity.
But sometimes it’s not so clear. Are your details really private? What if someone gets access to the raw data? Can you trust that expired SSL certificate? Who can see your location on foursquare?
Can we expect everyone to understand the implications of logging in to Google whilst connected to Tor? At what point does the obligation fall on the online service providers to inform their users when they’re about to perform a potentially privacy breaking operation?
Do users have a reasonable right to expect all private data is encrypted, and if not, how can we manage those expectations. Who do these users expect the data to be private from; other users, other companies, their spouses or family, the government?
This talk will discuss a number of systems that address security, privacy or anonymity, how they work, where they don’t, and what we can do to help increase the protection our users have.
An Exercise in Database Out-Scaling by Rick Giner
Using a component I developed for the Joomla! CMS called HyperMySQli as a case study (original article on the topic can be viewed here) and potentially also exploring other CMSs like WordPress and Drupal, I’ll introduce the various complications of reading and writing data to multiple databases and how the issue can be dealt with.
I’ll cover the configuration of the MySQL databases and other ways to deal with database scaling, keeping the discussion as language-agnostic as possible for a general developer audience.
Question Time
After our two talks, we have some question time for anyone to talk about whatever they want to (group related) and then head off to a nearby venue for food (if still being served) and drink.
