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The Place: The Science Gallery
The Topic: Your Digital Rights (with respect to online privacy)
The Audience: Everyone with a vested interest in the Internet, Privacy & Data Protection
The Cost: None. Tickets are free. Get them at here.
Can't Attend: There will be a live stream available here.
The Digital Rights Forum is a public debate where a panel meet to discuss the important issues surrounding digital rights, with each event designed as general over-arching topic and a more narrowly focused subject.
On Friday, the 18th of May, the forum will tackle the issue of Online Privacy.
With our lives evermoreso integrated with the web and social media, staying safe online is becoming something of an increasing concern to everyone. From mobile apps to websites and email, protecting our personal information and online privacy has never been more complicated and more important.
Faced with software vulnerabilities such as the leaking of contacts onto the Internet by mobile applications providers, the increasing prevalence and push to revealing more private and personal information on social networks and attempts by some to protect their businesses through litigation or processes which require the disclosure of personal information, the modern digital landscape has made protecting one's privacy more difficult than ever before.
With this in mind, the next Digital Rights Forum will assemble once more to discuss the current state of data protection and online privacy in the current context of social networks and mobile applications.
Panelists:
Chair:
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“So I was opening the door to the office and something wonderful caught my eye, first crop!”
The Internet is a great force for communication, but something it lacks is the kind of nuanced relatability we humans need so much.
I think any office without any kind of natural infiltration, is lacking some core humanity. Being able to relax is so incredibly important, but when you work in an environment so seperated from nature and life, focused primarily on work and value generation, how can you breath?
People should be happy to come to work, they should enjoy the experience. It was remarked once, by whom I forget, that the ideal office should be one where people would pay to come to every day.
So my advice to you: pets and plants for all. Let people feel a part of nature, let them breath.
I'm pretty utilitarian in my hobby for growing plants, I like them to have a purpose beyond just looking pretty. That's why I focused on edible plants, but certainly there's room for more than that.
The take-home is that people would be better off it they participated in the growth and development of their own environment, and having something touchy-feely definitely helps reduce stress.
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Today, I can confirm that The Science Gallery and Billy Hawkes (Data Protection Commissioner) have both agreed in principle to participate in the event.
I will continue to post updates as they happen.
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Data Points
During the debate, the hashtag #DRF2012 generated 1,737 tweets from 477 users who collectively created 4.3 Million impressions [source: ultraknowledge]
The Science Gallery website received, in just over one hour, the same amount of traffic that it usually receives in one week. The demand for the live stream was so high that it crashed the Science Gallery's website.
The Digital Rights Forum press coverage included The Irish Times, The Metro Herald, Broadsheet.ie, Silicon Republic, journal.ie, politics.ie, The Cork Independent, and many more. (RTE PrimeTime were also present)
For a while there, #DRF2012 was the number one trending topic on Twitter for all of Ireland.
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The Place: The Science Gallery
The Topic: Your Digital Rights (with respect to copyright)
The Audience: Everyone with a vested interest in the Internet & Copyright
The Cost: None. Tickets are free. Get them at here.
Can't Attend: There will be a live stream available here.
The Digital Rights Forum is a public debate in the prestigous Science Gallery on Tuesday 3rd of April at 1-2pm, to discuss the issues surrounding copyright legislation and digital rights in Ireland.
The argument has been made that statutory instrument 59/2012 which was signed into law by Richard Bruton, T.D. on 29th February of this year will curtail access to websites and services in Ireland and may represent a real threat to Irish citizens civil rights and free access to The Internet by enabling rights holders to seek potentially costly and damaging injunction against websites as innocuous as Youtube, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Boards.ie and others.
These issues and more will be addressed by the panel at the forum, with a Q&A session for attendees to directly address the panel with their concerns.
Panelists:
Chair:
Agenda:
12:45 Doors Open [15 mins]
13:00 Introductions (chair to open up procedings) [3 mins]
13:03 3 mins introduction/speech (Minister Sean Sherlock)
13:9 3 mins introduction/speech (Paul Durrant)
13:12 3 mins introduction/speech (Tom Murphy)
13:15 3 mins introduction/speech (Simon McGarr)
13:18 Panel Discussion / Rebuttal (20 mins)
13:40 Q & A [20 mins]
14:00 Finish
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If you are in anyway nerdy or geeky and want to hang out with other people like yourself, take a look at Tog. Hacker spaces often, fill in the gaps which traditional education leaves open, its well worth a visit.
Dublin Science Hack Day
There's nothing really to add here, it was all covered in last week's post. It just so happened that one event spanned two weekly updates.
Although, I must say that It took a couple of days to recover after the 30hour hack-a-thon. Shocker, huh.
Tog Craft Night
More tog awesome with the craft night. People just come in and craft things, I think they were doing knitting mostly this time, but for reasons I cannot go into, I ended up spending most my time digging into MonoTouch and MonoDroid while working on the Tog mobile App (cleaning the git history etc.)
Dublin Beta at National College of Ireland
Kind of bizarre for me.. I have spoken publicly and privately about my issues with NCI at great length so when I heard that Russell Banks of Dublin Beta fame had put together an awesome group where students get together and share knowledge, I jumped at the chance to find out more.
I ended up giving an adhoc talk about getting into mobile app design, from sketching out an idea to self-educating yourself and targeting key skills in the market place. Who knew I actually had that kind of info stored in my head? It was mostly a brain dump, but they were very receptive.
Unity Workshop
The second meet-up of the Unity users group met up for a workshop in Tog, hosted by Mark Ahern of Simple Lifeforms. I don't really go to these kinds of workshops to learn much, because I don't usually, but I do tend to pick up a few nuggets which I use in my own code, or at the very least, makes me think differently about the way I'm doing things, which is invaluable.
I spent most the time listening to Mark while working on my own UnifiedInput class to detect gestures between platforms, which incidentally is coming along nicely!
Tog Wireless Security Workshop
This was a workshop on 802.11x security hosted by Martin Mitchell in Tog. I already had pretty extensive experience with wireless security but it had been almost two years since I last looked into it, was a great refresher and people seemed to enjoy the evening.
We all had a chance to hack into WEP access points, and if we had forever and a day, WPA. It as good fun.
MIT Online Electronics Course 6.002x
MIT has begun its online electronics course, dubbed 6002x (whereas the real world equivalent is 6002). I've only started it so I dont have too much to say about it, but its looking like a great course and I'm having too much fun speeding up the lecturer to 1.5x regular speed. I don't know why, but it makes the content much more digestible at that speed.
There has been some talk that Tog may hold a meet-up for those taking part in the course every two or so weeks to share notes, chat about the course and the usual stuff.
MonoTouch / MonoDroid
Through means and reasons I cannot elaborate on, I was given a copy of MonoTouch and MonoDroid so that I can continue development on the Tog mobile app in my spare time.
Free time is increasingly becoming a rarity for me, but I will endeavour to continue working on the App to a point where at least version 1 can be published in the app stores.
Unite 2012 (Amsterdam)
All signs are pointing to me attending this year's Unite conference. Unite is the meeting event of hobbyist programmers, indie game developers and professionals interested in the Unity3D tool chain. Unity3D is a multimedia, cross platform development tool which enables you to simply and easily create 3D (2D with some 3rd party tools) games and simulations and deploy them to practically every platform that matters: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Web, Consoles (Xbox360, PS3) and so on.
Unity differs from MonoTouch/MonoDroid in the sense that MonoTouch/MonoDroid is targeted at application development, with exposed 2D/Graphics API's if you wish to hook into them, while Unity provides all the tools you need to complete a fully functional game or interactive simulation. So there is some overlap, but not much.
Unity 2012 will be taking place in Amsterdam this year, you can find more information here: Unite 2012.
Enterprise Ireland Competitive Start Fund
So Enterprise Ireland finally got back to us regarding feedback for the Competetive Start Fund applications. Without going into any great detail, the story is that nothing is broken, some items they identified as being items that need work, were also items that I had identified beforehand so I am quite pleased with that. Other areas were scored highly apparently, so I think some further development and another application might be on the cards.
Teneo Ventures
I just learned this morning that my company's LLC has finally been registered with the CRO. I will speak more on that topic when next week's summary comes around.
And, finally
of course, typical developments continue. Work on Fandom and other projects continues.
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