[Watford] [ANNOUNCE] GLLUG Meeting - 12th August - OpenStreetMap, Security, Bash toolbox

[Simon Morris]

Hello,

On Saturday 12th August we have a GLLUG meeting starting at 1300.

We will be meeting in the New Cavendish Street campus of Westminster
University. This is in the shadow of the BT Tower, the nearest tube
stations are Great Portland Street, Warren Street and Goodge Street.
You will find a map at:

http://gllug.org.uk/uploads/wmin-campus.pdf

NOTE: you will need to sign in at the front desk to gain access to the
building. More information is available on our website
http://www.gllug.org.uk

This event is FREE to members and non-members alike. We have 3 speakers
confirmed so far for the meeting

They are...

_Steve Coast_

Steve founded the OpenStreetMap Project two years ago (in fact our
meeting falls on the projects 2nd anniversary celebrations!). He is also
organising Londons first Techa Kucha Night on July 25th.

Geodata such as street maps or postcode databases are generally held in
state-controlled monopolies, restricting the ability of ordinary hackers
to make things and tell stories with maps. OpenStreetMap.org is
developing the software and community needed to create open maps
collaboratively in a wiki-like way.

Maps are made using freely-available Landsat satellite photography and
user-submitted GPS traces with an open RESTful API and four
community-written editors. Maps have been bootstrapped from other
sources including a delivery company that has GPS units attached to its
couriers and public domain maps. Eyeballs and footsteps are used to
refine this data into a usable map.

The first year of OpenStreetMap has seen over fifteen hundred registered
users contribute, a quarter of a million street segments added and 14
million GPS points uploaded from a wide variety of international
contributors. The political and technical stresses and lessons learnt
from the first year are discussed with an eye to a future where open
geodata is the norm. 

-----------------------------------------------------

_Shane Coughlan_

Shane is a political scientist by study, though he has been meddling
with technology since programming stuff on a Sinclair Z80 when he was
eight years old. This conflict of interest eventually lead him to write
an MA thesis on the subject of cybernetic warfare. Shane is involved in
numerous projects, including FreeDOS, Enigmail OpenPGP, WinPT, OpenGEM
and Mobility. He is an associate of the Free Software Foundation, a
fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe, and a member of New
Labour.

Security is a popular buzzword. People talk about Internet security,
computer security, information security. But what is security? More
importantly, why is security so hard to actually obtain?

Some companies would try to describe security in terms of products and
solutions. In doing so they frequently misrepresent security as
something you can buy, something tangible. Security is not tangible.
It's a process. It's something that involves every aspect of how you use
ICT tools. Security is a chain encompassing everything used in the
communication process, and the key link in the chain is you.

I'm going to talk about how we can apply security processes to the real
world for real people. Human interfacing is the key term. It will help
us to get more from existing tools like OpenPGP and to prepare ourselves
for the coming revolution of quantum encryption. This is about building
security processes around people rather than machines.

-----------------------------------------------------

_Greg McCarroll_

Greg is an active member of both the Greater London Linux User Group and
the London Perl M[ou]ngers. He has stepped forward to put on a talk
aimed at the members of our group who have jumped the first hurdle of
installing GNU/Linux and are now looking for the next steps.

A little knowledge of bash scripting and some perl can make your life a
lot easier. Greg is going to show us how he has built a collection of
scripts to handle things like:

* Performing backups
* Running a stopclock
* Launching shells on remote machines on the network
* A video jukebox

His talk will cover topics such as handling variables, command line
arguments and conditional processing.
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