Talks

Hack the Docs: how security professionals use documentation

We write documentation to help our colleagues and users find their way through our systems - but your carefully-crafted documentation can also help attackers learn what your systems do, and give them unintentional pointers on where to start breaking it.

Made to Measure? The Biases and Boundaries of Biometrics

Smart devices have been permitted to measure many aspects of our everyday lives, but without a strong grounding in the ways that human measurements have been used and abused in a pre-smartphone era, we risk retreading some of the more sinister paths history has drawn us down.

Vampires in the Browser: banishing uninvited Javascript from your web app

There are many sneaky ways that you may find yourself with someone else's Javascript inside your app without realising you've technically allowed it to be there. This talk is here to help you solve this problem.

What We Do in the Shadows

Every organisation's infrastructure has its shadow, the unofficial system of servers, accounts, and hardware that crisscrosses and bypasses the sanctioned pathways. This talk is a space for both confession and redemption: in it, we will delve into the psychology that leads to the development of shadow IT, the opportunities that can grow out of this corporate underground, and how to get these systems out of the shadows and into the light.

Apathy and Arsenic: a Victorian Era lesson on fighting the surveillance state

A tale of a two hundred year old method for fighting the surveillance state, based on the advocacy led by 19th century scientists to abolish the domestic use of arsenic. This talk offers advice on how to help everyday people have more power over their own information and how to sustain hope for the future.

How to Disappear Completely

This talk provides an overview of the latest urban camouflage technology and how to deploy it in order to foil facial recognition. We'll dive into the ethics of biometric identification, the way current legislation affects this technology, and what is needed for facial recognition technology to be both useful and just.

Wildman Whitehouse and the Great Failure of 1858

This is a tale of long-winded rants, spectacular sideburns, and gentlemen scientists behaving badly. It is also a lesson about the importance of honest reflection in technical teamwork.

Rage against the Ghost in the Machine

Outside of 'Black Mirror' episodes and art installations, the question of personal data and digital legacies is rarely seriously considered. This talk is a space to take stock of how the software we write today could be used in fifty years, and what design decisions we should make to ensure we can respect the wishes of the dead.

Scientific hooliganism: what we can learn from the first hack in history

This is a tale of business secrets, flame wars, stage magic, and magnificent sideburns, direct from the records of Edwardian England.