WorldCon, part 4 -- Saturday panels, etc.
Sep. 8th, 2004 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayGot up around 9, and figured out how to use the coffee maker for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kestrell. Even with the coffee, we were somewhat bleary-eyed, so we made a last-minute schedule change, and, instead of going to one of the more intellectually-challenging panels, we went to...
10:00 Neil Gaiman Reading
For the first time in public, Neil read the first chapter (and a bit more) of Anansi Boys. Was *very* funny, and I'm greatly looking forward to the finished book. Which is probably more than a year away, sigh. You could tell it was a first draft, though, as the scenes set in Florida still had lots of Britishisms in them.
11:00 What's Entertainment? -- A Look at the Future
First panel we saw with Henry Jenkins (the Director of Kes' graduate program at MIT). Unfortunately, he was way outnumbered by clueless people. The same tired old arguments about "kids don't read", "literacy is dying", et cetera ad nauseam. Connie Willis had at least half a clue, as she realized that people had been having this argument for several decades, but she still couldn't seem to move beyond it. Henry Jenkins was the only one on the panel who understood that the societal definition of "literacy" is undergoing tectonic shifts, and that "kids these days" are *more* literate than most of their elders in the New Media. Kes scored brownie points with him by bringing up the way that email and blogging are really just letter-writing and diary-keeping, dressed up in new technological clothes, and that (in these forms) more writing is happening by people in general than has for at least several decades.
12:00 The End of Copyright: Can the Arts Survive the Digital Age?
Another Cory panel. Also featured Charles Petit (Harlan Ellison's IP lawyer), who I recommend as a smart guy and incisive panelist. One panelist, Steve Miller, was very strongly anti-piracy, as he is not only a writer, but a small-press publisher, and sees internet piracy as directly costing him money. Cory Doctorow, at the end of the panel, as an almost offhand remark, gave what I thought was a devastating reply: "What's the alternative? Sue your fans?"
1:00 Tradeoffs between Freedom, Security and Privacy
Yet another Cory panel. Yes, Kes was basically stalking him :-) Also featured one of Kes' *anti*-heroes, Joe Lazzaro, who is some sort of tech director for the Mass Commission for the Blind. At one point he was responding to something Cory said, but forgot his name; Kes buried her face in her hands and whispered "I am *so* not with him." Another interesting panelist was James MacDonald, who apparently used to do real-world intelligence work for the military. He had an interesting list of decryption methods, including "rubber hose", "checkbook", and "dumbass", among others. The cogent upshot of which is that the weakest point in a crypto system is almost always the users. Near the end, unfortunately, the panel degenerated into "aren't terrorists evil", which, while true, is not very illuminating.
... and I have to go to a meeting, so I'll stop here for now. Gosh, there was a lot of WorldCon...
kestrell. Even with the coffee, we were somewhat bleary-eyed, so we made a last-minute schedule change, and, instead of going to one of the more intellectually-challenging panels, we went to...10:00 Neil Gaiman Reading
For the first time in public, Neil read the first chapter (and a bit more) of Anansi Boys. Was *very* funny, and I'm greatly looking forward to the finished book. Which is probably more than a year away, sigh. You could tell it was a first draft, though, as the scenes set in Florida still had lots of Britishisms in them.
11:00 What's Entertainment? -- A Look at the Future
First panel we saw with Henry Jenkins (the Director of Kes' graduate program at MIT). Unfortunately, he was way outnumbered by clueless people. The same tired old arguments about "kids don't read", "literacy is dying", et cetera ad nauseam. Connie Willis had at least half a clue, as she realized that people had been having this argument for several decades, but she still couldn't seem to move beyond it. Henry Jenkins was the only one on the panel who understood that the societal definition of "literacy" is undergoing tectonic shifts, and that "kids these days" are *more* literate than most of their elders in the New Media. Kes scored brownie points with him by bringing up the way that email and blogging are really just letter-writing and diary-keeping, dressed up in new technological clothes, and that (in these forms) more writing is happening by people in general than has for at least several decades.
12:00 The End of Copyright: Can the Arts Survive the Digital Age?
Another Cory panel. Also featured Charles Petit (Harlan Ellison's IP lawyer), who I recommend as a smart guy and incisive panelist. One panelist, Steve Miller, was very strongly anti-piracy, as he is not only a writer, but a small-press publisher, and sees internet piracy as directly costing him money. Cory Doctorow, at the end of the panel, as an almost offhand remark, gave what I thought was a devastating reply: "What's the alternative? Sue your fans?"
1:00 Tradeoffs between Freedom, Security and Privacy
Yet another Cory panel. Yes, Kes was basically stalking him :-) Also featured one of Kes' *anti*-heroes, Joe Lazzaro, who is some sort of tech director for the Mass Commission for the Blind. At one point he was responding to something Cory said, but forgot his name; Kes buried her face in her hands and whispered "I am *so* not with him." Another interesting panelist was James MacDonald, who apparently used to do real-world intelligence work for the military. He had an interesting list of decryption methods, including "rubber hose", "checkbook", and "dumbass", among others. The cogent upshot of which is that the weakest point in a crypto system is almost always the users. Near the end, unfortunately, the panel degenerated into "aren't terrorists evil", which, while true, is not very illuminating.
... and I have to go to a meeting, so I'll stop here for now. Gosh, there was a lot of WorldCon...