I’m buried in work right now, but I didn’t want to let more time pass before posting these photos from Monday’s Tampa Devs meetup, where the topic was AI.
Be sure to scroll all the way to the end to see photos of Vince playing the accordion!
Category: What I’m Up To
The folks at the local news program FOX 13 Tampa Bay must’ve liked my appearance on their series on ChatGPT last month, because they’ve invited me to do a live interview tomorrow (Monday, April 10th) at 4:10 p.m .!
I’ll be talking about conversational artificial intelligence applications such as ChatGPT, their upsides and downsides, and what I and other people are doing to prepare for an age where AIs are commonplace.
If you can catch it on TV or via their live streaming site, give it a watch! I’ll also see about getting an online version that I can post here.
One hundred dollars isn’t a lot of money. But one hundred dollars times one hundred — ten thousand dollars — can “move the needle” for a nonprofit trying to do good work in the community!
That’s the idea behind 100 Techies Who Care. We’re looking for 100 people in Tampa Bay’s industrious and energetic tech community to each commit 100 dollars to these nonprofits:
We’ll gather for an event at Embarc Collective on Tuesday, April 18 at 6:00 p.m. The three nonprofits will make a brief presentation, and after some Q&A, members will vote for the organization they want to support. The nonprofit with the most votes will get $5,000, while the other two will get $2,500 each.
Want to find out more and participate? See the 100 Techies Who Care event page on Meetup.com and register!
I will be one of the 100 Techies Who Care. Will you?
Arriving at BSides
Anitra and I took part in this year’s BSides Tampa cybersecurity conference, which also happened to be the tenth anniversary of this event, and it was fantastic! This post contains my photos from the event.
BSides Tampa is sponsored by the Tampa Bay chapter of (ISC)², which is clever and mathematically-correct shorthand for “International Information System Security Certification Consortium”. (ISC)² is a non-profit specializing in training and certifying information security professionals.
BSides gets it name from “b-side,” the alternate side of a vinyl or cassette single, where the a-side has the primary content and the b-side is the bonus or additional content. In 2009, when the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas received way more presentation submissions than they could take on, the rejected presenters (who still had very could presentations; there just wasn’t enough capacity for them) banded together and made their own “b-side” conference that ran in parallel with Black Hat. From that event came BSides.
Since I work in the cybersecurity field as a developer advocate for Okta’s Auth0 product, I figured I’d take an active role in BSides and volunteered to be a “runner”. I showed up on Saturday morning, picked up my badge, donned a T-shirt, and got to work helping out wherever I could.
The volunteers help run the event, and they help keep it inexpensive (admission is a mere $45, and workshops are $5 each — a far cry cheaper than most tech conferences). They were everywhere, starting with the registration desk, where they processed an amazing 1,100 attendees:
It takes a big space to hold 1,100 people. Thanks to University of South Florida for providing that space: the Muma College of Business. Here’s the BSides map, showing all the rooms and halls where all its events took place:
The sponsor booths
My first job was to check to see if the sponsors at the booths needed anything, which gave me a chance to take photos of each booth.
The Hackerbox booth was particularly interesting to me. I used to be fairly adept at putting together circuit projects as a teenager, having learned from Forrest Mims’ hand-drawn electronics books from Radio Shack back in the ’80s:
They sell a number of kits that let you build projects that will help you learn electronics and better understand the devices that we use daily.
They had a number of kits for sale, including the “Old School” kit, an old-school VGA PC powered by a couple of Arduino Nano boards running Linux:
The “Biometrics” hackerbox highlights biometric identification: face recognition, fingerprint scanning, and voiceprinting. It’s powered by an ESP32 wifi microcontroller and TensorFlow Lite:
They also had some excellent kits for people wanting to get their feet wet with soldering and basic electronics…
…and some kid-friendly kits for budding hardware hackers:
I then toured around the other booths, bringing them water and whatever else they needed. The booths were…
I know Chris Machowski from The Undercroft, the former name of the Neon Temple security guild. I was a student at the first and only cohort of UC Basline, a cybersecurity training program that The Undercroft offered in the summer of 2020. He was showing his gorgeous graphic design:
I also had a chat with the folks at Corellium, whose service provides mobile developers with virtual ARM devices for testing:
I have a great relationship with Computer Coach, for whom I’ve taught Python and JavaScript courses, and with whom I’ve worked at numerous tech events in the area:
Black Hills Information Security:
The STEM room
I then helped out in the STEM room, where Tampa Hackerspace, Scoutlier, and AMRoC Fab Lab had set up shop and were showing young people what they could do if they got into the world of science, technology, engineering, and math. I was great seeing the young’uns get excited about this stuff.
Signs
While in the STEM room, I had the chance to take pictures of some spare signs, all of which bore Chris Machowski’s excellent design for the BSides Tampa logo:
Hacking AWS: Welcome to the Jungle
I got assigned to keep watch over a couple of sessions, including Mike Felch’s presentation, Hacking AWS: Welcome to the Jungle. It covered a number of intriguing techniques for gaining access to AWS instances.
Interestingly enough, ChatGPT turns out to be an excellent tool for doing AWS recon…
…and Mike has an interesting project, CloudGPT, which harnesses ChatGPT to analyze AWS policies for vulnerabilities. We’re getting closer and closer to the world of William Gibson’s “Sprawl” novels, with AI-assisted “ICEbreakers…”
Mike has a lot in his bag of AWS tricks:
Mike has posted his slides for Welcome to the Jungle on SlideShare.
Quick break
I took a couple more photos during a quick break for lunch between sessions.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Once again, I was assigned to keep an eye on the “big room,” where Ken Westin gave his presentation, Down the Rabbit Hole, where he talked about helping law enforcement with technology and OSINT techniques.
He emphasized an important fact: Every contact leaves a trace. This is a principle formulated by Edmond Locard (1877 – 1966), who is considered the pioneer of forensic science. It says that the perpetrator of a crime generally does two things:
- They bring something to the crime scene, and
- They also leave with something from the crime scene.
While this principle was made for the physical world, it’s applicable in the digital world.
Even with over a decade of cameras in GPS-equipped phones, many people forget that smartphone photos have EXIF data embedded in them, which has been many a crinimal’s undoing.
(By the way, if you’re curious about reading and erasing EXIF data from photos, I’ve written a couple of articles on the topic. There’s a Python version and a JavaScript version.)
I rather like this pun on “the quantifed self:” The quanitifed self-pwn. In all the self-measurement involved in the activities that are part of the quanitifed self, there’s the possibility of unintentionally providing the collected data to unwanted parties:
Another slide I liked: The Hierarchy of Data Bleed, a play on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs:
Another quick break
And then, another quick break. I decided to enjoy some “outside time,” where I got to take in some fresh air, play the accordion (video to come), and catch up with friends:
How to be a Whistleblower: Exfiltrating Sensitive Materials Safely
The next session over which I kept watch was How to be a Whistleblower: Exfiltrating Sensitive Materials Safely, an intriguing topic.
Once again, Locard’s principle reared its head: Every contact leaves a trace:
Bawls break
Bawls were one of the sponsors of BSides. I didn’t even know that this energy drink was still around!
A good portion of my job as runner was to move boxes of the stuff from storage into the ice chests scattered about the site. “Gotta move more warm Bawls,” I quipped.
Closing
There was a raffle at the closing session, and while some people had already gone home, the remainder still managed to pack the big room. That’s when it was announced that BSides has 1,100 attendees out of 1,400 registrants. Nicely done!
Afterparty
It’s not a true tech event without an afterparty, and BSides did not disappoint. AWS sponsored the shindig, which took place at the nearby World of Beer, and it gave me a chance to catch up with more people.
BSides Tampa was an amazing event, and I hope to up my involvement in next year’s edition. Maybe I should talk to Okta about sponsoring it…
Thank you, BSides Tampa Krewe!
Thanks to the BSides volunteer Krewe and their leader, Elvira Reyes, for letting me join in the fun! I hope to see you — and be among your number — next year!
A few weeks ago, Kristin Moore from Fox 13 News Tampa reached out to me and asked if I’d like to be part of a story they were doing on ChatGPT. I said “yes,” they dropped by my home office to interview me, and you can see the result, which aired on Monday evening:
I appear in two segments of the piece, along with:
- Local realtor Chris Logan, who’s been using ChatGPT to speed up the (presumably tedious) process of writing up descriptions of houses for sale
- University of South Florida associate director of the School of Information Systems and Management Triparna de Vreede, who talked about its possible malicious uses and what might be possible when AI meets quantum computing.
- IP lawyer Thomas Stanton, who talked about how AI could affect jobs.
Watching the segment, it occurred to me that I need to light my office the way that the news crew did for the segment — it’s got such a great “cinematic hacker” vibe!
Also: My thanks to Kristin Moore for inviting me to be part of the piece!
The 5th annual Python Web Conf — an online conference for mid-level to advanced Python developers — takes place next week, from Monday, March 13th through Friday, March 17th. Not only is Auth0 by Okta (where I work) one of the sponsors, but I’ll be in attendance!
My teammate, Jessica Temporal, will deliver one of the keynotes on Monday, March 13th at 1:00 p.m. EDT (UTC-4, and yes, we’ll have just moved to Daylight Saving Time). Her keynote is titled Go With the Flow, and it’s about authentication and authorization flows, which happens to be something that we in Okta and Auth0 are pretty good at.
Juan Cruz Martinez and I will also be in attendance and available for chats throughout each conference day and during the Zoom Breakout Rooms sessions at the end of each of days 1 through 4 — Monday, March 13th through Thursday, March 16th.
Want to find out more about Python Web Conf 2023? How about checking out these 90 videos from Python Web Conf 2022? You’ll find all sorts of topics covered, from the nuts and bolts of the Python programming language, libraries, and tools, but also subjects such as CI/CD, data science, machine learning, better processes, writing documentation, and how to be a better programmer.
As for this year’s conference, Python Web Conf 2023 has 5 tracks:
- App Dev
- Cloud
- Culture
- PyData
- Tutorials
See their schedule for more details.
Tickets are:
- US$199 if you’d like to attend live, be able to join tutorial sessions, partake int he online social events and have exclusive access to the recordings for 90 days.
- US$100 if you only want post-conference videos available to you for 90 days after the event.
- There’s also a grant program if you need assistance.
- Videos of the sessions will be posted publicaly on YouTube following the 90-day period.
Last night, which was also the last night in February, the Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer meetup took place in Seminole Heights at the Corner Club.
Anitra and I arrived a little bit before the starting time, 6:00 p.m., and had the back patio all to ourselves:
The crowd arrived soon after, the sun set, and we got down to the business of talking about all sorts of things, from ChatGPT to a business idea so crazy it just might work to Tampa’s growing scene of tech events to cycling clubs to music, and so on.
Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer is a pretty good summary of what this meetup group is all about. There are no presentations, lectures, or workshops. Instead, it’s just people getting together at an interesting Tampa Bay venue, tasting what comes out of the taps and kitchen, and talking about what interests us, what we’re working on, and what we’d like to work on.
I like to refer to the meetup’s general philosophy as “All conversations, no presentations.” The goal is to make new friendships and maintain current ones, exchange information, help each other solve problems, and if we’re really lucky, Tampa Bay’s next great endeavor — maybe a technological one, maybe a creative one, maybe even both — will come about because people met here.
The Corner Club is one of Seminole Heights’ many hidden gems. They’re a neighborhood café with lots of great food prepared from scratch (we recommend the papas bravas potatoes), an interesting drinks selection — with and without alcohol, including some really good coffee — and even local artists’ works on the wall for sale. I really like their outdoor space in the back, which is generally where we hold events when we’re there.
We hold Coders, Creatives, and Craft Beer meetups monthly, and we’ll announce the March event shortly. Thanks to everyone who came out last night — and yes, we’ll have more get-togethers soon!