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**Update: **The mp3 recording of the speech is online Professor, Dr., Cyberpunk (What would William Gibson say) Bruce Sterling gave a speech called “The Hacker Crackdown”, a reference to his 15 year old book about “hackers” and how the ideas and ideals have changed over time. Starting off by comparing the original motivations for “romantic computer hacker” Anonymity, Pseudonymity or a stolen identity. Took place in another space - cyberspace Hacking involved gangs. Loose, laterally organised networks, smart mobs. ...

Elmar Ledergerber, the mayor of Zurich, greets the - not to many - visitors and wishes “happy tweaking” The team behind tweakfest, explains the reasoning behind Tweakfest and what awaits us. The agenda and the goals of tweakfest look impressive. 10 things are going to be premiered, a lot of speakers. Art meets commerce. I’m probably going to blog in german for the rest of tweakfest, because the constant translation between german and english is getting difficult. ...

Tweakfest takes places in “Museum fur Gestaltung” in Zurich. Interestingly enough, at a conference that is about “visions of the digital lifestyle”, there is neither electricity for the audience, nor wireless LAN. So there won’t be a backchannel, collaborative note-taking, heckling, background checking of the speakers or all the other fun stuff that would be possible. Could it be, that “reality of modern conferences” haven’t arrived in Zurich yet? **Update: **Just before I left, there was a WLAN available. Unfortunately, it seemed that it did not allow connections to the internet. Maybe tomorrow will be better ...

Today, Tweakfest starts in Zurich. It’s a conference about “visions of digital lifestyle”. The program reads like a mixture of really boring (“Die Kreativwirtschaft als strategischer Erfolgsfaktor”) to the political interesting (“Totale Überwachung: im Namen der Sicherheit?” - featuring Matthias Leisi on the panel ) to the one I’m looking forward to (“From Science Fiction to Science Facts” by Bruce Sterling ) and then a lot of other presentations that might or might not be of interest ( the new digital home, future of the mobile phone, dancing robots, etc, etc) ...

Laurent Haug of ballpark.ch is organizing a conference called Lift06 in Genva in the beginning of February. The roster of speakers looks promising, the price (CHF 295) looks right and Geneva is only a train ride away. I think I’ll be there (Laurent still needs a Ruby on Rails demo) Technorati Tags: conference, lift06, refactoring, geneva, ballpark

After a couple of weeks of having FolderShare installed on a variety of Windows and Macintosh Computers, I decided to upgrade to the paid, professional version of their service. Foldershare allows you to keep multiple folders in sync across multiple computers. It works beautifully and flawless. Today I wanted to put it on my Mac Mini which I got back from repairs (it’s harddisk had died) to sync back files from my Mac Laptop. ...