(ComputerSecurity) Conference Collecting

We wanted to quickly announce the availability of http://cc.thinkst.com (a resource in need of it’s own domain & a better name.)

CC is a simple application that aims to give us a single point where one can search and browse infosec conference talks and materials*.

Quick Overview
One of the cool things about having all of this data in a central db is that we are just as easily able to search by topic (http://cc.thinkst.com/searchMore/foo/) as we are by speaker (http://cc.thinkst.com/searchMore/halvar/)
Finding a speaker we are interested in, allows us to see all the talks (we know about) he has given (http://cc.thinkst.com/speaker/Flake/Halvar/)
And also allows us to get a good overview of his public research timeline (http://cc.thinkst.com/speaker/Flake/Halvar/timeline/)

One of the “funner” things is the ability to see who the speaker has previously (publicly) collaborated with (http://cc.thinkst.com/speaker/Flake/Halvar/links)

This allows you to go from topic, to speaker to birds of a feather. Where the info is available, we can easily go from halvar to zynamics to “who else from zynamics has spoken (and on what?)”

With quality input data, and solid pointers to the original content, we would be able to move more easily towards a much needed infosec siteseer of sorts (and there’s a wealth of interesting meta information just waiting to be examined).

All projects like this start with good intentions and their utility tapers off as the members stop updating it (and we are all probably slightly poorer for it). The good news is that this doesn’t have to happen here. We approached a handful of conferences already who have agreed to climb aboard. They get an uber simple upload form, and a csv’ish template. Before (or just after) a conference, they upload speakers.csv and CC will add/index/process it. CC will still link to the original content on their sites (so CC becomes a good way for people to make their /archives more useful.)

(So far we have only spoken to BlackHat, SysScan, BruCon, Hack in the Box & ZaCon )

Check out the site. if you see broken data, use the form to submit a patch. If you run a conference or know people who do, please kick us their details, we would love to talk to them...

* We initially built cc with a whole bunch of scraping (which would account for it’s occasional spulling-errers, but feedback and conference organizer involvement is changing that.)