ARP you going to be there? We R going to have three epoch sessions by Cloudflare speakers. Ifdown, seems apt you could SELECT to JOIN. Cat make it? Not a bg deal, wget it (though it mega hertz we won’t C you). All the audio from the three sessions will be recorded, you can listen to the cd.

WPS! I almost forgot to tel(net) you whois going to be there, and WAN and where to go.

On Friday, March 9, I’m moderating a panel with Emily Schechter from Google, Aaron DeVera from Deloitte and Gabe Kassel from eero about how Wi-Fi networks work and WEP happens when attackers coax people into joining insecure networks. It’s at Salon K in the Hilton at 3:30PM.

On Sunday the 11th, Nitin Rao is on a panel with Heather West from Mozilla, Stefan Lederer from Bitmovin and Fred Benenson from Unlimited Liability Corporation LLC about the impact of the recent revocation of Net Neutrality rules on online video streaming. It’s at 11AM at Salon J in the Hilton. Nitin is really good at putting concepts in a GNU frame, so I expect this to be a bit (g)rate. Whoami kidding? It will be emacs-ulate.

And then on Thursday March 15th, Marc Rogers is giving a talk about how he hacked the Tesla Model S and the current state of automotive security. (The TLD(r) is that it’s a long road ahead, but automotive companies are driven to make it better). It’s at 11am in Room 203-204 at the JW Marriot. He gave a similar talk at Defcon so this is kind of a SQL.

There’s a lot but looking forward to packet all in. IEEE hope you can join!

--

MAR 9, 2018 | 3:30PM – 4:30PM | HILTON AUSTIN DOWNTOWN SALON KShould I Use This Wi-Fi?

You’re sitting at the gate, about to connect to the free airport Wi-Fi when you stop and think. You’ve heard something about insecure public Wi-Fi before, but could using a bad Wi-Fi network really leak your data or let someone hack your Facebook? Just as there will never be perfect code, there will always be inherent flaws in the tools we use to communicate, work and pay our bills. Find out how vulnerabilities in the web are exploited and what that means in the future of our online privacy.

MAR 11, 2018 | 11:00AM – 12:00PM | HILTON AUSTIN DOWNTOWN SALON JFighting the Demise of Net Neutrality w/Innovation

As consumer demand for streaming video explodes, digital publishers are scrambling to upgrade their video production capabilities in the fight for viewer eyeballs. But in light of eroding net neutrality protections, publishers must ensure their streaming infrastructure delivers a stellar consumer experience in order to stay relevant and compete with giants like Netflix and YouTube. Hear from industry leaders on how the war on net neutrality will alter how audiences consume video.

MAR 15, 2018 | 11:00AM – 12:00PM | JW MARRIOTT ROOM 203-204Who’s Really in Control of Self-Driving Cars?

A few years back, I hacked the Tesla Model S. Scary, right? Actually, it’s not as scary as it seems. In this session, I’ll discuss the current state of automotive security as I see it and give a deep dive discussion on where security needs to be moving forward. I’ll discuss the steps needed to hack a car, the cars that are most vulnerable, the security of self-driving cars, and how concerned consumers can protect themselves.

It’s that time of year again, when the end of summer is in sight, students are back in school, football is on TV again, and your social feeds are flooded with “vote for my panel at SXSW” updates. While it feels like our team was just at SXSW, it’s already time to start planning for SXSW ‘16. If these topics interest you, please take a minute to vote for them!

How to vote:

1. Create an account here

2. Enter your name & email address, then confirm your account

3. Log-in with your new account and go to the “PanelPicker”

4. Click “search/vote” and search for presentations by title

5. VOTE!!

***Voting ends on Friday, September 4th!

Just like last year, PanelPicker voting counts for 30% of a panel/presentation’s acceptance to SXSW. Check out the previews of our sessions below. Every vote counts!

1. They’re Coming for our Internet: We can fight backJoin Matthew Prince, CloudFlare’s co-founder and CEO, for a presentation focused on Internet censorship and global security issues. Matthew will share how online censorship varies globally, and how tech giants should collaborate to expand the Internet’s reach, not divide it. He will also cover what your own personal rights are as an online user, and how you can better preserve them. If you're reading this blog post, this is a presentation you won’t want to miss!

Speaker:Matthew Prince, CloudFlare

1. Innovating Like the “Early Days” 5+ years LaterInnovating is easy in the early days--especially without the legacy systems, prior customer commitments, or formal internal processes that come with time. Fast forward and you have more employees, customers, commitments, internal silos, and business goals than ever before. How do you maintain the agile innovation pace you had early on? This panel of builders and visionaries will share how they stay laser focused on what’s over the horizon, avoiding incrementalism. They’ll share how they keep their teams paving the way for others to follow.

Speakers:Dane Knecht, CloudFlareCharise Flynn, DwollaMarc Boroditsky, Twilio

1. PR for Startups: Low to No Budget Tips for TodayLearn how to drive PR for your startup--no matter how big/small you are or what your current role is. Join a former tech journalist and PR leaders from growth-stage and unicorn startups--across the enterprise, on-demand, and consumer technology industries--for a candid discussion on navigating the media landscape. Walk away with tips and tools (even free ones!) to drive awareness and take your company to the next level.

Speakers:Daniella Vallurupalli, CloudFlareJohnny Brackett, ShypMichelle Masek, ImgurRyan Lawler, 500 Startups

1. The New Battle Over Encryption & How to Survive ItStrong encryption is taking over the tech landscape, but it is facing a backlash. Some in government are calling it a threat to law and order and pressing companies to build backdoors for surveillance. Come hear a top developer of secure apps, a major Internet company's policy expert, a national tech business reporter and a longtime privacy advocate talk about what this new "Crypto War" means for the future of innovation, cybersecurity, the tech economy, and your business.

Speakers:Heather West, CloudFlareKevin Bankston, New AmericaMoxie Marlinspike, Open Whisper SystemsJennifer Valentino-DeVries, Wall Street Journal

Please vote and help CloudFlare get to SXSW Interactive 2016! I can already taste the BBQ...

We’ve had the good fortune to share many great experiences with the Acquia team over the last few years. From breaking bread with founder and CTO Dries Buytaert at SXSW, to skiing the slopes of Park City with the company’s CEO Tom Erickson, to staying up late with their incredible team onboarding a joint customer under a DDoS attack. It’s always a pleasure to spend time with the Acquia team.

Today we are thrilled to welcome Acquia as a CloudFlare Partner. Together we developed Acquia Cloud Edge powered by CloudFlare making it easier for any of their customers to access CloudFlare’s web performance and security solutions. The Acquia Cloud Edge is a family of products that protects websites against security threats, ensures only clean traffic get served, and speeds up site performance no matter where visitors are located.

Acquia Cloud Edge powered by CloudFlare comes as Edge Protect and Edge CDN. Edge Protect defends against DDoS and other network-level attacks. CloudFlare sits on the network edge in front of Acquia web servers, allowing early identification of attack patterns and questionable visitors, and mitigating attacks before they reach a user’s site. Edge CDN accelerates the delivery of digital experiences through CloudFlare’s global network with the fastest, most full-featured CDN on the market. It cuts page load times by up to 50 percent and reduces bandwidth. Customers see up to a 95 percent cache hit rate, reducing the number of requests that have to be served from the Acquia infrastructure.

CloudFlare has been a fan of Drupal from the very beginning, and with nearly 2 million sites built on the open content management framework, we are excited to partner with Acquia to provide the best web performance and security for the Drupalverse.

Get started or learn more about CloudFlare and Acquia.

Has your Twitter feed been flooded with “vote for my SXSW panel” tweets? With so much buzz all over the place, we wanted to keep it simple and share all of the presentations and panels affiliated with CloudFlare, in one place. Check out CloudFlare's presentations and panels below. If our topics interest you, casting a vote will take just a few minutes!

1. To sign up go to this link

2. Enter your name & email address, then confirm your account

3. Log in with your new account and go to the “PanelPicker”

4. Click “search/vote” and search for your panel by title

5. VOTE

Please note: Voting ends on September 6th!

PanelPicker voting counts for 30% of a sessions acceptance to SXSW. Our panels cover a variety of topics from a tell-all that reveals the real story behind the male/female co-founder dynamic to exploring ways to protect human rights online. There’s something for everyone so check them out and vote for your favorite! Every vote counts!

Help CloudFlare get to SXSW!

“Lean On” is the New “Lean In”Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare will sit down with Michelle Zatlyn, co-founder and Head of User Experience at CloudFlare for a tell-all about founding a startup as a male/female team. A cross between “The Dating Game” and “21 Questions,” this humorous--yet raw--joint interview will cover how co-founders of opposite sexes struggle and succeed.

Speakers:

• Michelle Zatlyn, CloudFlare

• Matthew Prince, CloudFlare

Fighting Surveillance can be Good for BusinessMatthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare and Chris Soghoian, Principal Technologist and a Senior Policy Analyst at American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will discuss how US tech companies have realized that privacy can be a competitive advantage. They will focus on how building secure products designed to resist surveillance and government coercion can be good for business.

Speakers:

• Christopher Soghoian, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

• Matthew Prince, CloudFlare

How the Internet Works: A Primer

Join world-renowned British programmer and writer John Graham-Cumming for a technical primer on the journey through networks and packets of information. Learn about the Internet’s early years and how it has evolved today, including the bottlenecks and hiccups nobody predicted, and predictions for its future.

Speaker:

• John Graham-Cumming, CloudFlare

We Take It for Granted: Defending All Human RightsWhen we log onto the Internet most of us take for granted the right we have to write and say whatever we want. The Internet was built for all of us, not just the powerful. Attendees of this session will hear from NGO’s, civil society groups, technology companies and victims of online censorship about the biggest threats to freedom of speech on the Internet today. They’ll hear what companies and individuals are doing to ensure a free and open Internet does not become a memory.

Speakers:

• Kenneth Carter, CloudFlare

• Christopher Soghoian, ACLU

• Ebele Okobi, Yahoo!

• Ronald Deibert, The Citizen Lab

A Must for Startups: 10 Tips About Law EnforcementThis panel serves as a practical guide for any startup founder or core team to become familiar with their individual law enforcement strategy. Attendees will hear from experts on every side of this issue to learn how to push back when it’s appropriate, how to preserve a company’s rights, and how to constructively work with law enforcement agencies.

Speakers:

• Jamie Tomasello, CloudFlare

• Nick Grossman, Union Square Ventures

• Nicole Nearing, Kik Interactive, Inc.

• Nate Cardozo, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Anyone Can Prevent Cyberwar-- Here's HowGovernments, cyber militias, and others increasingly seek to exploit the digital security vulnerabilities of their adversaries to cause physical harm including imprisonment, disappearances, and even murder. Learn more from security researchers and victims alike about how these crimes have unfolded and what you can do to prevent them.

Speakers:

• Ryan Lackey, CloudFlare

• Bill Marczak, Bahrain Watch

• Eva Galperin Electronic Frontier Foundation

• Runa Sandvik Freedom of the Press Foundation

David Partners with Goliath: BD Hacks for StartupsThis group of business development gurus will discuss tactics that will propel your company forward and attract the right partner. Learn from panelists who have been building partnerships for their entire careers--assembling some of the largest partnerships in the tech industry. They’ll cover the good, the bad, and the ugly of architecting large-scale partnerships.

Speakers:

• Maria Karaivanova, CloudFlare

• Bob Rosin, LinkedIn

• Niall Wall, Box

• Bernie Brenner, www.truecar.com

Don’t Stand So Close to Me: Engineering & SalesThis panel will focus on growing sales without ruining your engineering culture. Sales leaders from the world’s most engineering-focused companies will discuss lessons learned from making both cultures strong--apart. Learn how to work better together and what fundamental shifts are needed to maximize your company’s potential in the marketplace.

Speakers:

• Chris Merritt, CloudFlare

• Scott Doughman, Yahoo!

• Armando Mann, RelateIQ

• Mitch Spolan, Chegg

This is a guest post from Rodney Gibbs. Rodney is the CIO of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit media organization that covers public policy, politics, and government. He and his team recently supported major livestreamed events at South by Southwest (SXSW), a conference that attracts more than 70,000 music, arts and digital media aficionados.

A few days before the start of the SXSW, I got a call from Hugh Forrest, the head of interactive programming at the festival. The Texas Tribune has worked with SXSW organizers on previous events such as SXSW Edu. Our organization was also recently in the news for livestreaming the Texas state filibuster that lasted 11 hours, gaining more than 200,000 concurrent viewers from 187 countries around the world.

Hugh was looking for help with a couple of events that were sure to be hugely popular - livestreamed interviews of two major speakers - Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks and has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012. Edward Snowden is the NSA contractor who released classified files detailing the US spy agency’s internet-tapping programs around the world. Hugh wanted to work with a news organization to livestream the SXSW interviews so he turned to The Texas Tribune.

On Thursday before the festival, we put together a plan to help us prepare for a super high-level of traffic and being on an international stage. We assembled a team, including our director of technology, Amanda Krauss, who listed all the things we’d need to do to make sure our website was ready to handle a crush of web visitors. More importantly, we wanted to tighten up security and make it difficult for any malicious actors to mess with us.

Harper Reed is an advisor to our organization. In a past life, he was the CTO for Obama for America, managing the website for Obama 2012. We asked him to look over our list and see if he would add anything. He made two suggestions - one of which was adding CloudFlare. It was Friday night at 4pm - about 16 hours before the Assange interview, when I reached out to CloudFlare’s CEO Matthew Prince via LinkedIn. We got a call back soon thereafter and our team spent the rest of the night setting up and testing CloudFlare on our website.

Our hard work paid off - the Assange livestream went off smoothly.

We had a lot of loose ends on our to-do list in terms of security, scaling, and elasticity - for us it was good to have these livestreamed interviews as a forcing function. But we were lucky - we had Harper who had learned the hard way and generously shared what he learned so that it went smoothly for us.

It seems like the going rule of thumb nowadays is ‘Don’t assume you’re not going to get hacked, just assume you need to figure out what you’re going to do about it.’ The hardest thing is to learn something under pressure. We got our security measures set up pretty quickly but if I could offer advice I would suggest doing the following:

1. Implement 2-factor authentication for your third party apps

2. Enforce strong passwords for your CMS and apps users, making sure people don’t use the same password elsewhere

3. Close down ports you don’t need - starting, for example, by closing down everything but ports 80 and 443

4. If you're worried you'll come under attack, put up a static site as your main site, disconnecting it from any back-end databases. A hacked database is irrelevant if your static site is still up.

Finally, we host our website on Amazon’s S3 but thought it would be good to put CloudFlare in front of it to defend against DDoS or other possible web threats and also speed up any content that wasn’t on Amazon. If you implement CloudFlare, the other piece of advice I’d offer is make sure you don’t mistakenly reveal your origin IPs externally (or ‘leak’ them).

On the day of the Snowden interview, The Texas Tribune saw a 10X spike in traffic. Typically 90% of our traffic is Texas, with the rest coming from New York, Chicago, and Washington DC. This time more than 80% of our visitors were new to the site, hailing from over 200 countries. Visitors from the Netherlands totalled more than half of what we saw from the US and the top country list also included Belgium and Mexico in addition to your usual Western European suspects. It felt good to be able to serve international traffic.

We also got a few emails thanking us. One from Brazil said, ‘I caught the end of the telecast and am just so impressed with what you've done and the technology that permitted me to see it! Thank you is not enough to say for your organization!’ That’s the kind of thanks that makes working late nights worthwhile.

We had an incredibly smooth experience, no downtime, no lagging, no security problems - it all went super smoothly. A lot of folks pitched in to make these events happen. I tweeted out my thanks and it bears repeating here.

Big thx to @harper @maycotte @clockwerks @CloudFlare @Chartbeat & @livestream for help w/ @texastribune's #Snowden #SXSW stream. — Rodney Gibbs (@rgibbs) March 10, 2014

I hope you can learn from our experiences and your next major event goes as smoothly as ours did.

CloudFlare is headed to the Interactive portion of SXSW in Austin from March 7-11, 2014. We are very excited to share some of the knowledge and experiences we’ve gained since our CloudFlare journey began. We have five, hot topic panel submissions that are in the running, so if any of the topics below sound interesting, cast your vote today.

About the 2014 SXSW PanelPicker:The 2014 SXSW PanelPicker public voting ends on Friday, September 6 at 11:59PM CT. PanelPicker voting counts for 30% of a sessions acceptance to SXSW.

NSA and the Future of Web Users and Web CompaniesMatthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO at CloudFlare, will join a panel with other industry experts to engage in a frank discussion about the NSA, online surveillance, and the privacy expectations from the perspective of both web users and web companies.

Movies and Music: Always Online EntertainmentNick Sullivan, a Systems Engineer at CloudFlare, put together a panel of experts, comprised of a variety of engineers who have all worked in the trenches for companies Rdio, SoundCloud, Apple and Netflix, to discuss the ins and outs of running a network built to scale for streaming and major releases.

Recruit the Best: Practical Tips to Build a TeamWhether you are a startup, small business or a manager at a large organization, finding and retaining the best talent is critical to your success. Michelle Zatlyn, Co-founder and Head of User Experience at CloudFlare will provide her insights and practical tips for building a team.

How a Partnership Can Make or Break Your BusinessThis duo presentation featuring Maria Karaivanova, head of Strategic Partnerships at CloudFlare, and Bill Lapcevic, VP of Business Development at New Relic, will cover how to build partnerships that rock, keeping you, your partners and your customers happy and thriving. Learn from these industry experts as they discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of architecting large-scale partnerships.

Why, How, and When to Build a SaaS Sales TeamChris Merritt, Sales Lead at CloudFlare, is joining Jamie Sutherland of Xero and Lars Leckie of Hummer Winblad in a session that will draw on sales leaders and experts that have built both inside and field sales teams. They will dig into the vagaries of building and running a sales team including lessons from recruiting, hiring, commission structures, and more.

A bunch of us from CloudFlare are packing up to head to Austin over the next 24 hours for SXSW, the interactive, music, and film festival. We've been supporters of SXSW for a while and helped the festival's panel picker stay online under the crushing load of people registering ideas to present over the coming weeks. Everyone who has visited the SXSW site to choose what to do at the festival has passed through CloudFlare's network and the site has been faster and safer as a result.

It's only fitting, then, that several of the startups launching at SXSW are using CloudFlare to ensure they stay online. One of the fastest ways to stop buzz is to have your site be unavailable. CloudFlare helps ensure that, even if you're a new startup without a ton of resources, you can have an infrastructure equivalent to an Internet giant.

A few of the startups launching at SXSW who are using CloudFlare have contacted us to give us a sneak peak at what they're working on. Some of them are pretty amazing and it will be interesting if the next Twitter or Foursquare emerges this year. I won't steal any of their thunder, but we're excited to help them with their infrastructure so they can stay online so they can focus on building buzz.

If you're launching at SXSW and you haven't done so yet, there's still time to signup for CloudFlare. It takes 5 minutes and even our free plan will do wonders to make sure your service stays online. Finally, make sure you look for us at the festival. We love startups and are always excited to hear about what the tech community is working on.

CloudFlare has been a big supporter of SXSW. This summer, when the Interactive, Film, and Music festival opened its Panel Picker for submissions, CloudFlare helped keep it online under the flood of ensuing traffic. A bunch of folks from team CloudFlare are headed to Austin. If you'll be there too, it'd be great to meet up. Shoot us a tweet (@cloudflare) or stop by one of the sessions our team will be participating in. Here are the four panels and talks our team is participating on.

JavaScript is everywhere from mobile phones and tablets to e-readers and TVs. With such a wide range of supported environments developers are often looking for an easy way to compare the performance between snippets, browsers, and devices. jsPerf.com, a site for community driven JavaScript benchmarks, was created to help devs do just that.

Chris Joel (@robodynamo) from CloudFlare is joined by Mathias Bynens and John-David Dalton from jsPerf.com, and Lindsey Simon from Google/Browserscope in this panel discussion on some of the best dev-created benchmarks and most interesting practices debunked by real-world tests.

It's every engineers dream to work on a company that becomes one of the top 10 largest sites online. This group of panelists have done just that. From Twitter to Facebook to Yahoo! - these engineers, tech operations, and cloud computing specialists have seen it all and will discuss what it's like to scale the largest infrastructures imaginable. This session will discuss what it takes for a team of engineers to scale to an Internet Giant, how it's done, and what the best practices are for making it happen.

Lee Holloway (@icqheretic), co-founder of CloudFlare, is joined by a powerhouse panel including Andrew Terng from Tumblr, Girish Patangay from Facebook, and Jeremy LaTrasse of Message Bus/Twitter. The panel is moderated by Jeremy Edberg, the former CEO of Reddit now responsible for cloud reliability at Netflix.

Ginger Rogers may have said it, but today's female entrepreneurs are proving it. Right now, women are starting and leading new and innovative companies at an unprecedented rate. From e-commerce to healthcare to Internet infrastructure, women are breaking new ground across all industries these days. But, why now? What are today's female entrepreneurs doing differently to build sustainable businesses and get the attention and credit they deserve? What unique struggles do they still contend with and what advice can they share with tomorrow's generation of female leaders? These questions and more will be addressed in this entertaining panel.

Michelle Zatlyn (@zatlyn), co-founder of CloudFlare, is on a panel moderated by All Things Digital executive editor Kara Swisher and joined by Piya Sorcar, founder of TeachAIDS, and Victoria Ransom, founder of Wildfire Interactive.

On Thursday, June 2, 2011, LulzSecurity.com registered for CloudFlare. One hour after they registered, they published 3.5 million usernames and passwords allegedly stolen from Sony Pictures' website. For the next three weeks, LulzSec claimed to hack organizations ranging from the CIA, to the US Senate, to the Arizona Immigration Police. In the meantime, law enforcement, cyber vigilantes, and rival hackers worked to unmask LulzSec and launch major attacks of their own to knock LulzSecurity.com offline. CloudFlare watched it all from the heart of the crossfire.

I (@eastdakota) asked and received permission from LulzSec to tell exactly what it's like to be one of the most notorious hacking groups of all time and how to keep your site online when the whole world is trying to shut you down.

Each year, the SXSW Music, Film and Interactive Conferences (sxsw.com) solicit session ideas from the community for the upcoming event using Panel Picker. After submissions are collected, PanelPicker launches a voting interface that allows the world to pick what sessions they'd like to see at SXSW. As soon as the polls open, there is a flood of social media-fueled traffic and all sorts of other challenges for a small IT team to manage. Earlier this week the PanelPicker for the 2012 SXSW Festival began taking votes and traffic to it was intense. That's where CloudFlare came in.

While the site continues to hum along powering millions of page views, CloudFlare has helped SXSW cut bandwidth use by almost half and substantially decrease the load on their servers. SXSW manages their own system security, so they turned CloudFlare's security settings to a low and just used us for the performance benefits.

You can see the effects of enabling CloudFlare on the SXSW servers for yourself:

The SXSW conferences are being held in Austin, TX from March 9 - 18. Members of the CloudFlare team are represented on four proposed panels, so we recommend you test to make sure the PanelPicker is running fast and smooth yourself by heading over there and voting up the following proposed panels:

• Scaling to Infinity: Dealing with Rocket Growth

• Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Backwards in Heels

• JavaScript Performance MythBusters™

• Surviving Lulz: Behind the Scenes of LulzSec

Finally, let us know if you're planning on attending SXSW 2012. We plan to be there in force and would love to celebrate in Austin with everyone at SXSW from the CloudFlare community!