Category Archives: Talks & Conferences

Dodged That

Posted on August 26, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

Looks like Isaac is going westward of the previously foreseen track, and we’ll get tropical storm force winds at worst. Right now (mid-afteroon) it is at times very wet and blustery outside — a good day to be indoors.

UM has cancelled classes tomorrow in what may turn out to be an excess of caution, but I think they are still smarting from the day some years ago when they did not close early and staff were forced to drive home in dangerously strong winds. Miami-Dade schools are closed tomorrow, which is another reason I’m sure the U felt pressure to close — many staff will not have alternate childcare on tap.

The result for me is that my first Torts class will not be until Wednesday, by which time jet leg will just be a dim memory. The Oslo trip was physically tiring, but it was a good conference. It’s amazing how many scholars outside the US are interested in ICANN and related legal/political questions. Far more, I suspect, than in the US, even though (or because!) ICANN is based here, and the US government is more than primus inter pares in its oversight.

Speaking of weather, I’m told that I’ve was fortunate to enjoy exceptional summer weather there — it got over 60 every day I was there, and there were several hours of actual sunshine on Tuesday. But it’s true what they say about prices in Norway. Wow.

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Slides From my P3P Talk

Posted on August 22, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

I thought I would post the slides from my P3P talk. I’m not sure if I will write this up into a paper. On the one hand, there’s really nothing surprising in what I’m saying here. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be a paper out there that directly addresses the topic, so there would at least be some point in writing it up.

A. Michael Froomkin, Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P): Lessons Learnt for Privacy Standards (Oslo, Aug. 21, 2012).

I’ve also attempted to embed the files, but that doesn’t seem to be working out….

[gview file=”http://staticd.discourse.net/site/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/P3P-talk-Froomkin-021.pptx”]

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Speaking at Two Events in Oslo, Norway

Posted on August 19, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

I’ll be speaking at two events in Oslo this week.

The first, on Tuesday 21 August, is a workshop on ‘Technical standards and privacy by design — A half-day Internet Science workshop at the University of Oslo. I’m speaking about what we can learn from the not entirely happy history of P3P.

In the second event is an igov2 Symposium on Governance of the Domain Name System and the Future Internet Project. On Wednesday I will be commenting on a paper by Kevin McGillivray about the changing role of the IANA contract. The IANA contract is one of the agreements between ICANN and the US government regarding the administration of the Domain Name System (DNS), and in light of recent changes in their relationship, it is now both the most important and the most obscure of those agreements. igov2, by the way, is short for “Governance of the Domain Name System and the Future Internet: New Parameters, New Challenges”; the conference runs through Thursday.

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Off to Privacy Law Scholars Conference

Posted on June 6, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

While my wife is in Hawaii at the Law & Society conference, I am going to be in Washington DC Thursday and Friday for the 5th Annual Privacy Law Scholars Conference, one of my favorite events of the scholarly year.

PLSC is run by Chris Hoofnagle and Dan Solove, who do a great job. The only bad thing about the event is that every year there are more and more parallel tracks — they are up to EIGHT this year — and I usually want to be be in at least three quarters of them simultaneously. This year I will miss more of the papers then ever before, not only because there are more tracks but because my draft paper, Lessons Learned too Well, was selected (by ballot of the attendees) for the so-called “Encore” track. That means I’ll be one of the six people presenting twice, which is an honor I’m absurdly pleased about. The downside is that because I’ll be presenting a second time, that makes even fewer papers I’ll be able to go to.

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At Cardozo’s “Anonymity and Identity in the Information Age”

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

I’m in New York for Cardozo Law’s Anonymity and Identity in the Information Age, speaking on the war on online anonymity.

It’s a great program, and I’m on the first panel so then I get to relax and enjoy the event.

Travelling here yesterday I learned two things: First that putting your boarding pass on your electronic device instead of a phone is not a smart move. The person in front of me at the TSA line was not able to have his boarding pass on his iPad read by the TSA screener’s machine. And at the gate, the person in front of me in the boarding queue was not able to have her boarding pass on her smart phone read by the gate agent’s scanner.

Second thing I learned, from the French person sitting next to me on the plane, is that a lot of French people with money are investing in Belgium (!) as a form of tax evasion. Apparently, if you buy an asset there you don’t have to pay tax on the appreciation if you hold it 5-7 years. Thus, among other things, there’s a property boom going on with appreciations of as much as 5% per year. (Bubble, anyone?) It wasn’t clear to me if this was legal tax avoidance, or a classic French fiddle, but my interlocutor seemed to think there was an awful lot of it going on.

Incidentally, last night I saw Venus in Fur. Highly recommended. It has three Tony Award nominations. The play is clever — arch at points, but fun and brainy at the same time — and I think that Nina Arianda in particular has to be a very strong contender for her spectacular performance.

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In NYC, a Work in Progess

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Michael Froomkin

I’m in New York for a lightning visit, attending New York Law School’s Internet Law Works in Progress Conference tomorrow.

If I read the program right, I get 25 minutes to talk, and 5 minutes for audience reaction, which is probably the inverse of how I’d wish it were for a work in progress session…

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