I Am The Cavalry will have TWO DAYS at BSides Las Vegas this year: August 2-3. We’ll be in the Copa Lounge [1] – which I guess technically means we’re the opening act for the Rat Pack impersonators those nights! (Sorry, no karaoke.) It’s a bigger room than last year so more can attend. Let’s try to fill it up and keep it full both days. It’s in a bar, that shouldn’t be hard to do. The full agenda is on the BSides Las Vegas site, [2] below is an overview.

Tuesday, August 2nd, 11:00am – 5:00pm

The first day sketching in details from the past year or two – both within the Cavalry and in the broader world of Cyber Safety. We will cover quiet successes, visible wins, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and where things need to go. We’ve got some really cool people participating in these sessions, such as:

• Keren Elazari will lay out why security research matters for the coming decades, how Hacker Heroes can wield our skills for the greater good.

• Michael McNeil, who is responsible for Philips’ disclosure policy and other industry leading medical device cyber safety capabilities.

• Dr. Suzanne Schwartz, of the FDA who is shaping the entire healthcare industry to be more security researcher friendly.

• A yet-to-be-named congressional staffer – one of many helping us inject technical literacy in policymaking and the public debate.

• We also hope to bring high level White House staff, Members of Congress, and others who may – or may not – decide to introduce themselves.

Wednesday, August 3rd, 10:00am – 5:00pm

The second day will be an experiment to see if the BSidesLV community can bring the hacker mindset to bear at scale. Given several very uncomfortable truths about the pace, direction, and scale of what we need to do, how we can rise to these challenges. When what we know how to do doesn’t work, we must break from our normal patterns and find something that will – no matter how uncomfortable the approach is. We will confront the hard things head on and see who blinks first.

We will have a couple of dozen I Am The Cavalry track passes for those who don’t already have a BSidesLV badge and want to participate (first come first served). The track works better the more time you spend, though it can be experienced in more consumable chunks so don’t be shy if you miss a session or two. BSidesLV this year is more important than ever before, to make us safer, sooner, together.

[1] Copa Lounge is the Nightclub on the Casino level. Yeah I had to ask too. Down the escalator from Con Registration, straight past the bar, past the casino entrance, on the right, before the bathrooms. You can’t miss it!

[2] Add these talks to your Sched. https://bsideslv2016.sched.org/overview/type/I+Am+The+Cavalry