Tristan Henderson

We spent our winnings from the Thales Prize on a Christmas lunch for our research group at Jahangir. Thank you Thales! Yi especially enjoyed his first taste of Da Bomb.

I am programme co-chair of the 6th International workshop on Wireless Network Measurements (WiNMee 2010) along with Henrik Lundgren. WiNMee is becoming quite a long-running wireless measurement workshop, which indicates that this field is still of interest to the research community. Good, because there are lots more data to collect (and to add to our data archive!). WiNMee 2010 will be co-located with WiOpt 2010 in Avignon. More details to come. Please consider submitting something!

I think I am a bit late to the party when it comes to this ad, but in my defence I don’t watch that many telly adverts. Anyway, I thought it was quite funny. Even though it is not particularly likely that I will buy the Sun. Or an iPhone, for that matter.

By now everyone must be sick of hearing about Facebook’s widely-criticised new privacy settings. So rather than add my 2p, I will point to some interesting posts from the blogosphere:

• The EFF explain the changes
• Joseph Bonneau reminds us that it is our social networks that are the most important data to keep private
• Ian Brown points out that it’s not all bad, as users now have more control over those annoying Facebook applications
• The Joy of Tech explains Facebook’s Newspeak
• Danny Sullivan compares Facebook to Microsoft (strange, because Google and Apple would be the far more obvious choices for “evil” corporation these days) and demonstrates the mess that the current Facebook privacy settings have become

Hopefully our PVNets project will help design privacy settings that actually reflect what users, rather than online social network operators, desire.

UPDATE: Facebook have backtracked and now provide some functionality for hiding your list of friends.

Who do you trust? Hubba hubba hubba! Money money money!

The web page for the 3rd International Conference on
Trust and Trustworthy Computing, Trust 2010, of which I am a TPC member, is now available. Please consider submitting something!

Fehmi and I went to Glasgow today to attend the finals of the Thales Scottish Technology Prize. Out of 37 entries, only 7 made it to the finals, so we were very pleased that our PVNets-funded SenseLess system for energy-efficient mobile sensing made the cut. Unfortunately, we did not take home the £25,000 first prize, but we did get £250 and a free lunch! So thank you Thales! We also met several interesting people from other Scottish universities and from Thales, so it was a good day out.

We were not permitted to take mobile phones or cameras on site, hence the outdoor photos. We did have some suitably cheesy photos taken by a professional photographer, so I shall post those when they arrive.

Our MobiSys workshop proposal has been accepted, which means that Pablo Vidales and I are co-chairing HotPlanet 2010, the Second ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Planet-Scale Measurement. It will be held with MobiSys in San Francisco in June. Please consider submitting something! More details to follow as we confirm them.

My new desktop PC arrived today. It is an Acer “nettop” – dual-core Atom, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD. It is less powerful than our student machines (!) but should be fine for my purposes. Ignore the Windows 7 sticker in the photo – I have wiped the hard disk and installed Karmic.

Can anybody hear me? Trying out the School’s new blogging service.