Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup - January

Los Angeles Hacker News Meetup is back, with a great line up of speakers and an opportunity to share what you've been hacking on.

The format is changing just a bit, whereby free beer and plenty of time before the talks will give everyone a change to hang out, presentations will be a bit shorter, and there will be a hack-and-tell at the end. We'll still head to the bar after the event to continue to share ideas.

Planned talks:

Joe Rozner: Playing Safe in the Node.js Sandbox

Sean McDonald: Case Study of an Art-Up: Startup thinking applied to an art project

Eric Gradman: Face Replacement Synthesis

Talk Details:

Joe Rozner: Playing Safe in the Node.js Sandbox

Running untrusted code is always a difficult problem to deal with. This talk will explore some of the potential problems that result from doing this including: resource starvation, data security, remote code execution, and unintended network access. It will then explore some of the design decisions of Node.JS and show how these can be used to help provide methods to sandbox code to prevent these types of attacks, ending with an explanation of some of the limitations of this technique and possible other solutions.

Joe Rozner is software engineer and infosec enthusiast. He's been building web applications for the past six years using technologies such as ruby on rails, node.js, backbone, and more. He's regularly competes in CTFs and has run the Open CTF competition at DEFCON, one of the worlds largest hacker conventions, for the last three years.

Joe Rozner ( http://www.deadbytes.net/ )

Sean McDonald: Case Study of an Art-Up: Startup thinking applied to an art project

The COLORBOX Project captures extraordinary portraits of people telling stories with gesture, expression and fabric art; we aggregate the data across the 2500 portraits we've taken so far to reveal trends and insights about how people emotionally associate with color. Hosts and supporters of the project have included Stanford's d.school, Mindshare LA, Coke, Intel, The City of Los Angeles and more. The project is carefully designed to build tech and value like a startup, even though the product we deliver is art. In our next stage, we'll also provide educators curriculum to use art to teach science - that's our secret sauce.

Sean is a software product designer who focuses on finding and telling the human stories in large and complex data sets. He has worked on a variety of data visualization projects and platforms and for five years ran a funded social network analysis consulting firm. He's a cofounder of The COLORBOX Project, which is pioneering the collection of "storydata" and has been successful in telling stories on The Moth radio show (NPR) and most recently won The Civic Data Challenge (Knight Foundation) along with colleague Will DeKrey.

Color Box ( http://www.colorboxproject.com/ )

Eric Gradman - Face Replacement Synthesis

We really aren't sure what Eric's talk will be about. Of course, if you know Eric, you know that its completely normal to be surprised..and that it will be pretty cool!

Eric Gradman ( http://www.gradman.com/ )

Hack and Tell

Have you been working on a project in your spider hole for months? Do you have a secret stealth idea that is ready for the world? Do just want some good old fashioned opinionated feedback from your peers?

This is the forum!! You'll have about 5 mins to take the stage and demo/show/share your project. Please let the organizers know prior to the event.