DragonCon 2001: Electronic Frontiers Forums:
Confirmed Guests and Bio's

"The Electronic Frontier": Where technology, politics, and online culture meet.

Friday, August 31 - Monday, September 3, 2001
Director: Scott Jones (scott@aprr.org)

Click here to go the main page.

Brent Allison holds an Master's in Education from Clemson University and is currently a doctoral student at the University of Georgia in the department of Social Foundations of Education. His research interests are in computers and the Internet and their social and policy impacts on schooling. He has been involved with Southeast 2600 for two years, a group that has served as the inspiration for his doctoral studies.

Dayna Baldwin is a self-proclaimed girl gamer geek who discovered the joys of Multi-User Dungeons and Multi-User Shared Hallucinations in 1995. She has participated in everything from playing, to staffing, to building grids in a huge varriety of MUSHes, from well established and largely populated games to games just getting off the ground.

Dave Bruzzone is a senior software engineer at Level(3) Communications, Inc. where he is part of the team that writes and maintains the company's Web-based provisioning software. This software is written in Java, and uses enterprise Java technologies, as well as a number of Web-based user interface technologies. Dave specializes in rich-client, and Web-based user interface development.

He also has a background in system/network administration and consulting. As a consultant, Dave wrote enterprise applications in Java. He has also taught a graduate-level distributed object system development class (using Java and CORBA) at the University of Colorado at Denver.

Dave uses Perl to make both his professional and personal life easier.

Hans K. Klein is Assistant Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also Chair of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), where he leads the Civil Society Democracy Project (CivSoc).

Klein's research interests include the democratic uses of the Internet, the governance of the Internet (notably ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), and the political shaping of technology development. Other systems about which he has written include local cable television networks, Intelligent Transportation Systems, the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC), and the Space Shuttle.

Prof. Klein received a Ph.D. in 1996 from MIT's Dept. of Political Science and Program in Technology, Management and Policy; an M.S. in 1993 from MIT's Technology and Policy Program; and a B.S.E. in 1983 from Princeton University's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has also studied at the Technical University of Munich and served as a visiting researcher at the Ecole des Mines in Paris.

Matt Pavlovich is the founder of OpenDVD.org and linuxvideo.org. He is involved in creating a freely available DVD/video player for the Linux operating system. Matt was sued in California court for creating an open source DVD player. The movie industry argued that creating any open source DVD playing software was a violation of the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and that any such software could be used to promote DVD piracy. Matt also testified as an expert witness in the case of Universal v. Reimerdes, where 2600 Magazine is accused of publishing and linking from their web site to freely available source code that can play DVD's on Linux. Matt contends that he has published his Linux DVD players solely for the purpose of allowing computer users to view their legitimately purchased DVD's on the Linux operating system.

John Pierce is a QA engineer for Internet Security Systems here in Atlanta. John is on the development team for RealSecure - the industry leading intrusion detection suite. In this role, John performs such actions as performance testing, decode testing, finding vulnerabilities/bugs in pre-release versions of RealSecure, writing test tools, and handling escalations from partners.

In addition to his work on RealSecure, John has done several special projects for ISS over the last two years. These projects have included training partner's QA and support personnel on RealSecure, doing research on distributed denial of service tools, making deployment suggestions for large customers, analyzing customer data to determine if attacks had occurred on their networks, and securing Networld Interop in 2000.

Prior to coming to ISS, John was a network consultant and is a former member of the US Army Signal Corps. He has a heavy Unix background, MCSE, and is an expert in firewalls, intrusion detection, and network security. To find out more about ISS or RealSecure, please visit the ISS website at www.iss.net.

Originally from Australia, Elizabeth Reid Steere now lives in California. Her research at the University of Melbourne and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology concentrated on the sociology of online communication. Since moving to the US she has worked as a consultant. Her work has included studies of chat program usage for Microsoft's research division, and she has acted as an expert witness in criminal cases involving online communication.

Mr. Wellborn has handled a number of high-profile cases involving unsolicited commercial e-mail (pejoratively known as "spam"). In 1998, he obtained a $2 million judgment against Cyber Promotions (the most prolific spammer in the country) on EarthLink Network. Earlier this year, he negotiated a landmark spam-related settlement in which all ISP's and Internet users worldwide were protected as express third-party beneficiaries from the future misconduct of a prolific and well-known spammer. Mr. Wellborn has substantial trial, arbitration, and mediation experience. His interest in technology began with his degree in Information and Computer Science from Georgia Tech, where he now teaches a course on Internet Law. Mr. Wellborn's practice focus combines "traditional" litigation, intellectual property issues, and general corporate advice. Mr. Wellborn also served as a Technology Advisor to the late Senator Paul Coverdell.