Frustrated by distracted workers so plugged in that they tune out in the middle of business meetings, a growing number of companies are going “topless,” as in no laptops allowed. Also banned from some conference rooms: BlackBerrys, iPhones and other personal devices on which so many have come to depend…

But as laptops have gotten lighter and smart-phones even smarter, people have discovered a handy diversion, making more eye contact these days with their screens than one another. The practice became so pervasive that Todd Wilkens turned to his company blog to wage his “personal war against CrackBerry…”

His San Francisco design firm, Adaptive Path, now strongly encourages everyone to leave their laptops at their desks. His colleague, Dan Saffer, coined the term “topless” as in “laptop-less.” Also booted are mobile and smart-phones, which must be stowed on a counter or in a box during meetings. It took some convincing, but soon people began connecting with one another rather than with their computers, Wilkens said.

“All of our meetings got a lot more productive,” he said.

Merlin Mann likes the idea.

It stinks. It of course is not being proffered as the sole solution to ‘the meeting problem’, but I don’t even consider it a close runner-up.

My Straw Man

cue birds shining, sun chirping

The meeting lead or a delegate has arrived before anyone else and prepared the room, ensuring there is appropriate seating, refreshments, and a printed agenda. The attendees all arrive on time, having had beautiful stress and distraction free mornings leading up to the meeting. All attendees have been preparing for the meeting in the shower or during the commute and are ready to brainstorm, compromise, and provide insights from their unique perspectives. The meeting lead or a delegate has a history of taking excellent notes and can be counted on to send next-actions to all attendees.

The actual meeting happens and is hugely successful! The meeting strays once or twice from the established goal when a few ideas are discussed that provide unintended benefits to support personnel or secondary goals. Everyone compromises, gives permission, understands, is motivated, is ready to kick off, or buy, or whatever the goal of the meeting was. The meeting ends before its established hard stop.

Reality

The people that are usually early to meetings show up early and wait the five minutes they are accustomed to waiting for everyone else to arrive. A percentage of attendees are late due to random things more important to them than the meeting. A percentage of the attendees have little more than token interest in the goal of the meeting. A few people will take bad notes, a few will take no notes, a few will take down what they think are their own next actions, a few will accept more than they have bandwidth to actually finish in time, and so on. No one knows who scheduled the meeting for 3:30PM on a Friday but everyone agrees silently to murder that person if their identity is revealed.

The meeting will not start on time because the early folks will be chatting about their personal lives or other work related stuff and the late folks will be explaining why they are late. The people that think they avoided any of the above pitfalls will silently begrudge the attendees that didn’t. The actual meeting begins and is rife with communication problems. One attendee spaces out due to family problems, another due to biological problems, a third because it is more fun than the meeting. One attendee keeps grinding the same axe, tangents fail to get redirected. One of the two people that conferenced into the meeting fills the room with barking dogs every time he unmutes, the other keeps saying “what”? when asked questions. Some people fiddle with their laptops and smartphones. The meeting will stop at the hard stop because people absolutely can’t stay later, or it will run late.

…and after the meeting

The people that were on time will blame the lack of progress partly on the late folks (and they’ll be right). The late folks will blame the lack of progress on their distractions (and they’ll be right). The percentage of attendees with no more than token interest in the meeting goals will forget they wasted their time (and they’ll be right to do so). The note takers will be amazed anyone does anything without taking such great notes, the non-note takers will wait for someone to ask them for a deliverable so that they can handle it, and the overloaded folks will do whatever they do that isn’t learning to be less overloaded.

Obviously the doodling is the problem. And the chairs in the room that allowed people to be so slouchy and doodly. And the cell phones and laptops. And the fidgeting. Why, I can see you now, skimming this and IM’ing someone else, and fidgeting with your left foot at that thing under your desk. Why in my day, meetings were productive and engaging!

I’m just returning to work after Shmoocon 2008 – I took Monday off to recover and catch up on sleep.

It seemed like the presenters this year were asked for only overview level subject matter. The talks were relaxed from past year’s research findings – they were more open ended brainstorms and predictions on the implications of known concepts. I’m still glad I went and will be back next year, maybe it was just a slow year for research.

Friday

David Smith’s password analysis talk was really neat. Rss subscribed!

Deviant returned to lock picking after last years gun-nut panel (sorry, not my bag) masked as a physical security panel, and it appealed to everyone I was with. I would have skipped it if it wasn’t a main track talk even though Deviant is a great presenter.

The Gringo Challenge was a great idea that didn’t seem to be given enough attention. I would have preferred vendors in the room where the lock picking stuff was and Deviant’s booth in the main hall with an announcer lining up folks to run through the challenge, all recorded on video. The bloopers would have been great!

Saturday

I underestimated the hotel black-out curtains and missed the morning talk I wanted to see Saturday.

G. Mark‘s A Hacker Looks Past 50 wasn’t a talk I’d planned to attend after really enjoying his talk last year and expecting a repeat as the title hadn’t changed. I obviously don’t know G. Mark. I was in the room for Aaron Higbee and Jaime Fuentes talk on ISP filtering – a brainstorm and what-if session that I did enjoy, and stuck around to see if G. Mark would be telling the same stories again. I couldn’t detect any repeats that weren’t framing a new anecdote. G. Mark has a brilliant literary knack for relating life’s anecdotes to a greater theme, but not without a bit of tangential confusion. Also, someone needs to help him re-do his website! I’d gladly assist – the main nav has two blank pages and a 404, and it is all outdated and full of spacer gifs.

I have to call out the heckler he had. G. Mark was giving away a lot of crap as he usually does, by ticket number. He read a ticket number for an NSA shot glass and a woman behind me was the winner. She didn’t seem too excited that she’d won the shot glass so G. Mark asked “Do you drink?”.

The crazy lady two seats over from me annoyed.

“Did you ask her that because she’s female or because she’s asian?”

Silence.

“I asked her that because she didn’t seem to want the shot glass.”

Anyway…

After a long lunch I checked out Simple Nomad’s crypto chat. A lot of slide-reading, but the content was excellent, if somewhat tinfoil. I expected no less.

While looking back, I really enjoyed these talks, I was bummed overall and pining for previous years. I was with a large group and there was always someone to skip an hour with, so I didn’t force myself to sit through any less interesting titled presentations. My loss, I’m sure. Every time I was in heading to skip a talk and get a beer it seemed like Shmoo guys were doing the same. Laurels?

Sunday

I missed the E-discovery talk that I wanted to see Sunday morning for the only Windows Vista focused talk; Dan Griffin’s Hacking Windows Vista Security. Too many infosec folks stand behind Unix superiority like it is 1999 still (myself included) while Microsoft has really gotten their act together. When I found myself arguing bash over Powershell a few months back having only been exposed to a Monad Ars Technica article I realized I had my head in the sand about Vista. Dan’s talk was great and I would have loved more like it! What is Server 2008 bringing that I can’t do now? What is Vista and Powershell bringing to forensics? Pwning? Nobody at ShmooCon was talking about it.

Atlas’s Vtrace talk was over my head but I mostly stuck it out. I didn’t have to keep up with the debugging techniques to keep up with the vulnerability research implications!

I went to RenderMan‘s talk before the closing and he enumerated the how each of us are vulnerable every day because of our RFID, bluetooth, 802.11, and IR wireless devices. The talk was a nice overview but pretty snarky. A generic salesman isn’t an idiot for leaving his bluetooth and 802.11 on and killing his own batteries when the vendors make that the default or easy path. Hackers blaming the victim again?

Toby Kohlenberg, after years of being the annoying pedant, had great timing at the closing panel discussion. After 20 minutes of Bruce Potter, Simple Nomad, Johnny Long, Rick Dakan, and one mystery person (the website isn’t updated yet) rapping about what the word Hacker means, I was starting to feel like we were in my sophomore Art classes having the “What Is Art?” talk. The closing thoughts were a plea to all of us to do good with our infosec skills, in some way. On our way home, Ben and I talked about this as a diversion to me complaining about the con (and to help stay awake!). More later when we think of anything to actually do.

Now I just need to go submit all this feedback to the Shmoo folks. I agree with Ben’s submitted feeback. 2006 was my favorite ShmooCon. It isn’t fair to complain and not submit feedback!