Bending Light: Optical trickery for the 21st Century

Presented at Kiwicon 4: The four e:Sheep-persons of the Cyber Infopocalypse (2010), Nov. 28, 2010, 1:30 p.m. (30 minutes).

The whole world is connected with light these days. You probably don't know, or notice (your desktop is just plugged into an rj45 wall jack, right?), but it's likely that your home or office network has some kind of fibre optics in it's path to the Internet, or the other sites in your WAN. In this talk I'll try and explain some of the risks around using fibre optics, as opposed to copper technologies, and what you can do about detecting and protecting from them (what is that encryption stuff anyway?). I'll also try and explain some of the more commonly used types of fibre technologies and how they're all tied together, to give a better overview for those who just haven't had to work with the stuff before. This bit is probably just more informative than hackery related.


Presenters:

  • Blair Harrison / trogs as Blair Harrison
    trogs. Blair. Sysadmin. Used to run a WISP, but managed to escape. Have been working for a NZ fibre optic networking company for a few years now, and a large managed hosting provider before that, over in the UK.

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