I’m not even trying running for Swedish parliament in the upcoming national elections in September. Skipped the internal pre-elections totally. The reasons are many, but the primary ones are:

1. I’m becoming a father – And I would hate to carry two fulltime jobs, as I did during the EU-elections, when my kid takes his first steps. It would kill me inside.

2. Putting my energy into work – As there are a lot of changes, and as some might know the hardest time being a manager is during transition periods. This is also about not doing a lot of things “so so”, but one thing really good.

3. I’m going to run for District Leader (DL) of Stockholm – In an internal election. If winning I’m going to try restructuring the organizational model in order to make more people involved and distribute responsibilities and knowledge.

It felt really good taking this decision as I had been going back and forth in my mind trying to decide on what to do. The main concept behind my decision is “Better to do a few things great, than a lot with poor quality”.

NOW, there are other people running in the current internal pre-elections that I would like to put forth as I know that they are really good people and have a lot to give.

Those are:

- Fredrik Lejnell (blogs in swedish):
Probably the most outspoken of all the Pirates I’ve met and what he lacks in theoretical knowledge, he makes up for with heart. He is active in the Stockholm region and is second in charge in the North of Stockholm. I’ve seen him debate a lot of people, including socialist party members trying everything they could (that one went on for two hours, totally insane) and I know he got his facts straight and can break down almost any opposition. I know him and his wife personally and know that he would make A LOT of noise in the parliament. He has previously been left-winged (not something I would usually support) but as all of the younger people in Sweden he is now leaning more over open waters with an eye-patch.

- Jan Lindgren (blogs in swedish):
Jan has been the District Leader for the District of Stockholm and invested more time and energy than he really can afford into the Pirate Party (as most of us have ). He has always been a good leader and speaker, and has helped me a lot when entering the organization as I know he has with many others. He was also one of the people on the voting ballot for EU-parliament and did the job associated with that very well, attending almost all activities (missed some due to allergies, something about trees). He is very good at putting forth cold facts (as he did with movie revenue & cashflow figures a couple of months ago) and representing the party. He is currently a student studying computer security.

- Johanna Julén (blogs in swedish):
Johanna was also one of the people on the EU-parliament ballot and I met her during the training weekend that was arranged for all of the candidates. She is very open, social and has a burning pro-integrity way of looking at our politics. She is a person that always try to see both sides and weigh the arguments to come up with the best solution. She is a good representative that knows how to express herself in order to be understood and make people relate to the issues. If I had not voted for myself in that election I would have voted for her. She is working as a techsupport rep. at a Swedish ISP and domain name registrar.

- Ola Nyström (blogs in swedish):
Ola is a very humble guy that has been getting more and more involved in the organization in the Stockholm area. Currently he is in charge of the North of Stockholm and is sitting in the same District Leader committee as I am waiting for the election of District Leader. He was a great resource when planning and executing the election ballot distribution in the District of Stockholm and has since been taking on official roles. He lives in Solna and works with firewalls/computer security (if I remember correctly, I’ll correct later otherwise). Voting for him will ensure that we have a balanced person that is capable of good planning and following the party politics.

And then there are about twenty others I like, but these are my top choices

Anyways, I’ll probably aim for the next EU election in 3½ years and I would be deceiving mysef if I think I’m not going to be involved in these elections as well Also, when the DL elections kick off, please remember to vote for me!

I’ll post some pictures later on tonight (or tomorrow) both here and on our swedish Panda Security blog (blogg.pandasecurity.se) together with some additional info.

Right now I’m at the airport (Bromma) waiting for a flight to Umeå where I will help a partner present our solutions to a possible client, and the calendar for the rest of the week looks like a car wreck…

It’ll work out though, and it’s nice to have something to do that I actually enjoy. No recession here for sure :9

Cheers,

All was well there and I had a good time and made a lot of progress work-wise. I also took a photo of a sculpture in front of town hall:

Apparently it’s made by Eduardo Chillida, a basque sculptor.

The trouble started on my way home when I was denied by an Iberia check-in assistant to check my luggage all the way to Stockholm (via Madrid). Apparently Iberia don’t allow checking your luggage over different flights if you haven’t booked them together (but Spanair could to Bilbao, so that’s bullsh*t).

I was a bit disturbed about this as I would only have one hour to move between terminals and gates in Madrid, but agreed and proceeded through security and so on. Actually had some extra time and bought some perfume for my wife Natasha.

When we landed in Madrid the luggage was slow and even though we took a speeding spanish cab (that’s like playing McRae rally games) we didn’t make it in time. This meant that we had to spend a night in Madrid and then take a flight to Stockholm (via Barcelona!) the next day. Hooray.. not.

Finding a hotel in Madrid was actually quite easy, and we had a good meal at a café / restaurant near to the hotel and then vent to sleep. Here’s a shot from my window:

The flight home the next day was without complications and it was with Spanair the whole way. Thank god for that.

Anyway… Besides putting me back almost 500€, I’m mad at Iberia for being idiots and not checking my luggage as any other company would have done. Hopefully I’ll get some compensation later on.

Back from the first day of Internetdagarna ’08 (The Internet Days) where I followed the IT-security line of seminars.

So what did I get home with me, apart from the orange swag-bag above, from the different seminars?

The first seminar was “Hotbilden – organiserad brottslighet, cyberterrorism och industrispionage” which translates to something like “The threat landscape – organized crime, cyberterrorism and industrial espionage” and was moderated by security interested journalist Tomas Gilså from Techworld. The participants were Tomas Djurling (DSI), Vesa Virta (FRA), Svante Nygren (KBM) and Stefan B Grinneby (SITIC).

First a presentation was held by Tomas Djurling which discussed the different threats against swedish companies and organizations and where those were coming from. Tomas is a former FRA employee and as such the seminar was a bit colored by international military and paramilitary threats. He also said that Islamistic terrorists are getting funding through internet crimes such as CC stealing botnets and so on. No references were given during the presentation and this was new to me (!) so it’ll be interesting to see if this is going to be discussed further in the industry (and if its true). Of course, if FRA is his source we will never know as their business are classified.

After his presentation there was a moderator lead debate in which the audience could submit questions on paper notes. I’m not going to comment on what was said here at this time but there was some interesting things discussed. The sound recording of this debate will be published later and I need to get some facts straight before commenting on what was said here.

The next seminar was “Incidenthantering i praktiken” which in english is “Practical Incident management” and was moderated by Anne-Marie Eklund Löwinder from .SE. Three speakers participated and those were Stefan B Grinneby (SITIC), Annica Bergman (Dataföreningen) and Michael Anderberg (Microsoft).

Stefan from SITIC talked about practical incident management under the theme “Incident management, firefighting or oil sanitation” and it actually worked It was a good introduction to the process of both preparing for incidents and practical hints on what to do in case of an emergency. His presentation was very clear and it made me want to steal parts for my seminars We’ll see about that though

Annica Bergman from Dataföreningen talked about a large scale incident that took place in the beginning of 2008, when the hacker group “Vuxna Förbannade hackare” broke in to their member services using SQL injection attacks and stole their whole member list (26000 members) including e-mail addresses and passwords. These details were later published on Flashback with a huge media storm as a result. She described the 90 days following the incident and discussed what her experience had been like and it was interesting listening to it. I wrote about another intrusion made by this group in this post.

Michael Anderberg from Microsoft talked about SDL (Secure Development Lifecycle) and how it’s applicable not only to software development, but also to incident preparation and management with CodeRed/Nimda as examples. For those interested he also gave a reference to this book as a source of additional information.

Last but not least were “Debattt: Utmaningarna” which translates to “Debate: The challenges” which was a debate about what the internet would look like in the year 2020 policy- and security-wise. The participants were Jan Kallberg (legal expert, also debate moderator), Nicklas Lundblad (Policy Manager, Google Europe) and Kurt-Erik Lindqvist (CEO Netnod).

This seminars started out with all speakers takign turns to present their primary views on how the internet would look like and what implications that might have in the year 2020 (12 years from now).

After this there was a moderator lead debate in which the audience also got to pose questions or statements that the panel commented on. The debate was both entertaining, informative and extremely straightforward. A lot of the discussions were either directly or indirectly relating to the surveillance debate we are seeing all over the world and it was great to see the panel tackle both the philosophic angle and the practical angle of this. This was, for me, the most intellectually stimulating seminar of all. Great perspectives presented by great thinkers.

Tomorrow Internetdagarna ’08 continues and I’ll be back with more information.

Here are a few of the photo’s I took during the day (didn’t take many, focused on listening;) ):

Internetdagarna ’08 posters

My colleague Rickard Uddenberg (Marketing Manager, Panda Security)

A Free Software Foundation rep. that also gave me a tip of gNewsense (the really free (as in freedom) Linux distribution)

The Free Software Foundation poster behind him…

The World Internet Institute (The Swedish part of World Internet Project) poster.

The Stockholm event was a success which was visited by both old, new and possible customers. Met some people that’s been with us for quite a while and it’s also always nice to meet new faces.

The day started out with some nice laptop-vs-projector problems, which of course attracted a crowd of willing engineers.

Even our CEO wanted in

Corporate and retail support in perfect symbiosis as they handled the clothing things. Yep, it’s starting to get cold again in Sweden. And yep, you gotta love the assignment.

The seminars started out with our CEO speaking,

Then Sebastian Zabala,

And then we had a break. I talked to customers with product questions or suggestions,

And then it was time for Pedro’s quite long (but informative) presentation…

.. in which he talked about some interesting things that might have been a bit over the audiences heads. But I think they got the ideas and understood the main picture of what he was talking about. Not sure about the deep technical details though.

All-in-all a great event.

Sorry for lousy quality… had to peak to ISO settings for the camera to even perform without a flash in the low light…

Cheers,

For those interested. Kinda late notice, but anyways. The dates are:

1 October: Stockholm, Skandiabiografen, Drottninggatan 82
2 oktober: Gothenburg, Biopalatset Salon 5, Kungstorget 2
3 oktober: Malmö, Filmstaden 2, Storgatan 22

I’m not speaking, but if someone wants to meet me I’ll be there answering questions before, during breaks and after. I’ll also be demonstrating TruPrevent policy creation with practical examples for those interested.

The schedule for the day is:

09.00 Breakfast and registration
09.30 Introduction Bo Hasse Gustafsson, CEO, PCM International AB
09.45 Sebastian Zabala, Security Expert, PCM International AB
10.30 Break (Coffee etc.)
10.45 Pedro Bustamante, Senior Research Advisor, Panda Security International
11.45 End notes
12.00 Lunch until 13.00.

Almost all material is going to be in Swedish, but Pedro’s presentation is in english as always.

Bringing my camera and will post photos of the event later on (CC Attribution).