[Qatar-pm] Qatar-pm Digest, Vol 9, Issue 1

[Nigel Gourlay]

2008/5/22 Yazan Bakwer <thanks_swim at hotmail.com>:
> I am 14 years
> old and I just started to program in C and some pascal. I have been looking
> for lectures and activities that people in Qatar(people who are interested
> in programming/computer science) participate in, since I am dying to find
> one that I can go to.

Yazan

It's good to see someone on the list who's just starting out with
their programming.

Next week, there's a conference at the Ritz Carlton being hosted by
Qatar Science and Technology Park. The details are here:
  http://www.qstp.org.qa/output/page44.asp

If you can get the time off school, it would be worthwhile going to
see Steve Wozniak on Wednesday morning. Send an email to
events at qstp.org.qa asking to be put on the list of invitees. You are
exactly the kind of person they are trying to encourage, so I would
think they'll be overjoyed to get your email.

--Nigel

p.s. I went along to the OWASP meeting with a couple of other people.
There was an introduction by a Q-CERT guy and a talk by Omar. Nothing
technical - just an introduction to OWASP's activities and general
stuff about the importance of security. About 30 people turned up,
including coders from QP, Al Jazeera, QF and the universities.

Omar suggested future meetings might occur monthly or quarterly, with
a technical focus for each meeting. For instance, a meeting might
concentrate on validation of user input, or how to prevent session
hijacking or cross-site scripting attacks.

It'll be interesting to see whether OWASP is successful. I hope it
becomes more popular, as Qatar is lacking a regular meeting of
programmers. However, I worry whether the setting up of the group is
just another tick-box for Q-CERT. At the beginning of last year, they
launched an Information Security Forum which was going to meet every
two months -- I think they've had two or three meetings. Still, maybe
this will be different.