This is Brad Templeton from the EFF. This Wednesday I'm moderating a panel at Jeff Pulver's semi-annual conference on Presence and Instant Messaging. It's a smallish (couple of hundred) conference where you'll see most of the commercial players in instant messaging, with the very notable exception of AOL. However, having attended this conference I have found that most of the people there pay little attention to issues of security and privacy in the IM world. Sometimes for real reasons (most IM is forced by NAT and firewalls to be routed through central servers) but often times simply because they haven't bothered. The panel I am moderating is on these topics of Presence and Instant Messaging, and due to various circumstances, right now I have only 2 other speakers on it, who will speak about the privacy and security work being done by two standards bodies, the PAM formum, and the IETF SIP working group. I have my own talk on the design and political issues, but I can move a lot of that into my plenary talk later in the day where I want to get those issues out. In particular I am interested in technologically interesting projects or research to allow privacy, encryption and anonymity in instant messaging, and also in presence data and location-aware devices. (Part of the conference is also on location aware services, E911 manadated location-aware phones etc.) So I apologize for not asking until today, but if you have done any work in these areas you would like to talk about briefly, I could have a slot for you, and get you free attendance at this normally $2,000 conference. Last time Lenny Foner gave a great talk on his work. The conference info is at http://www.pulver.com/pim/ and my session is This Wedesday, Oct 31, at 9:45am. It is at the Marriott in Santa Clara. Sorry as well for posting without regularly reading cypherpunks, but I need to keep my email load down.