I found the message in the talk persuasive, but the presentation of it sorely lacking. Her delivery was stilted, probably because she was either very nervous a

I found the message in the talk persuasive, but the presentation of it sorely lacking. Her delivery was stilted, probably because she was either very nervous and/or hadn't practiced her presentation nearly often enough to sound natural. On top of that, the talk was way too long. It could have been easily cut in half, at the very least. In a Boing Boing article[1] (which also, incidentally, calls her presentation a "tour-de-force"), her points were summarized in these quotes: Hard-to-parse protocols require complex parsers. Complex, buggy parsers become weird machines for exploits to run on. Help stop weird machines today: Make your protocol context-free or regular! Protocols and file formats that are Turing-complete input languages are the worst offenders, because for them, recognizing valid or expected inputs is UNDECIDABLE: no amount of programming or testing will get it right. A Turing-complete input language destroys security for generations of users. Avoid Turing-complete input languages! Ok. I got that. Seems reasonable enough. It didn't take me 40 minutes read that, and it shouldn't take 40 minutes to present basically the same thing. Maybe half that if you thought you really had to fight hard to make your case. A more concise presentation containing just the important/interesting bits would have been less painful to watch and probably a lot easier to prepare for. That said, the Q&A period at the end was good. She seemed a lot more comfortable there, and there was a lot more interesting and informative content there than in the presentation proper. [1] - http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/linguistics-turing-completene.html http://boingboing.net/2011/12/28/linguistics-turing-complete...