Latest Event News

Today is the last day to take advantage of our early bird tickets. Once the deadline passes, we'll be closing ticket sales until September.

August is always quiet (usually for summer holidays), so for the first time we're being intentional, and we'll close the doors until 4th September. When tickets re-open, they'll be available at full price.

This also means that our newsletter is taking a break during this time, and you'll hear from us again in September when we return with more interviews with our speakers, news about the event and community news.

Get your early bird ticket

From Our Archive

There really is a wealth of content in our FFConf archive, going back over 16 years, and with nostalgia in mind, we thought it might be nice to look back on some of the history of the web.

Remy asked Chris Wilson to speak in 2012 on his own experiences - as he was a key figure in the development Mosaic and then on IE2 through to IE8, and he had some battle stories to share - including the origins of <BLINK> and <MARQUEE>!

So take a step back in time to get a sense of some of the origins of our web.

Community News

The Online Safety Act was passed in October 2023, and as of 25-July, it became enforced legal duty for web sites to use "highly effective age assurance to prevent children from accessing pornography, or content which encourages self-harm, suicide or eating disorder content".

There's quite a lot to take in, but if you want to consume some of that information passively, we'd recommend the following:

• Skeptics with a K, Mike Hall covers the process and software performing these checks - and some of the data is shocking.

• Novara Media has a good video covering the issues and includes an interesting interview with Kate Sim from Children's Online Safety & Privacy Research.

There's already push back and a campaign to tell our government that this act isn't working.

Searches for VPNs have exploded and Proton VPN has claimed over 1,400% increase in sign ups. There has already been rumours that the UK government might want to ban VPNs, but this has already been ruled out.

Of course there's going to be ways around these checks too, donning faces that are computer generated (weren't those face ageing apps all the rage a few years back?) - and equally, would you even trust a 3rd party with this kind of data? It's not like data never gets leaked…