During the non-skippable antipiracy warnings on a lot of DVDs and BluRay disks these days, the MPAA often has an MTV-style juxtaposed and jump-cut commercial that includes the admonition "You wouldn't download a car, would you?" which has spawned a response in the form of an image macro that seems to have gotten a few of us thinking. Earlier this week the notorious BitTorrent tracker The Pirate Bay posted on their blog that they had created a new category of files that can be shared via their website, Physibles, or files that can be used to create actual, tangible objects if fed into a 3D printer, automill, or autolathe. Surprisingly, the category began to fill almost immediately, from some DIY bio stuff to a theoretically illegal portrait (note: safe for work).
I think it's only a matter of time before people start seeding torrents of things they upload to Thingiverse to give the .stl files for their objects and projects a leg up on distribution. As things stand now it's getting scarily easy to design and fabricate things for very little money. With a good eye and some patience it's possible to design a whole product using Blender or Google Sketchup (both free), export it to an .stl file (howtos for Blender, Sketchup), and e-mail the file to a company that specializes in small runs of objects and devices for a couple of dollars. Or, if you're feeling enterprising, you can copy the .stl files onto a USB key and take them down to your friendly neighborhood hackerspace and either print it on a RepRap or Makerbot, or if necessary have a CNC gantry router carve the pieces for you. Technologically speaking, we're not at the point where we can download the specs for a vehicle (just some parts of one) and run them off, not by a longshot. However, these relatively primitive personal fabrication devices represent solid first steps toward eventually having at our disposal real autofacs (automated factories).
I don't ordinarily write much about work, mostly because it's not that interesting but also because it's a bad habit to get into, lest I let something critical slip and get in trouble. However, the last two days were sufficiently rough (and strange) that I feel that I have to write something about it, if only to give my fellow BOFHes something to go on if they find themselves in the same particular position I was. The past two days have been by far the strangest problem I've ever run into working in IT or information security.
Let's set up the scenario: We have a file server with approximately eight terabytes of data RAIDed across eight drives, eight CPUs, 4 GB of RAM, and a particular all-steel server class case with a 750 watt power supply in it. It's running Linux. Early Tuesday morning I recieved a warning from Logwatch that one of the hard drives in the RAID had failed. The array was still functional because the mirror's twin drive was still operational but it's always a good idea to replace a dead drive as soon as possible, lest the other die at the worst possible moment. So, I powered the server down, hauled it up to my office, and set to work. I figured that as long as I had the server offline I could install the set of hot-swappable drive bays I bought last year to save myself having to crack the case open every time I had to replace a drive.
For any topic you can imagine, there is a healthy and active blog by and for people who are or who are strongly interested in that topic. They will also have a Cafepress store which is slightly surreal.
A couple of days ago, a few "Hey, are you still alive?" messages hit my inbox, and just now have I had the opportunity to post an update.
I've been busy as hell since 2012 started and it shows no signs of letting up. When you work in IT and you take a vacation for 10 days, whether or not something blew up at work isn't the question. The relevant question is actually, "How many things blew up at work?" and the answer is usually a number that can be comfortably counted on one hand... in hexadecimal. Lots of long hours, cursing, sweating, but thankfully not many animal sacrifices were required. Always a good way to start the year off, I think, not having to expense any roosters or other small furry animals, let alone cleaning bills for the office carpet.
On 9 January 2012 Lyssa and I headed out to Politics and Prose in Washington, DC to attend another William Gibson book signing, this one for his first non-fiction anthology entitled Distrust That Particular Flavor. It's a collection of magazine articles, reminiscences, and speeches that he's given over the past twenty years or so, and I think there is something in there for everybody. It's a quick read, a day if that, and if you pay attention you'll find that Gibson has lost none of his wit or sense of humor over the years, and you'll enjoy it all the more for that. Of course, I took a few pictures while I was there; feel free to take a look around. I didn't have a backpack full of stuff to get autographed this time, just a couple of stickers that I gave to Gibson after he was kind enough to autograph my book.
After that came the midnight release of Byzantium Linux v0.1a...
More under the cut...
Approved for: GENERAL RELEASE, DISTRIBUTION UNLIMITED
UPDATE: Due to a critical bug in Byzantium Linux v0.1a, a file containing the mesh routing and application software was omitted from the .iso image. The code which makes Byzantium, well, Byzantium isn't there. To fix this, please re-download the .iso image from one of the mirrors linked below and try again. We humbly apologize for our screwup. QA processes are being put in place to ensure that this never happens again.
We're sorry.
Project Byzantium, a working group of HacDC (http://hacdc.org/) is proud to announce the release of v0.1 alpha of Byzantium Linux, a live distribution of Linux designed to fulfill a crucial role in the evolution of the Internet. That role is a rapidly deployable ad-hoc wireless mesh network which can augment or replace the current telecommunications infrastructure in the event that it is knocked offline (for example, due to a natural disaster) or rendered untrustworthy (widespread surveillance or disconnection by hostile entities). Unlike other mesh networking projects Byzantium was designed to be run on any x86 computer with at least one 802.11 a/b/g/n wireless interface. Byzantium can be burned to a CD- or DVD-ROM (the .iso image is just over 300 megabytes in size), booted from an external hard drive, or can even be installed in parallel with an existing operating system without risk to the user's data and software. Byzantium Linux will then act as a node within the mesh and will automatically connect to other mesh nodes and act as an access point for WiFi-enabled mobile devices.
THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE! Do NOT expect Byzantium to be perfect. Some features are not ready yet, others need work. Things are going to break in weird ways and we need to know what those ways are so we can fix them. Please, for the love of LOLcats, do not deploy Byzantium in situations where lives are at stake.
FEATURES:
Binary compatible with Slackware v13.37, so existing packages can be converted with a single command.
Able to act as a gateway to the Internet if a link is available.
Linux kernel v2.6.38.8
Drivers for dozens of wireless chipsets
KDE v3.5
LXDE (2010 release of all components)
Mplayer
GCC v4.5.2
Perl v5.12.3
Python v2.6.6
Firefox v4.0.1
X.org v7.4
Custom web-based control panel
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (to use)
Minimum of 512MB of RAM
i586 CPU or better
CD- or DVD-ROM drive
BIOS must boot removable media
At least one (1) 802.11 a/b/g/n interface
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (for persistent changes)
The above requirements to use Byzantium
2+GB of free space on thumbdrive or harddrive
WHAT WE NEED:
Developers.
Developers!
DEVELOPERS!
No more Bill Ballmer impersonations.
People downloading and running Byzantium to find bugs and tell us where the problems are so we can fix them.
People booting Byzantium and setting up small meshes (2-5 clients) to tell us how well it works for you with your hardware. We have a hardware compatibility list on our wiki that needs to be expanded.
People who can help us translate the user interface. We especially need people fluent in dialects of Chinese, Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu.
People to help us write and translate documentation.
These beginning-of-the-year posts are always hard to write. Somehow they're always too close to the end of the previous year for everything to have sunk in, but also come too soon for anything to have really happened. I've been wrestling with this post for days (since the third of January, actually) and every time I sit down to work on it, not a whole lot hits my keyboard. When this year started I hit the ground running and haven't had time to sit and really reflect yet. So, I'm going to do the best I can to make this post not suck and be somewhat thought provoking (in that order).
It's finally here. 2012. The meme that's been floating around in the collective consciousness of the western world has landed on the pages of our calendars and is already beginning to manifest around us. Regardless of where you stand on the whole 2012 thing you have to admit that there are enough people concentrating on the notion now to make one wonder what, if any repercussions could happen if enough people work along with this particular current. Various and sundry sorts have been saying for years (since the 80's, if not the late 70's) that this is the year when Everything Changes. Well, Shit Got Real(tm) in 2011 and the world shows every sign of speeding up, not slowing down. Already we've had a world leader (Kim Jong-Il of North Korea) die and be replaced by one of his sons, the Occupy Movement (though one supposes that it would be more accurate to call it a platform of discourse) spreading even farther around the globe (with no shortage of bloodshed, I'm afraid - case in point, things going pear shaped with #occupynigeria, as government supporters opened fire with live ammunition on protestors this morning), and more rumbling that sounds suspiciously like the words "nuclear program" coming from the Middle East.
I have to confess, I have no idea where things are going. I've been scratching my head over this for a week or two and I just don't know. The most honest folks out there in all spheres of influence and persuasions of weird seem to have converged on the same answer: They don't know, either. Call it a veil, a black wall, nothing, static, information overload, or "Things are changing too fast," but it all amounts to the same thing. Things are changing too fast everywhere and trying to keep up is getting harder and harder. Things are happening so rapidly (to give you an example) that Twitter aggregation and curation sites like paper.li are becoming popular as precis of events on a particular topic. Scanning or grazing aren't efficient enough anymore, so you may as well search for what you're interested in and hope you can keep tabs on what you find.
All I can say for sure is that the current appears to be flowing back toward a model of small groups that all know and keep up with each another (i.e., have a smaller Dunbar number), and more importantly are active in each other's lives. The negative side effects of very large groups where you can be alone in a crowd are beginning to be taken seriously, and people seem to be instinctively finding the others (to steal a phrase from Tim Leary) and forming family bonds that are just as tight as those of one's ancestry. Once again, people are realizing that the results of sticking together are more long-lasting and far-reaching than those of going it on your lonesome all the time. Also, and this is the really interesting bit, those groups of extended family (for that's what they appear to be and function as) are teaching one another the new set of techniques and technologies necessary to thrive in a time where the only things that are really certain in life anymore are that the sun will rise and set and there will be a noticable percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere (as recent financial history will attest to). The world really does seem to be improving bit by bit, just as a couple of saplings grow into a forest, and like a forest it's all coming up from ground level: You, me, and every other biped wandering around on the face of this mad planet three jumps out from the nearest visible G2V ball of plasma and not the weird egregores that live in towers, office parks, and virtual servers running in Amazon's EC2. The only advice I can give to anyone in 2012 of the Common Era is this: It's up to us now. If we don't stand up and act this year, this moment, nothing at all is going to be fixed.
All of you reading this out there are intelligent, well connected, resourceful, and insightful. You see what's going on. You know what to do.
Pencils down. Blank badges on. Volume up. Let's be incandescent.
I know, I know, I should get around to writing a proper New Year's post. I won't have time to do that for a day or so. I would like to make a brief announcement, however - there will be a development sprint for Project Byzantium at HacDC on 6 and 7 January 2012 starting in the early evening. It'll probably be cold at the 'space so dress warmly. We're going to be working on the final roadblock before we publish v0.1a, which is the captive portal, or the website that mesh clients will see when they first associate with their local mesh node regardless of what website they try to browse (and, incidentally, display the list of services available on the mesh around them). After much experimentation on the parts of everyone on the dev-team, it seems like we're going to have to write our own, so if you're a programmer with some experience writing web apps we could really use your help. If you show up before 1900 hours on Friday bring some cash for pizza.
Earlier this month Lyssa and I took the daughter of a good friend of ours to her first concert at the 9:30 Club in downtown DC. We decided that we wanted her first concert to be a memorable one, so we took her to see VNV Nation when their latest tour took them through our nation's capital. So, one evening, we hit up a local restaurant for dinner and then headed downtown, a remarkably short jaunt these days since the move.
Shortly after arriving I ran into Mike and Tara, two old friends of mine from a previous trip through the Beltway circuit. We caught up on old times and everything that's been happening in the past two or three years, raided the merchandise table, and then staked out space on the dancefloor to watch the show.
The opening act was called Straftanz, and they are a pair of crazy German cyberpunks who seem to have about as much fun on stage performing as the rest of us did watching them. At first a few of us thought that they were going to be yet another "boot up the laptop and press play" act, but they made up for having 'just' a laptop by bouncing around the stage as if they'd mainlined shots of espresso prior to hitting the power button. You'd have thought that they were at their favorite club night on the dancefloor from the way they.. well... had a good time. Granted, I'm not really one for audience callbacks when they're in a language I don't know but it was fun to watch them interact with the crowd just the same. There was even a drum machine solo by DJ P0n-3 about halfway through their set, which reduced a few of us to giggling heaps on the floor. I was kind of upset when their set was over because it was so obvious that they were having so much fun up there I was enjoying watching them to see what they'd do next. I also recommend that you read the blog on their website, it's just as fun as they are.
Then came a set break, followed by a countdown on the big LED boards at the back of the stage before VNV Nation took over. VNV always puts on a high-energy show, and this time was no different. I'm probably putting myself in the line of fire by saying that you have to respect an industrial act that has a drummer playing drum pads hooked to a sampler in their stage show rather than a preprogrammed drum machine. However, their sound mix that night was a little off (way too much bass, not enough of everything else) so everything sounded... flat? Empty? Missing something important, at any rate. I spent the show feeling like there was something really important that I wasn't getting that everyone else obviously was. I'm not sure what it could be - intellectually I know what should have been there, but on other levels I felt a little like I messed up the secret handshake or didn't lift the goat's tail or something. We were extremely amused when Straftanz good-naturedly bought the band a round of drinks and brought them up to the edge of the stage; unfortunately, it's not legal to do that in DC so they had to be turned away at the last moment. I maintain that Ronan having identified the libations as Jagermeister at the last minute had nothing to do with it.
I don't know how long VNV Nation's set lasted; I do know that they did two encores in addition to a full concert (here's the setlist) and by the end of the night each and every one of us were sore and reeling. None of us are really used to such a short drive home after a show, so I think all of us got rather more sleep than we otherwise would have under the circumstances. I still highly recommend that you go to see VNV Nation live if you get a chance, I think there is an excellent chance that you'll take something away from their lyrics that you don't expect if you listen carefully. I took a few pictures at the show where I could, feel free to take a look at them if you like.
Note: Updated January 4 2012 in response to a comment by Jamie Zawinski, proprietor of the DNA Lounge.
I haven't been writing about SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) or PIPA (the PROTECT IP Act) because, frankly, I've been too busy trying to fight them. To keep abreast of them following the #SOPA hashtag on Twitter is really the best way to go about it because things are changing so rapidly. Between the people watching the live stream of the markup hearings and people who are actually attending the hearings and livetweeting (I'm looking at you, @EFFlive) things are changing too rapidly to do much more than write about point-in-time snapshots. Suffice it to say that when Congress dismisses the words of the people who built the Internet with contempt and ignorance, something's dangerously wrong.
These two bills pose a serious threat to the Internet as we know it. If you haven't been paying attention, the Net has done something heretofore unprecedented in Human history, which is give everyone who can get access to it a voice. Books can be burned, getting on television is too expensive, and gathering in the town square can get you picked off by a sniper but the Internet makes it possible to exchange ideas, evolve new ones, and share media and culture with minimal effort and maximum potential of propagation. That is what has some people frightened; hidden in the guise of stopping software piracy and the sale of counterfeit goods are provisions that would make it possible for nearly any online resource to be taken down with a single complaint, legitimate or not.
This year something frightening started happening: US ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) began seizing domains that they claimed participated in the piracy of media. The way they did this is by strong-arming domain registrars into re-assigning ownership of the domains in question to US ICE, and then changing the DNSes considered 'canonical' for those domains to ones run by ICE. Whenever you plug one of those seized domains into your browser, you actually get a website run by ICE with the now-infamous This domain has been seized banner. Now, this next bit may come as a shock to the "Then they were obviously doing something illegal!" crowd: You don't have to be involved in piracy to get your domain shut down. Websites can and have been shut down "just because" and there is no legal recourse to get your domain name (and visibility, and search engine rankings) back. You pretty much have to register a new domain and go through all the trouble of making its presence known again.
For a clearer picture of how DNS resolution works, I recommend that you check out this article. I could recapitulate all of it, but that would put this article way off into the weeds and they did a better job than I could anyway.
Can you remember ever having lived in a time of peace?
Seriously. Give it a little thought.
This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and I've reluctantly come to the conclusion that I can't think of a single period of time beyond a week or two in all the years I've been alive that I've known anything like peace in the geopolitical sense. I was born in the late 1970's with the horrors of the Vietnam War fading slowly in popular memory. Even though I was too young to really record any memories the Vietnam War was one of the first "bad things" I recall hearing or reading about as a youngster. Of course, as a child of the 80's I'd be asleep at the wheel (or just distracted by one of the many funny image sites on the Net...) if I neglected to bring up the Cold War the United States was embroiled in for most of my formative years. Yes, I speak of the time in which Communism was the enemy of the USian way of life and myriad wars were fought by deniable assets, authors of propaganda, and the ever-present threat of thermonuclear annihilation. If we didn't buck up, stand true to our principles, and recite the Pledge of Alleigance reverently at the ol' Stars and Stripes each and every morning then we'd find ourselves either standing in a soup line anxiously awaiting our daily allotment of black bread and borscht or be reduced to so much ash blown away on winds several times hotter than those at midday in the outskirts of Las Vegas.
Then, things seemed to quiet down a little when the Berlin Wall came down. It was a time that none of us ever thought we'd see, the time when east and west Germany were no longer separated by walls and machine gun emplacements, and it looked as if we might just be able to heave a sigh of relief as the USSR threw in the towel. We won. Mom, Pop, and apple pie came down on top of the hammer and sickle like Hulk Hogan off the top rope, one-two-three, ring the bell because the match is over. Right?
More under the cut...
A couple of weeks ago the crowd over at Reddit started putting together a project that's been referred to online as /r/darknetplan, an effort to build a completely decentralized, encrypted wireless mesh network that is censorship-resistent and anonymized. They kick around a lot of ideas in their discussion threads (mostly links to other articles, with discussion of each on-site) and the project's IRC server is packed with interested people. Now, I'm not one to slam anyone who wants to give such a project a shot but they came under some scrutiny from a blogger whose opinion is that it's a waste of time and professes to have some knowledge of how such a thing would work (which is fair, from the references given I'm inclined to take this individual at their word).
First, the obligatory disclaimer: I am one of the hackers working on Project Byzantium, a live distribution of Linux that makes it fast and easy to set up an ad-hoc wireless mesh network. You're probably sick and tired of hearing me talk about it by now so this article strives to not be Byzantium-specific. The reason I'm writing a rebuttal is because the other developers and I have either already run into and fixed some of the problems described in the article, or our research and experiments have proven that certain aspects of the argument do not apply. I am also writing a rebuttal because Byzantium falls into the same category as /r/darknetplan and some of the same arguments seem to apply.
Well, the holiday season is upon us once again. Not that you could fail to notice unless you've been living in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and your only link to the outside world is a 300bps modem connection over shortwave radio. As it's wont to be down here, the weather in the DC metroplex is a little erratic, swerving drunkenly from shirtsleeves comfortable to bone-chillingly cold to damp and rainy almost on a daily basis. Lyssa and I took a few days off last week to drive back to Pennsylvania and visit our respective families for Thanksgiving and came back a day early to recuperate and get ready for the home stretch of 2011. Everybody at home seems to be doing well, and things are going swimmingly on the home front. Much of Thanksgiving Day was spent lounging around the house trying to stay out of the way and working on our respective projects. Lyssa spent much of her time working on a couple of time-sensitive knitting projects while I got some work done on the Byzantium codebase (more on that later). At one point, my father-in-law Bill sat me down to see if I could get him past a particularly tricky part of the game Battlefield 3; unfortunately, I don't really play video games (Portal 2 is more my speed, and even then I only play sporadically) but even after digging up a couple of walkthroughs I had to admit defeat. I guess it's time to turn in my "Child of the 80's" membership card and delete the InSoc discography from my iProduct.
At my parents' place, everybody seems to be doing pretty well. Lyssa and I had dessert there on Thanksgiving Day and got the fifty cent tour of the house, post-remodeling. The basement (my old lab) has undergone a sea change, and is slowly being converted into a usable gameroom of the sort common in older Pittsburgh houses. My grandfather's getting up there in years (93 - a good age, no doubt) and is still up and around. At one point on Saturday he decided that a breath of fresh air would do him some good, and so went for a short stroll around the back yard, walker be damned. On Friday afternoon, while Lyssa and her mother braved the Black Friday crowds I drove back home to visit my family again, and spent the afternoon pulling the model train platform out of the shede, eating too many cookies than is really good for me, and searching for a few choice components (namely, a power supply for my old public address system and some replacement parts for the train (which wound up not happening and turned into an eBay scavenger hunt)). For the first time in many years (since college in the late 1990's, actually) I went out for dinner with my mother, and we caught up on everything's that's transpired in the past decade or so.
More under the cut...
For the past couple of years sonic weapons called LRADs (Long Range Accoustic Devices) have been increasingly deployed against protestors in the United States (here is footage from Pittsburgh shot in 2009 (warning: remove your earphones!)). A step up from mere marketing tricks that make you suspect that you're going mad, these sonic weapons pump out enough sound pressure to cause permanant hearing damage at a distance of a couple of hundred feet. Earplugs don't work because the sound is loud enough to be conducted into one's inner ears through the bones of the skull. Getting behind hard cover probably won't help much because sound reflects off of solid objects in other directions consonant with the laws of physics.
Last night, a very talented hacker of my aquaintenance named Maradydd went on an OSINT spree and assembled approximately 135 megabytes of data from around the Net pertaining to LRADs, including high-resolution images, technical documentation, and sales information and put all of the information online. Some of the PDFs are password protected (they're encrypted with 128-bit AES and will need to be cracked), some aren't. Unfortunately server this archive is hosted on has a very slow link so I've asked for and been given permission to put up a copy of the documents to take some of the load off of her provider.
You can download my local mirror of the documents from here to help save Maradydd's bandwidth. Please uncompress the archive, go through some of the docs, and post what you find for the education of all and sundry.
If anyone wants me to uncompress the archive and put the individual files up to make it easier let me know in the comments and I'd be happy to do so.
I'm not going to recap the Occupy Movement because there is, quite simply, too much to it to pack into even a one paragraph summary. Suffice it to say that the political system has, if I may be blunt, failed too many people one too many times, and the reaction of the people has been to gather and camp out anywhere and everywhere. Town squares and city parks are occupied. Colleges are occupied. Big cities (like New York City, San Francisco, and Washington, DC) are occupied. Little cities (I really don't know what constitutes 'little' in the United States, so whatever city you consider little applies) are occupied. Police raids have been swift, violent, and ultimately ineffectual. Protestors were not the ones to throw the first punch, and even when rubber bullets, stun grenades, and tear gas were fired into groups of people by police they raised not a hand in retaliation, instead turning to offer first aid and a helping hand to their fellow sapients. Protestors have been crippled by riot police and a number of protestors were involved in hit-and-run vehicular attacks; in Washington, DC the police escorted the perpetrator away and refused to file charges or take statements from witnesses.
How, exactly, do we know that the protestors are not starting the violence? How do we know what, if anything is going on? Where's the proof?
The proof is all over Youtube. Everything happening at the Occupy camps as well as the protests they organize is streamed live where thousands of people are keeping one eye on the video and one finger poised over the rewind button. Links to footage are tweeted and retweeted within seconds of their hitting the Net. Videos are not only being watched but mirrored to be put back up later in the event of legal shenanagains (the so-called Streisand effect). In the event that something does go down (such as the hit-and-run I mentioned) analysis and extra evidence is compiled and released (local mirror of the license plate and driver) to tell the other side fo the story. The one you're not getting on the evening news.
As I mentioned late last week (done so because it took that long to finalize some details), Ben the Pyrate and I were invited by Bread for the City to take part in what they called Broadband Bridge, a technology discovery faire for the public. Broadband Bridge contacted us because one of their major projects - adding broadband Internet access to the services offered by Bread For the City - dovetails with the spirit of Project Byzantium if not the two use cases we had in mind when we started building it. In truth, there is absolutely no reason that one could not build and maintain a community mesh with Byzantium. Anyway, Ben and I polished our presentation up a bit by working on it in Google Docs during the week and we got everything pulled together for Saturday afternoon.
We milled around a bit while figuring out who was who and where everything was, a slightly uncomfortable turn of events. I felt as if everything was organized around us but we weren't actually privy to the layout of things. Presently, two of the organizers who had invited us found us in the crowd (maybe it was our standard issue black trenchcoats) and after describing what we had on us (a presentation on mesh networking and Byzantium in particular) we figured out where and when we could present. The tech faire was standing room only, with other projects' tables arrayed around the building's lobby and attendees milling around all over the place. As we are wont to do when out and about, Ben and I had to be very careful about turning around too fast lest our backpacks accidentally knock something over. On the one occasion that there was an unintended gravity test (which wasn't our fault, incidentally), we took a few minutes out to improvise repairs on the apparatus in question.
More under the cut...
DISTRIBUTION: Washington, DC and surrounding areas. If you're outside of this area please boost the signal!
This weekend in Washington, DC as part of Digital Capital Week Broadband Bridge will be holding a Discovering Technology fair so that people active in the local community can exchange ideas, find out what has to be done, show off what they're working on, and build something great for the DC metroplex. The DiscoTech is a free event which starts at 12:00pm on Saturday, 5 November 2011 and will run until 5:00pm at Bread For the City (1525 7th Street NW, Washington DC). Among the activities at the DiscoTech will be stations where you can ask questions about commonly-used and cutting edge technologies, personal electronic devices, and most of all learn how policy and the Net both impact and help build local community. Workshops will be held that afternoon starting at 1:00pm on a variety of topics from robotics to broadband policy and tech projects active in the DC metroplex. It is suggested that those who are interested RSVP at broadbandbridge.org but the way the announcement is written it seems as if anyone can drop in. Ben the Pyrate and I will be there speaking about mesh networking and Project Byzantium.
This is the weblog of the Doctor, who is (in no particular order), a geek, a writer, a musician, a mystech, a coder, a traveler, an adventurer, an engineer, a magickian, a system administrator, a consultant, a transhumanist, and is interested in just about everything to some extent.
The Doctor's life is quite busy (his career doubly so) so he posts whenever the opportunity arises. It isn't as often as he would like.
. It's a collection of magazine articles, reminiscences, and speeches that he's given over the past twenty years or so, and I think there is something in there for everybody. It's a quick read, a day if that, and if you pay attention you'll find that Gibson has lost none of his wit or sense of humor over the years, and you'll enjoy it all the more for that. Of course, 
; unfortunately, I don't really play video games (
is more my speed, and even then I only play sporadically) but even after digging up a couple of walkthroughs I had to admit defeat. I guess it's time to turn in my "Child of the 80's" membership card and delete the 
