It is, in theory, possible to configure any network service to be reachable over the Tor darknet. This includes instant messaging servers, like the XMPP server EjabberD. Conversely, it must be possible to configure your instant messaging client to connect over the Tor network. I used Pidgin as my client, and here's how I did it:
I then created a new XMPP account in my Pidgin client which connects to the XMPP domain the server was configured for (let's say it's 'xmpp-domain', though …
As mentioned over at the Project Byzantium blog, we released v0.3.2a of Byzantium Linux last night. This release is noteworthy because we figured out how to successfully port it to the Mac, which involved a certain amount of kernel hackery.
We also released two .iso images, one a regular .iso image that you can burn to disk and boot from, and another that you can write to a flash drive and boot from as well as burn to a disk. We recommend that Mac users try …
Regular readers of my blog (when I post... I'll write about what's been going on soon, promise) know that I keep a sensor net focused on the field of microfacture - personal manufacturing and rapid prototyping. Most of the time I natter on about 3D printing, but depositing layers of material to make something isn't the end-all-be-all of small scale manufacture. The other end of the spectrum - milling, or carving feedstock - is just as useful, and for many applications it's a preferable technique for making things. The thing about automills is that they're not yet as common as 3D printers. People …
ANNOUNCING BYZANTIUM LINUX V0.3a (Beach Cat)
Approved for: GENERAL RELEASE, DISTRIBUTION UNLIMITED
NOTE: This is Byzantium Linux for x86-compatible laptops and desktops. This release is not compatible with the Raspberry Pi. We just started work on that port.
Project Byzantium, a working group of HacDC is proud to announce the release of v0.3 alpha of Byzantium Linux, a live distribution of Linux which makes it fast and easy to construct an 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 …
The reason I haven't been posting much here is because I've been gearing up for this: Project Byzantium was awarded a grant by InformSec to advance the development of Byzantium Linux. The grant is for $10,000us across a six month period of time, during which we will accomplish the following milestones:
A while back I wrote an article about web applications that can live wherever you can store a file and not necessarily on a web server out of your control. I probably should have posted a link to Google Group dedicated to unhosted applications, but that's neither here nor there. To recap briefly, what I discussed in the previous article are called unhosted communications applications, like social networking or instant messaging software. This begs a crucial question: Assuming that you're running an unhosted application in your web browser, how do you tell other people how to connect to you with …
It's almost taken for granted these days that your data lives Out There Somewhere on the Internet. If you set up a webmail account at a service like Gmail or Hushmail, your e-mail will ultimately be stored on a bunch of servers racked in a data center someplace you will probably never see. Users of social networks implicitly accept that whatever they post - updates, notes, images, videos, comments, what have you - will probably never touch any piece of hardware they own ever again. Everything stays in someone else's server farm whether or not you want it to, and while there …
Long time readers are no doubt familiar with my facination with the subject of biological computing, using organic structures to process and represent information rather than silicon-hybrid substrates. When you get right down to it, DNA is an information storage and representation system, just like the tape upon which a notional Turing machine reads and writes symbols. Using this metaphor (which isn't nearly as tortured as it sounds), the ribosomes of eukaryotic cells would be the Turing machines that read the tape and carry out the operations (protein synthesis) encoded in the nucleotides.
