As you've no doubt guessed, the reasons for my radio silence have been many and multi-layered, and now things have calmed down a little. I've been scrambling with the rest of the development team to get Project Byzantium in such a state that it was ready to show off at ContactCon. ContactCon, held late last week, was an unconference dedicated to showcasing and networking the developers of next-generation communication technologies that was driven by the attendees presenting their work rather than gathering to listen to people speak on stage. Most of us who attended are working on technologies that are …
I got back from ContactCon last Friday evening. Between the stress of travel and prepping to participate and present at a conference, the fact that ContactCon was standing room only, general lack of sleep, hauling too much equipment around and dehydration, I don't have the strength right now to write up the conference or post any pics. Suffice it to say that I haven't forgotten anyone - your contact info is neatly stacked up next to my keyboard, and I'm going to write back to everyone - but I need to recuperate a little.
On Saturday, 8 October 2011 I will be at HacDC giving an impromptu class on personal privacy, online anonymity, and operational security for activists. I will be talking about some of the online surveillance technologies in use right now, risks inherent in organizing online and how to mitigate them, practical cryptography, practical anonymity, and operational security. If you are not familiar with using PGP or GnuPG and would like to generate and distribute a key or learn how to send and receive encrypted and signed e-mail, I can walk you through the process during the class. I will probably be …
Friday evening the Byzantium development team met once again at HacDC to determine where all of us are in the engineering and development process and figure out what we have to do before we can put the alpha release online and announce open testing. Ben the Pyrate has been hard at work setting up the infrastructure and is constructing an automated build environment for the Porteus project (whose distro we're basing Byzantium on), and which we can leverage to make it easier to compile Byzantium Linux into a bootable .iso image. Right now the installation process is entirely manual, which …
A couple of weeks back Project Byzantium was contacted by Jeffrey Young, a journalist with the Chronicle of Higher Education working the online beat. He'd heard about the project and wanted to interview the developers; after some discussion on the mailing list he and I set up a time and spoke on the phone for an hour or so. A couple of days ago the article went live on their website, and I must say that I'm very pleased with how well it turned out. All I can speak to are my bits, but the location aside (we meet at …
Possibly the second worst thing about pulling up roots and moving someplace new is all the paperwork: You can only accomplish so much until you brave the outermost ring of Hell and return with proof of your valor. To put it another way, until the Department of Motor Vehicles deigns to give you a new driver's license, implicitly stating that you've been accepted by the state as being a full resident you'll probably be stuck. This usually involves a two step process, the first being the acquisition of a title, or legal proof that you are the lawful owner of …
As I've said a few times, all the nights I spent at the gym prior to moving into our new house really paid off. While I'm nowhere near as strong as the movers were I can still pick stuff up and put it down again without a whole lot of trouble. At least, until Lyssa pointed this out to me:
The left-hand image was taken an hour after Lyssa noticed; the right-hand image was taken a week later.
It seems that, while cleaning up the basement last friday I managed to give myself a subconjunctival haemorrhage. To put it another …
