It seems like every time we turn around, somebody else is trying to enact another scheme to make the Internet a little less open, a little less useful, and more of a surveillance tool for people who can't quite make out what the writing on the wall seems to say.
The latest, and possibly most frightening salvo in the as-yet undeclared War On the Internet is something called the PROTECT IP Act (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act). In a real sense, it's COICA v2.0 in that it still allows the US …
On 14 May 2011, Ben Mendis and I will be presenting on Project Byzantium at NOVALUG. We'll be talking about what Byzantium is and why we're building it, and we want more people to get interested in this project. Ben and I will be talking a little bit about what routing does (at the 50,000 foot view), what mesh routing is and why it's important, the nature of the Egypt and Katrina Problems, and the solutions we have in place for those problems. We're also going to talk about how Byzantium specifically works, what resources will be available on …
Note: All links anonymized due to the possibility that Someone might subpoena web server logs.
Earlier today during my morning news crawl (Twitter has pretty much supplanted everything I used before due to how fast word travels on that service, even Google News) I ran across something that made me shiver while considering the implications: the US Department of State is considering implementing new paperwork that United States citizens would have to fill out to apply for a passport which includes a biographical questionnaire that asks some pretty outlandish things which are analyzed in depth here. The proposed form, called …
The other day I'd gotten sufficiently comfortable with my cellphone (an HTC Hero) to take the next step and root it (which is to say, I used the z4root exploit to get admin privileges). I mentioned it in passing to Lyssa last night and she made an observation that caught me off guard: "If you had to jailbreak your phone," she said, "how can you call Android 'open'?"
How indeed.
Let's set up an example. The Android OS is based on the open source Linux kernel as well as a suite of applications and systemware different from those of your …
During the last weekend of March in 2011, a few dedicated hackers met at HacDC for the second development sprint of Project Byzantium. Our goal this time was to improvise devices by which gateway nodes of two mesh networks could relay traffic beyond the range of wi-fi to solve the mesh density problem (not enough nodes covering enough ground for complete connectivity). We had a couple of ideas for making a serial link between two mesh nodes that would act as network gateways on each mesh to forward traffic. Traditionally, the easiest way of linking two different systems was over …
Real life being what it is, I haven't had an opportunity to post much lately. I've a couple of writeups on Windbringer's desktop that are little more than disjointed notes right now that I really need to finish. The only thing I've really gotten done are the photographs I took at Mythic Faire a couple of weeks back.
I've updated my .plan file again. As always, there is NSFW content, coarse language, quotes that called to me, and non sequiturs that I hope will make at least a few of you laugh.
When things slow down at work, I'll have something more substantial to post about (like Project Byzantium).
