I have other stuff to write about that will come in time.
I'll be presenting at the Global Existential Risks and Radical Futures Conference in San Francisco, CA on 14 June 2014. I'll be giving a talk entitled Echos Into the Past: Outbreaks of Future Technologies in the Present, about technologies that exist right now which the transhumanist community may wish to consider as first steps toward long-term goals.
I haven't seen this get a whole lot of love recently, so I thought I'd boost the signal in some small way.
On Sunday, 29 September 2013 between 1200 and 1700 EST5EDT there will be a Mini Maker Faire in Silver Spring, Maryland. If you've never heard of Maker Faire, it's a series of events organized and thrown by Make Magazine that are collectively billed as the Greatest Show-and-Tell on Earth. At a Maker Faire you can see everything from 3d printing demonstrations to singing Tesla coils, combat robots to kite photography, and everything in between. Mini-Maker Faires are, as …
Byzantium Linux v0.5b is officially released. We've changed a significant number of things under the hood for the fourth ISC development milestone, such as completely revamping the build process by splitting the repository into a number of other modules, making the captive portal page more reliable, and updating packages to their latest stable version. All of us are kind of fried right now - that's why we called this release Sleep Deprivation - so we've made it available on the usual mirror sites as well as a brand-new BitTorrent tracker.
Project Byzantium can now take a breather for a day or two to recuperate, so I have some time to write a hopefully coherent post during my second cup of coffee.
Last week we wrapped up ISC development milestone number three: Addding amateur radio support to Byzantium Linux. This was probably our more difficult development effort to date, as it required that we use our relatively newly earned skills as ham radio operators to figure out a way to connect mesh networks over long distances - longer distances than 802.11 wireless can ordinarily cover. I'll not recap the entire report …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
I've enabled SSL on my website to encrypt all traffic. You can read the full monty here. I recommend that you change your bookmarks appropriately: https://drwho.virtadpt.net/
As of 1818 EST5EDT on 17 August 2011, I ran the gpg --refresh-keys command
on my primary workstation. In the process of downloading and uploading new
signatures and keys, GnuPG suggested that I change my preferences;
specifically, the message digest and encryption algorithms that it defaults to
whenever it runs. I accepted the changes and was forced to re-export and
re-upload my public key. The size of the key has changed (due to being
re-exported and saved to a file) but the key itself has not. The key ID and
fingerprint are still the …
