Tomorrow is Free RPG Day once again, a day to let your nerd flag fly by paying your friendly local gaming store a visit to see what they have in stock. If they're worth the Cheetos and Mountain Dew on their gaming tables they'll have some nifty new games for you to take home for the asking (it is Free RPG Day, after all). If you're lucky you'll be able to try them in the store with your closest friends (or people you don't even know, which can be just as fun). Or maybe you heard about tomorrow well in …
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 …
Please boost the signal - link to this post everywhere!
I realize this is a bit late, I've been laid low by a sinus infection, but thankfully a few of us have been getting flyers put around the DC metroplex.
Saturday night, on 3 July 2010 from 7:00pm to 9:30pm Nebula Award winning author Catherine Asaro and musician Donald Wolcott will be performing live at Stacy's Coffee Parlor in Falls Church, Virginia to celebrate the release in paperback of Asaro's latest novel of the Skolian Empire series, Diamond Star. For one night only the duo will perform songs from …
I'll be giving a presentation on Tor for the Washington DC Linux Users' Group the evening of 19 May 2010. The LUG meeting will start at 1900 EST5EDT (7:00pm) and run until 2100 EST5EDT (9:00pm) or thereabouts; afterward folks usually go to dinner nearby and hang out for a while. The meeting location is 2025 M Street NW; Washington, DC; 20036. From the street look for the big Tux the Linux Penguin poster or a sign for the LUG.
Confirmation's just hit the NOVALUG website - I will be presenting at the next meeting on 10 April 2010 on the topic of anonymity technologies in general and Tor in particular. Tor is the name of a free/open source utility which protects the user from traffic analysis and some content monitoring by passive attackers. I will discuss the origins of Tor as well as the threat model it was designed for, its capabilities, and potential attacks against the network as a whole and individual users thereof. I will also talk about operational security for users and Tor nodes. I will …
Word has come down from the state of New Jersey that Saloncon, the first known neo-victorian convention in the United States, is no more. Following the tribulations of 2009, including the economy floating upside down in its fishbowl, the organizers are not able to set the wheels in motion for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the organizers have branched out in new directions in their personal lives and do not have the time or energy right now to put on a convention as a result. saloncon will certainly be missed; I know I shall miss the yearly trek to …
The Foresight Institute, a think tank concentrating on the possibilities and potential hazards of emerging and potentially disruptive technologies has announced the Kartik M. Gada Personal Manufacturing Prize totaling $100kus. Part of an effort to spur the development of rapid fabrication and manufacturing technologies at the grassroots level, the prize aims to help bootstrap the quality of life of people living in the twenty most poor economies on the planet. The idea is to lower the cost of entry to the field of manufacturing commodity personal goods by making use of recyclable materials and cheap to construct additive fabbers. The …
A most disturbing announcement was posted to the or-talk mailing list by Roger Dingledine, one of the core developers of Tor. Earlier this month it was discovered that moria1 and gablemoo, two of the seven directory authorities of the Tor darknet were compromised along with a server added to the project's domain to track and serve metrics. One of the boxen was imaged for later analysis but all were reconstructed. New crypto keys were cut for the directory authorities due to the compromise, necessitating a new release of the software. Scarily, moria also hosted the Subversion and git repositories for …
For several years now, the website Wikileaks (mirrored across the global Net as well as a couple of darknets) has been the first place to go if you wanted to learn about anything shady going on. Founded as a clearinghouse for whistleblowers and do-gooders by Sunshine Press, they make it their business to archive and disseminate sensitive documents that were leaked because they provide proof of dastardly goings-on in the world, from illegal search and seizure to confidential e-mails about screwed up policies and procedures to hit lists of thorns in the collective side of the powers that be. A …
