Congratulations to Telecomix alumnus Asher Wolf, who was awarded the 2014 Print/Online Award for Journalism along with Oliver Laughland and Paul Farrell at the Amnesty International Australia Media Awards on 21 October 2014! ~~~~~====::) ~~~~~====::) ~~~~~====::)

At the DC Cryptoparty in October of 2012 I did two presentations: One on GnuPG and one on whole disk encryption. While I'd put the GnuPG presentation online I hadn't done the same for the disk encryption one because I had to update it after the cryptoparty to take into account new information acquired that afternoon regarding MacOSX and Windows. I did so, converted the OpenOffice Presentation deck into a PDF, PGP signed them, and uploaded them this afternoon.

v1.0 of the WDE presentation is now available for download:

• cryptoparty-whole_disk_encryption-v1.0.odp (v1.0) (sig)
• cryptoparty-whole_disk_encryption-v1.0.pdf (v1 …

Now that things have calmed down a little, I've finally had time to finish and post one of my presentations from the Washington, DC cryptoparty. My presentation on GnuPG is now available for download. If there is anythings that needs to be fixed in it, please let me know and I'll get a new release out.

Please bear in mind that this is a high-level lesson on how to use GnuPG, so you won't learn how AES works or how to implement SHA-1, because you don't need to know that stuff to sign e-mail or encrypt files. If you want …

A couple of weeks ago I announced that a cryptoparty would be held at HacDC in the first half of October. If you haven't been watching hashtags on Twitter, a cryptoparty is a party where people get together to eat pizza and learn how to install and use strong cryptographic software (like GnuPG and Truecrypt) safely. These parties began in Australia as a result of the government there passing a bill which requires mandatory recording and storage of all net.traffic, just in case someone living in Australia is doing anything illegal. Almost immediately cryptoparties began springing up around the …

On 14 October 2012, HacDC will be hosting the first #cryptoparty in Washington, DC. Everyone in the DC metroplex who is concerned about privacy, anonymity, surveillance, stalking, journalism, or activism are invited to attend, regardless of your level of technical expertise or field of endeavor. At the #cryptoparty, experts will be on hand to teach you what you need to know to evade surveillance, protect your e-mail from eavesdroppers, protect the data on your hard drives and USB keys from theft, and communicate safely.

The #cryptoparty begins at 5:00pm sharp on 14 October 2012, so bring your laptops, smartphones …

I suppose I should talk about work a bit.

I don't ordinarily do that, because I think there's a conflict of interests between writing in a personal blog and talking about things I get paid to do, but sometimes it can't be helped. The last couple of weeks have been spent preparing for a fairly major server migration (e-mail service for a couple of offices and a couple of dozen employees), which for once didn't involve significant hardware wrangling (though that's going on in other areas) but does take a fair amount of time (most of it spent writing documentation …