UPDATE: 20191230 - Uploaded much better video footage to my Peertube account, linked appropriately.

My preparations leading up to HOPE 9 were something of a last minute scramble; at HacDC the night before we left for New York my trusty cellphone of four years decided to give up the ghost. This meant that I had to get to a Sprint store early on Thursday morning, pick out a new phone (a Samsung Galaxy S-2, which appears to be a later model of Lyssa's phone) and set about migrating all of my data in the little time there was before I had …

The hot topic these days is the January 25th revolution in Egypt: the people rose up and demanded that their president (who is known for, among other things, having bloggers raided, torture, censorship, and general repression of the people of an entire country) step down and do whatever it is that retired dictators do (which is usually not what the people wish he or she would do). For the record, the United States was well aware that this was happening, and in fact aided the government of Egypt to the tune of 1.5 billion US dollars a year because …

A well-known blogger in Egypt who went by the handle of Sandmonkey who'd come under the scrutiny of the old Egyptian government was raided and taken into custody, and his blog was taken offline. Telecomix has asked that his final blog post be mirrored across the Net. I've mirrored the text from here verbatim.