"The truth of the world is that is is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no one is in control, the world is rudderless."
--Alan Moore
I've been thinking about that quote a lot lately.
In the month or so since my last post I've been basically keeping my head above water and trying to live as productive a life as possible. It's easier than it sounds, oddly, but it costs a lot …
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 …
A couple of weeks ago, HacDC added a new tool to the workshop, a laser cutter from Full Spectrum (which, I've just discovered, was a Kickstarter campaign). We've been saving up for it for a while, but one of the nights I was there I got to see its unboxing and (with the permission of the folks there) I took some pictures.
A couple of months ago we ported Byzantium Linux to the RaspberryPi. I took a couple of photographs during the development sprint and then promptly forgotten that I'd done so. While cleaning out my camera's SD card a few days ago I rediscovered them.
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 …
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 few months ago Project Byzantium sent an application for the Access Innovation Prize, an initiative that will award five $20kus grants to projects operating in five problem spaces (Blackout Resilience, Making Crypto Easy, The Bounty, The Golden Jellybean, and the Access Facebook Award).
Project Byzantium is back from New York City, where we were assisting the people of the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn restore their communications infrastructure following Hurricane Sandy.
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 …
