The term "hacker" is often used pejoratively. In reality, a hacker is someone who finds a clever and creative solution to a programming problem. Hacker culture typically advocates free and open source software and community based thinking. Malevolent hackers or "crackers" or "black hats," are the ones that we need to worry about. Thus, the distinction between white hat and black hat hackers.
HacDC is a community organization in DC dedicated to the collaborative use of technology. HacDC is part of a global trend in amateur engineering clubs that have come …
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 …
To work around some scheduling conflicts, this month's Project Byzantium development sprint will be held this weekend, 24 and 25 August 2012 at HacDC. If you've been following the project for a while and would like to get involved, or if you're a new developer and would like to get up to speed this will be a perfect time. In addition to talking over lessons learned since the release of v0.2a we'll be teaching new developers everything you'll need to know to get up to speed.
We're in the home stretch. I'm writing this at HacDC while waiting for a build to finish. We're getting ready to freeze the codebase for v0.2a of Project Byzantium, after which time we're not going to change anything until people start using it and the bug reports come in. In other words, we'll have a code freeze until we start working on the next release. We have special give-aways for HOPE Number Nine and a presentation to finish up (start, really).
Anyway, this is a post to say where I'll be and what we're doing. I have two presentations …
I've been struggling to come up with a suitable title for this post but I gave up on the effort in favor of writing about what's actually been going on in my life lately. First, the good stuff, and then I'll follow up with everything else.
Last month we launched the new Project Byzantium website. It took us a while to get it together - we tried a couple of CMSes before we found one which struck a good balance between ease of use, usability, and plain old "it does what we need." I wish that it had been a smoother …
"This is our SUV, the Nebuchadnezzar. From it, we hack into the Matrix and broadcast our pirate signal."
That pretty much sums up our trip to CarolinaCon 8, held last weekend at the Hilton Hotel in Raleigh, North Carolina.
CarolinaCon, now in its eighth year, is a small, intimate hacker con founded by people who believe that sharing information with one another is the best way to both learn and advance the state of the art. It's the sort of con where you will see a talk by someone who may have learned about public speaking from watching Jerry Seinfeld's …
A week or two ago it was announced on one of the HacDC mailing lists that we'd been given a pair of tables at the second USA Science and Engineering Festival which was held this past weekend. It was a call to members who wanted to exhibit their work during the festival, and not a few of us threw our headgear into the ring. Rather than hold a Byzantium development sprint this weekend Sitwon, Haxwithaxe, and I met at HacDC to mass-produce demo CDs of Byzantium Linux to give out at our table along with the HacDC stickers, postcards, and …
Last weekend the Project Byzantium development team assembled once again at HacDC, this time to close out tickets because we're getting ready for the second alpha release of Byzantium Linux as well as the launch of the official website. I think we're making pretty good progress - about half of the tickets in the bug tracker are closed (i.e., have been fixed) and we're lining up the next set of features. Some weeks back a group of hackers associated with the Zero State took over a pub in the UK and put Byzantium Linux through its most difficult test yet …
Just a quick heads-up about the Project Byzantium development sprint this weekend:
The development sprint will not be at HacDC this month, but instead it will be held at the Thurgood Marshall Academy in Washington, DC because we'll be at Discotech again. DiscoTech will be held between 12:00pm and 4:00pm on Saturday. Come one, come all, stop by and see what new things are afoot in DC!
Approved for: GENERAL RELEASE, DISTRIBUTION UNLIMITED
UPDATE: Due to a critical bug in Byzantium Linux v0.1a, a file containing the mesh routing and application software was omitted from the .iso image. The code which makes Byzantium, well, Byzantium isn't there. To fix this, please re-download the .iso image from one of the mirrors linked below and try again. We humbly apologize for our screwup. QA processes are being put in place to ensure that this never happens again.
We're sorry.
Project Byzantium, a working group of HacDC (http://hacdc.org/) is proud to announce the release of v0.1 …
