I know, I know, I should get around to writing a proper New Year's post. I won't have time to do that for a day or so. I would like to make a brief announcement, however - there will be a development sprint for Project Byzantium at HacDC on 6 and 7 January 2012 starting in the early evening. It'll probably be cold at the 'space so dress warmly. We're going to be working on the final roadblock before we publish v0.1a, which is the captive portal, or the website that mesh clients will see when they first associate with …
DISTRIBUTION: Washington, DC and surrounding areas. If you're outside of this area please boost the signal!
This weekend in Washington, DC as part of Digital Capital Week Broadband Bridge will be holding a Discovering Technology fair so that people active in the local community can exchange ideas, find out what has to be done, show off what they're working on, and build something great for the DC metroplex. The DiscoTech is a free event which starts at 12:00pm on Saturday, 5 November 2011 and will run until 5:00pm at Bread For the City (1525 7th Street NW, Washington …
On Saturday, 8 October 2011 I will be at HacDC giving an impromptu class on personal privacy, online anonymity, and operational security for activists. I will be talking about some of the online surveillance technologies in use right now, risks inherent in organizing online and how to mitigate them, practical cryptography, practical anonymity, and operational security. If you are not familiar with using PGP or GnuPG and would like to generate and distribute a key or learn how to send and receive encrypted and signed e-mail, I can walk you through the process during the class. I will probably be …
Friday evening the Byzantium development team met once again at HacDC to determine where all of us are in the engineering and development process and figure out what we have to do before we can put the alpha release online and announce open testing. Ben the Pyrate has been hard at work setting up the infrastructure and is constructing an automated build environment for the Porteus project (whose distro we're basing Byzantium on), and which we can leverage to make it easier to compile Byzantium Linux into a bootable .iso image. Right now the installation process is entirely manual, which …
A couple of weeks back Project Byzantium was contacted by Jeffrey Young, a journalist with the Chronicle of Higher Education working the online beat. He'd heard about the project and wanted to interview the developers; after some discussion on the mailing list he and I set up a time and spoke on the phone for an hour or so. A couple of days ago the article went live on their website, and I must say that I'm very pleased with how well it turned out. All I can speak to are my bits, but the location aside (we meet at …
As with any project, if you want people to use it you have to make them interested in it. To make them interested in it, you have to tell them about it. In the era where Internet access is considered a fundamental human right by many, finding places to post about what you're working on is easy. So, as one might expect I've been hooking up with Internet activists and technologists wherever and whenever I can to exchange ideas and get the word about Project Byzantium out. However, it seems like I keep answering the same questions over and over …
It's been a couple of weeks - far too long, really - since I've written anything about Project Byzantium. We've been hard at work when we haven't been working our day jobs though we haven't really made a lot of it public (or at least visible). A few weeks back an official developers' page was set up on the HacDC wiki and the mailing list was fixed at long last so you don't have to subscribe to a Yahoogroup and worry about cross-posting. Right now only a little conversation takes place aside from notifications whenver code is checked into our repository at …
Earlier this month (I know, I know, I plead working on the weekends) Ben Mendis and I presented at NOVALUG on Project Byzantium. We had a pretty good turnout that Saturday, especially seeing as how the location was changed at the last minute but the NOVALUG website hadn't been updated. Ben and I had worked on the presentation all week using Google Docs and I think we did a pretty good job of putting together a framework to speak from that didn't put people to sleep. I also think we did a pretty good job for a) not rehearsing together …
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 …
During the last weekend of March in 2011, a few dedicated hackers met at HacDC for the second development sprint of Project Byzantium. Our goal this time was to improvise devices by which gateway nodes of two mesh networks could relay traffic beyond the range of wi-fi to solve the mesh density problem (not enough nodes covering enough ground for complete connectivity). We had a couple of ideas for making a serial link between two mesh nodes that would act as network gateways on each mesh to forward traffic. Traditionally, the easiest way of linking two different systems was over …
