It's been nearly a month since I've last had time to post anything here. Earlier I'd expressed hope that things would slow down and I'd have some compute cycles free to get my breath back, maybe go for a walk and do something fun. Unfortunately, as so often happens these days, that was wishful thinking. I wish that I had a lot of good news to write about, but unfortunately I don't. Just a little. If this post is going to be too much for you in your personal situation, close the tab. Seriously. If you've got your own ten …
I don't ordinarily do this, but I think this is a special case.
During the time of Occupy and the Arab Spring, the hacktivist collective Telecomix was the boots on the ground, the eyes in the sky, and a bloom of jellyfish swimming to and fro in the endless oceans of the Net. Among the many jellyfish who banded together beneath Agent Cameron's banner was the talented hacker Tomate, who later went public with his real name - Stephan Urbach. When the Telecomix network came under an unprecedented (at the time, anyway) attack that we were never able to trace the …
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 …
I'm snowed in at work because I have to catch up on everything that happened while attending HOPE 9. If we just met and you're trying to get in touch with me, please be patient. I'm not ignoring or trying to dodge you, I'm up to my neck and don't have time to get back to you yet. E-mails will be answered as time permits, I'm trying to catch up on Twitter, and your business cards are neatly stacked and await sorting. If you need my PGP public key here it is; when sending encrypted e-mail me please attach your …
All hell broke loose in Syria on 3 February 2012. The city of Homs was invaded by the Syrian military, which then opened fire. Over 400 people are confirmed dead, and I don't have an accurate count of the number of people who were injured anymore.
One of the problems hacktivists ran into when trying to disseminate useful information to people in Syria and Egypt was how to get through to people when DNS and web access are being filtered or outright blocked. Putting up web pages containing phone numbers of ISPs volunteering dialup access was something of a crapshoot because there was no guarantee that people would be able to view them. Someone (I don't remember whom) hit on the idea of contacting sysadmins in the Middle East by leaving messages in the access and error logs of their web servers. This works but pumping …
