Privacy

I was sitting in Sinnamon on the Stranmillis Road, enjoying a coffee, a sausage roll, and my Kindle, reading the latest 2600. One article immediatly stood out to me, ‘A World Spinning’. The main focus of the article was the world-changing domino effect, toppling regimes across the middle east, all caused by one, little textfile. The textfile in question was a US Embassy cable highlighting the indemic corruption in the (ex) Tunisian Government. As most know, this leak was from WikiLeaks; a rag-tag loosely knit chaotic alliance of hackers across the globe, all with the the same general aim to allow open and plain discourse and stopping governments across the globe from hiding secrets from their citizenry; big secrets and small… Of course, as with most things to do with hackers, the aim isn’t that simple; having spoken to some of those involved, it was abundantly clear that some elements within Wikileaks purely want to screw with governments that (they feel have) wronged them, but others are simply motivated by the cat-and-mouse challenge of acquiring, validating, securing and releasing information in a hostile environment. ...

On Saturday the 23rd October, the Hackers invade The Space! In association with QUESTS, Dragonslayers, and IETNI, HackerspaceBelfast will be running a series of events over 24 hours of software, network, and hardware hackery goodness, as well as screening hacker movies, DIY repair, and maybe, just maybe, how to build a laser. Running parallel to Dragonslayers’ 24 hour gaming event, which will incorporate console, PC, and tabletop games, attendees will be able to both play and make games to their hearts content. ...

So we’re only a few weeks into developing this idea, and first I’m going to give some credit where credit’s due; the people that I’m working with this have been brilliant, I want to give special thanks (in no particular order) to Ryan Grieve (@thegrieve), David Kane, Ben Harrison, Martin Gilchrist (@Gilchrist_LLP), Jonny Milliken, Dan Reid, and Chris Murray (@kris18890). Anywhere, where are we now? ...

I am sick and tired of seeing ‘so and so joined SOMETHING COOL EVERYONE SHOULD SEE’ only to check out the group and see its behind a join-wall. so I’m starting my own library of pointless Facebook joinwall groups along with alternate source material and a brief of what is behind the joinwall. Affectionately known as FGL. Check it out and let me know what groups you want exposed.

“In this upcoming round of ACTA negotiations, the U.S. delegation will be working with other delegations to resolve some fundamental issues, such as the scope of the intellectual property rights that are the focus of this agreement. Progress is necessary so that we can prepare to release a text that will provide meaningful information to the public and be a basis for productive dialogue. We hope that enough progress is made in New Zealand in clearing brackets from the text so that participants can be in a position to reach a consensus on sharing a meaningful text with the public.” ...

Folks, we’re basically screwed; The Digital Economy Bill recieved Royal Accent on April 9th and is officially now Law. So after barely three days of parliamentary ‘debate’ where only 20-ish MP’s actually spoke on the subject (but somehow 189 MP’s decided it was a good idea anyway), our civil rights have been sacrificed infront of the alter of copyright. Many sites have a much more indepth tretise on the subject than I could do so I’ll keep this short. ...

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Super Happy Dev Castle – SHDC #0 This was a brilliant event, I just wish I had planned ahead to have a project to work on ! Install Multiple Linux Distributions Via PXE (The Easy Way) This is YAPIWD, yet another project i want to (or wont) do… Google Wave in Action: Real-World Use Case Studies [Use Cases] I never got into google wave that much but i think i may have to revisit it after reading this article! ...

For a man who’s title is currently Baron Mandelson, _of Foy in the County of Herefordshire and of Hartlepool in the County of Durham, _First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, President of the Board of Trade and Lord President of the Council, educated in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and is hotly tipped to become a major part of the Lisbon-Treaty-generated-unelected-cou-detat-european-super-parliment, you’d think the power-addicted, peace-process screwing, ‘shreud loaning’ rat would leave well enough alone. ...

Currently, this is a major American congressional argument, and hasn’t really come up publicly in Europe (outside of Scandinavia , but Net Neutrality is going to be one of those issues that if people aren’t made aware of it, the legislation removing it will sweep over all of us. Imagine what would have happened if in 1998, ISP’s had throttled the traffic going to a little rack in Stanford University that would late take over the internet as the great distributor of information. Imagine if Google couldn’t pay the ’top-tier access fee’ and had simply died. ...