fossopw
Gender and tech
Trans Technology Symposium at Rutgers next Tuesday, 3/5
My friend Christina Dunbar-Hester and her colleague Bryce Renninger are guest curators of a pretty eclectic and awesome exhibit of gender-subversive art and artifacts which runs through June 3, 2013 at Rutgers University Institute for Women and Art in the Douglass Library. In their words, “Trans Technology focuses on technological art and artifacts that engage in trans, queer and feminist projects that help to trans (to use the word as a verb: spanning; interrogating; crossing; fusing) conceptions of the heterosexual matrix in technology.” A bunch of the featured creators will be at a symposium this Tuesday, March 5, 2013.
I was asked to contribute a jokey tee shirt with a series of (fallopian) tubes (Senator Stevens, don’t tie our tubes!) that I made back in 2006. Click here for the back story. My friend and frequent collaborator, Georgia Guthrie, is showing a piece that she knit from network … Read the rest
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Overclocking, wire tripping, and further adventures with Tor
Yesterday I was at the OTI offices again for a workday. For a chunk of the day I worked with Dan Staples on reviewing some things I’d learned about network settings in Commotion, and testing a Tor-enabled Commotion build. (More on that in a separate post.)
A couple of funny things happened on the way to the Internet. First, running Tor on a Ubiquiti PicoStation wireless node caused the little machine to overheat and reboot within 30 seconds of the process starting! Ha! We niced the process and managed to get it to stay up long enough to properly start up. I’ll do some more troubleshooting to figure out why it’s running so hard and see if there’s a way to (literally) cool it down. But I thought that was a pretty awesome problem.
At the same time, I successfully connected to the Internet through a Buffalo Air … Read the rest
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Tor basics in plain English
Here’s a cheat sheet that I wrote up for myself about two weeks ago after I’d gotten my bearings with the basics of Tor. I actually wrote it as an informal status update to my mentor and realized that if it was helpful to me, it might be helpful to someone else. If you see any errors, don’t be shy about setting me back on the right path!
First, though, please bask in the glory of this super awesome clickable graphic that demonstrates what network traffic is and isn’t obscured by Tor and HTTPS (encrypted HTTP). This snippet below is just a teaser. Click it to go to a page where you can click buttons for Tor and HTTPS and see how they work.
After a visit to the OTI offices and an overview of Commotion with my project mentor Will Hawkins, I felt like the fog had parted a … Read the rest
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Week three is the new Tuesday
Last week I was chatting with one of the GNOME internship program mentors who asked how the internship was going for me. I said that I felt pretty good, but that I was in a little bit of a lull. I’d learned about all I needed to know to get my feet wet with the technical end of my project, and now I needed to get better clarity on the question I am asking/problem I am solving to be able to really dig my heels in. I was floundering a little, but also having open-ended conversations with people who might be interested in the work. I didn’t know at that moment that those conversations would lead to a significant breakthrough the next day, resulting in a much clearer goal for my internship term.
It was nice to hear, then, that apparently a bunch of the interns in my cohort were … Read the rest
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OPW Internship: Organizing My Thoughts
As I wrote previously, I started a work-from-home internship with the Open Technology Institute last Wednesday. The project I was placed with has me working on boosting privacy and anonymity in wireless mesh networks. I spent some time orienting myself with the task and organizing my thoughts.
The stated goal of the project is to integrate Tor with Commotion. More specifically:
Tor Integration:
Commotion mesh nodes are capable of being configured to enter directly into the Tor network. We need an intern to configure, package, and document the process of making a tor-entry node. If the intern completes this task within the time frame they will have the opportunity to tackle custom configurations that will allow for Tor exit nodes on the mesh that allow small bandwidth Tor traffic from elsewhere to be run over the network to further obfuscate it.
Great! So….what does that mean? This … Read the rest
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Doing It Right: The GNOME Foundation Outreach Program for Women
Yesterday I got news that I was accepted into a super cool internship program. For the first quarter of 2013, I’ll be working with the Open Technology Institute to help them integrate Tor with their mesh networking platform called Commotion.
The internship is part of the GNOME Foundation‘s Outreach Program for Women. GNOME is an open source desktop environment, and my preferred desktop on Linux. In 2006 they ran an internship program whose goal was to get more women contributing to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). People loved it and in 2010 they revived the effort and started running it twice a year.
For this iteration, they’ve partnered with a slew of FOSS projects to offer some pretty diverse opportunities in cloud computing, security, and tools for privacy and fighting censorship. The internships are set up as full-time work from home, making them accessible for … Read the rest
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