The closing keynote of four days of Noisy Square at OHM was delivered by Eleanor Saitta (Dymaxion). A volunteer effort (Lunar, hdez, kali, KheOps, pabs, zilog and others) transcribed and proofread the full text of her call to arms. Audio recording — 43 minutes — MP3 — 99 MB Foreword: I’d like to thank Quinn … [Read more…]
Bits of Freedom was relaunched at HAR2009 four years ago. This morning the Dutch digital rights organization presented what has happened in the last four years. In 2009 the sense of urgency was high: the data retention law was being implemented, biometric fingerprints in passports were to be introduced and stored in a centralized database, … [Read more…]
Before the start of OHM there has been a lot of debate in mailing lists, on public blogs and on IRC about the presence of the police and companies that support the police at the festival. This discussion goes deep as it touches on the open, inclusive and tolerant nature of the hacker communities. At OHM this has already led to many heated discussion and even a few incidents.
Dutch Digital Rights organization Bits of Freedom presented four different scenarios for the future. In their day to day operations they sometimes feel like their work is mostly being shaped by current affairs. They wanted to take some time at Noisy Square to show three different ways that an event like OHM could be organized … [Read more…]
Julian Assange, in his political-attack-surface-minimizing outfit, was pretty straight about it at OHM on Wednesday night: technologists who are involved in the exploit market or academics renting out their allegiance to the transnational surveillance state should not get any intellectual or moral respect. Smart people have many opportunities in life and moral people don’t whore … [Read more…]
Jaap-Henk Hoepman started his talk with a few short definitions of privacy. It is seen as the right to be let alone, the right to informational self-determination, as freedom of unreasonable constraints of one’s identity and as contextual integrity. He then showed us that there are three types of data/information: volunteered, observed and (more … [Read more…]
Miriyam Aouragh stepped on the stage wearing a T-shirt from the Stop the War coalition. She said that she would not have come to OHM if it weren’t for the principled counter-stance that Noisy Square has taken. Her talk about “techno-counter-revolutions” started with a quote from Karl Marx: The revolutionary advance made headway not by … [Read more…]
Gmc (Koen Martens) opened OHM 2013 by talking about how we are all snooped on by government who are desperate to find what he called “statistical terrorists”. He wanted to know what we are going to do about this. If we know that end-to-end encryption is needed, why isn’t it part of the core architecture … [Read more…]
