Towards the end of helping Iranians get access to the Internet, I want to link to some resources, both specific and general.

Here are two ways to set up proxies (one for Windows, one for OS X):

1. How to setup a proxy for Iran citizens (for Windows!)
2. How To Set Up An Anonymous Proxy For Iranians Using Squid on Mac OS X

I would also suggest the easy option of setting up a Tor node. This adds to the overall goodness of the Tor network anyway.

Anonymous, strangely enough, seems to be interested in helping as well (http://iran.whyweprotest.net/). Their site has a nice forum with all sorts of information geared more towards the less skilled (which is really necessary), as well as helping people track what is going on. They are using Tor Hidden Services as well, which is a sort of parasitic Internet running within the Tor network.

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He said:

“I don’t know if Tor is the end-all-be-all, but the basic point would be: browser-based, quasi-auto-configuring anonymous darknets (that set up and tear down without a trace), and look something like other (e.g. HTTP) traffic would be a boon to free speech.

Until the government decided that it was aiding and abetting pedophilia, and banned it. Thankfully the first amendment does not apply there.”

On Twitter, Vinay Gupta, of Hexayurt fame, suggested:

“http://guptaoption.com/cheapid == identity backbone for dealing with things like distributed voting. You want timestamping and good, clear access to the HTTPS certificate chains to be able to encrypt messages to other users using client side certs.”

I had figured that I’d get more commentary than that on something that is very relevant to current news. I mean that this is blue sky territory, people. I know that there are more ideas on enabling openness and freedom through Firefox, Thunderbird, and in the platform than none at all. There have to be ideas out there on how to extend these to enable, for example, anonymous communication, routing around censorship, etc.

Meanwhile, I heard two stories while driving from work in the car on NPR yesterday relating to the use of Twitter, social networking, and the Internet in the current protests. I found the pieces immediately brought to mind the importance of the Internet and enabling openness as a core necessity.

Check out In Iran, A Struggle Over Cyberspace and The Challenges To Turning Off The Internet In Iran. The latter story even has the obligatory Jonathan Zittrain quote.

Update: Now Zittrain has posted in relation to this matter as well. I seem to be timely as this just went up: Why the PC matters.

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Watching the twitterstorm around the current situation with the Iranian elections has been fairly thought provoking. The Iranian protesters are completely shut out of the official media in the form of newspapers, radio, and television in Iran. These are under the thumb of the state at the service of a man that may (or may not) have stolen an election for himself. The only viable option is the use of the net and other direct media communication, such as SMS. Of course, the state can block access to net resources and has turned off the cell networks at various points. Like the situation in China at times, people have found ways around these blockages to continue to report and communicate with each other.

Going back to my day job here at the Mozilla Corporation, I wonder what role, if any, we, the Mozilla community, can play in enabling freedom and openness. We aren’t specifically political as a group in the sense that we have no vested interest in battling specific governments. In fact, it is often in our best interest to be and be seen as neutral in such things. That said, we are also interested in an open Internet and an open Internet, by its very nature, has a political component because it is the antithesis of the state controlled firewalls and mechanisms of control that various authoritarian regimes like to put into place.

To the end of promoting an open Internet, is there more that Mozilla could do with software to help enable that process? Opera Unite has gotten some press during the last few days for facilitating the direct sharing of information over the net, though it reminds me of the defunct AllPeers software that went away last year. I have friends that work on the Tor Project, which has the explicit goal of allowing anonymous communication between people. Tor actually targets itself to helping dissidents, bloggers, and others that need to route around state blocking and tracking.

What kind of tools could Mozilla incorporate into Firefox, for example, with its more than 100 million users, that could help people in the future? I’ve advocated for Mozilla to support the Tor Project before (which didn’t really get beyond getting more Firefox bugs fixed). I’d like to see us help create the next generation of tools or even support and build in the next generation for anonymous communication, networking, encryption and other mechanisms. I’ve pointed out before how painful it is to send and receive encrypted e-mail within Thunderbird (or through webmail services like gmail) even though it has become clear that governments routinely snoop on e-mail (even the American NSA) well beyond what people have suspected.

One of the reasons that I work at MoCo is that we aren’t driven by a profit motive, being owned by a non-profit, and have an idea of social good built into what we do. I’d like to see how that could be explicitly expanded. I’d love to hear suggestions as I have only the most basic of ideas (such as making encryption for communication easier or transparent or adding jabber support into the Mozilla platform) and I’m sure others have far better thought out ideas.

Of course, I could be out to lunch and most people don’t care about such things. I somehow doubt if this is true though.

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I encourage people to watch it. I’ve embedded it below but you can find it here as well. (The link at fora.tv is to a much higher quality streaming version.)

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I encourage people to go take a look at them if they are interested in this sort of thing.

You can see the Other Al doing his presentation on the use of Real Names below (unless you’re reading this through a Planet, which nukes embedded video…):

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The local hackerspace of which I am a member, Noisebridge, was profiled in the Gadget Lab blog the other day. It is actually a decent articleon the space and the movement in general.

This reminds me that I need to get my dues in…

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I have one problem with it though: I abhor all Digital Rights Management. Evil, evil shit. It’s all well and good at first (at least some people think so) until three, five or ten years later when the rights server goes offline and all that media that you thought you owned turns out to be “owned.” You lose access to it and that’s it, you’re screwed, bub.

This is why I don’t buy music, tv shows, or movies on iTunes even though I have an iPhone and a Macbook Pro. I’m Cory Doctorow’s little bum boy when it comes to DRM.

So, with the Kindle (and it’s little brother, Prince Michael Jackson II), all content that you can purchase so easily from Amazon is, of course, DRM’d. That makes me not want to give one cent to buy it for fear that my library will just go up in a puff of magic smoke in five or ten years.

What really needs to happen, as happened with DVDs in general and Blu-Ray to some extent, is that the Amazon DRM format needs to be cracked so the books can be freed from it. Even if it was a pain in the ass, if I knew I could do that, I would feel much more free to buy books from Amazon for the Kindle.

Until then, I suspect that I’ll be stuck with my groaning shelves of books filling my house. Personally, I’d rather free up all that space and go all Zen… :-)

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When I had a first generation phone, I admit that I jailbroke it, installed third party applications (including things like ssh) and generally had a good time with it. About two months ago, I bought the iPhone 3G (and my wife will be getting my old iPhone when her contract with T-Mobile is up in the next month). At that point, I started using applications from the app store. First the free ones but now I’ve paid for a few, like Colloquy, the IRC client. We use IRC as an essential part of our work at Mozilla and being able to get into a channel is very useful. I have Enso the meditation timer, Twitterific, Facebook, iGo the Go app, and others. I find myself using it all the time.

One thing that continues to bother me is the lack of a real keyboard. I used to have a Sprint Treo, which is what the iPhone replaced, and I loved many aspects of it. I didn’t appreciate the chiclet keyboard except that it was an actual keyboard of sorts, which made a huge difference for me. I typed out a multi-paragraph e-mail to a Mozilla higher-up this morning in a coffee shop on my iPhone and, let me tell you, the experience there blows chunks.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I realized when I was typing (and I’ve realized it before) that if I could use any one of a number of small, portable and foldable Bluetooth keyboards that are available, that I wouldn’t even need my laptop on many occassions. The iPhone screen is very nice, the connectivity is pretty good and can use wifi, 3G, or EVDO networks. What it really lacks for me is a an input method that doesn’t suck. Why is this the case? Well, Apple purposefully cripples the Bluetooth stack that comes with the iPhone in order to only work with Apple designated hardware or various headsets and nothing else. There is no real reason to do this. What damage would it do to let me use a stowaway keyboard with my iPhone so I could write real e-mail or, my word, blog posts? I’ve got a Wordpress app that will let me post to my blog here but I never use it? Why? Well, hunting and pecking for 30 minutes on a soft-keyboard to write a post that would take me five minutes on a laptop is a complete waste of time.

I know that there are people out there hacking the Apple Bluetooth stack in order to open it up but I really don’t want to go back to having to jailbreak my phone (and possibly bricking it on the next update) simply to use a freakin’ keyboard with it.

All right, Saturday anti-Apple rant (written on a new Macbook Pro) done. Enjoy your day! :-)

Update: As one commenter noted, I should have said “Edge” instead of “EVDO” since the iPhone doesn’t support the latter. My mistake.

Update II: I don’t care if it makes battery life worse (ha ha) on my iPhone or somehow degrades the “Apple experience.” I just want to be able to type on a freakin’ portable keyboard with real keys so I don’t have to lug a laptop around in order to write a freakin’ blog post or e-mail. Am I in crazytown here?

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I’ve blogged before about Noisebridge, the hacker collective in San Francisco (or the Bay Area as a whole, really) of which I am a member. The group has been meeting once a week for coffee for most of a year now and has been looking for an affordable space for most of that time.

The vision of the group is:

“We want to provide infrastructure and collaboration opportunities for people interested in programming, hardware hacking, physics, chemistry, mathematics, photography, security, robotics, all kinds of art, and, of course, technology. Through talks, workshops, and projects we encourage knowledge exchange, learning, and mentoring.

As a space for artistic collaboration and experimentation, we are open to all types of art – with a special emphasis on the crossover of art and technology. From hardware labs to electronics, cooking, photography, and sound labs, anything that’s creative is welcome.

We intend to have many interesting things happening at all times. Sharing is essential to making this work. A logical followup to this is to find a space to display our creative projects. “

As of today, we finally have our own space, keys in hand and lease signed. It is just off of 16th and Mission in San Francisco (at 83C Wiese St between Mission and Valencia just off 16th). We signed papers today after collecting promised funds from people over the last week once it became clear that the space would work and that the will of the collective was that we should get it.

Right now, there is literally nothing in the space and it needs to be cleaned. We’re going to hold our first meeting in it tomorrow, Tuesday the 30th, at 8:00 PM. Jacob Appelbaum seems attached to calling the space, “Noisebridge Meadows.” It consists of a 20′ by 30′ room with a kitchen and bathroom, a small “board room” with doors, and a 15′ by 30′ loft area above overlooking the main room. You can see shots of it from the initial showing last week on endenizen’s flickr set for it. It doesn’t look like much yet but it is ours!

Priorities now will be to get it cleaned up, networking and wiring set up or improved, and connectivity added. We should be meeting in the space every Tuesday evening, at minimum, and probably doing some other events or classes there in the short term (my wife suggests a “cock fighting” night as a monthly rent party).

We’re still in the middle of the process of incorporating as a non-profit but this is almost done and will make fund raising and contributions a lot easier.

This has been a long time in coming, especially for some of the much earlier members than me. I’m really looking forward to watching the space and group develop.

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The group has continued to meet fairly often over the last six months. Generally, there have been weekly meetings every Tuesday night in San Francisco. For much of the last month, we’ve been meeting at People’s Cafe, over in Berkeley, due to meeting organizers being over in the East Bay (which has made me happy since I live there as well). We still do not have a space or solid prospects for a space. One of the common tasks during the meetings is to go over Craigslist ads for spaces or discuss other potential spaces that people know about. One of the problems here is that in order to get a space in San Francisco, one must be able to pay at least $2,000 a month. With the interests of the group in electronics, robotics, etc., we also need a space that will allow us to work on projects as well as have groups of people come and go. In order to be able to gather money from people, we have to incorporate…

Basically, we’ve been bogged down, to a certain degree, by writing legal bylaws and the process of incorporation in order to get a bank account and set everything up for people to put money into the group. In a lot of ways, it probably would have been easier if five or so people in the group who work in the tech industry had just decided to get together and rent a space. It would be less official but we’d have one to work in… Instead, we’re going the legal non-profit route, which takes a lot of time. We did decide on a set of board members and officers for the group and near final bylaws are undergoing a review by a lawyer right now. Once these are cleared, we’ll file the paperwork and should be incorporated a few weeks later.

For my own part, I’m pretty skeptical about us finding a space in San Francisco within any kind of budget. As many people know, space is phenomenally expensive there and mixed-use spaces have been taken over as lofts or turned into condos over the years. You can get space much more cheaply (a third the price) in the East Bay, such as in Oakland, but many of the group are committed to this being a San Francisco organization more than a general Bay Area one. This is true even though at least four or five of the regularly attending members live in Oakland or Berkeley. This strikes me as a bit shortsighted for the group but you can’t force a collective to do anything… :-)

Members of Noisebridge will be attending The Last HOPE in two weeks. The Last HOPE is a hacker convention occurring in New York City and there is going to be a gathering of members of various hacker spaces there during the event. I’m not going to attend the event but members will be showing off some of the projects that they’ve been working on (such as the remote controlled blimp) during the event and talking to other groups about their spaces.

I’m hoping by the end of the year that Noisebridge will be incorporated and have found a space for people to meet in and work on projects together. I’m told that some members have been working on this for a couple of years so I shouldn’t be frustrated by the slow pace of things.

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This space is Noise Bridge and it is intended to fill the same sort of role that the hacker spaces of Europe do. As the wiki for the group states:

Noise Bridge is a hacker space in the same spirit as the European clubs like Metalab of Vienna, CBase of Berlin, MAMA of Zagreb, ASCII of Amsterdam. Many other clubs of a similar stripe can be found on Hacklabs. It would not be out of the question to consider Noise Bridge to be a possible San Francisco Chaostreff. Noise Bridge is a hacker space that shares a Dorkbot-like ethic and indeed many of the members of Noise Bridge are long time Dorkbotters.

Noise Bridge is a space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring and of course learning.

The group as whole has an interest in programming, hardware hacking, chemistry, mathematics, photography, security, robotics, all kinds of art and of course technology.

It is a place for mentoring and asking questions.

This is all very much in formation and you can consider the above to be a bit of a manifesto of the vision that people wish to see realized. The first priority is to nail down the interests of people and to get the word out to those that would be interested in taking part in such a space.

A number of the attendees at the meeting this evening had just return from 24th Chaos Communication Congress (24C3), which I blogged about recently. This and similar events have inspired people, such as Jake, to think about why we don’t have  similar events here in the Bay Area and also why we don’t have a space to support people interested in hacking in the older sense of the word. Given that Silicon Valley is next door and we have one of the highest concentrations of tech people (of all sorts) in the world, it is surprising that it hasn’t happened.

This evening, there were probably about a dozen people in attendance. Meeting notes should be up soon but most of the discussion was around the idea of finding a space to rent and then of what kind of projects people would be interested in do. Everyone wanted to get a sense of the kinds of things people are interested in and where we could support and inspire each other. Jake and others discussed some of what they’d seen at 24C3 as well.

Quite a few of the people there tonight are actively involved in local non-profit organizations focused on technology or involved in open source software in some way. In some ways, it feels like very much the same sort of crowd that you see in the Mozilla community and other open source projects (though with a bit of pierced and dyed hair slant).

Right now, it isn’t clear that the group is far enough along to get a space yet since that has a fairly heavy financial commitment for people. There is an active disinterest in incorporating the group legally or forming some sort of non-profit. No one is interested in being the singular leader of a formal organization. Most people seemed to just want to see how things progressed over time and have an adhocracy more than anything else. This is a bit of a refreshing change though I do think that the requirements around getting a space may require more formality than this.

I encourage anyone in the Bay Area interested in Noise Bridge and the possibilities around it to join the e-mail list (or the announcement list), hang out on IRC, and start attending meetings. As of this week, there are going to be weekly, low-key, meetings on Tuesdays in an effort to keep things moving and to get people together. These are occuring in downtown San Francisco in the evening.

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