Backbone 409

Topics

Issues

  • Data sovereignty

  • Sustainable community infrastructure

Debates

  • Which is more sinister: corporate or government surveillance?

  • What role does free software play in the surveillance state?

  • What can we do about the NSA and GCHQ's surveillance regimes other than ask them politely to stop? How will we know if we have any success?

  • How does mobile telephony play into the global surveillance state? What are the current tradeoffs, are they worth making, and can we imagine a better set of tradeoffs?

  • Who controls the cloud? Are users of virtualization destined for corporate slavery, or can virtualization be used to increase information sovereignty, autonomy, interdependence, and mutual aid?

  • Authenticity, Anonymity, Surveillance, and Repression: tensions on today's Internet.

  • The evolution, ethics, and economics of software vulnerability disclosure patterns; what are their consequences for dissent?

Workshops

  • Perfect forward secrecy: what is it, when is it useful, how can you use it?

  • Radical protocol analysis: how do our communications protocols influence us socially and politically? What can we do to reshape the protocols so that they have better social and political consequences?

  • Backups as basic organizational hygiene.

  • Distributed naming schemes -- how do we know who we are on the 'net? Why does it matter? Who gets to decide? What else could we be doing?

  • OpenPGP best practices.

  • Using distributed revision control for web application intrusion detection and disaster recovery.

  • Running a free software computer lab.

  • Using free tools for crafting and arts.

  • Ethical and practical considerations around power consumption for information infrastructure.

  • Theory and practice of disk encryption: what can it protect you from, how does it work, and how do you do it?

  • What exactly is a bootloader anyway? (or, understanding your computer more closely, from powerup to shutdown)

  • Bug reporting for fun and profit (profit to the community, that is).

  • Vulnerability analysis: a hands-on session, showing each other ways that we audit code for security problems.

  • What is Git? How can content-addressable data storage change the way we think about information and history?