Keynote: Hacking for Freedom
(Description of Hacking for Freedom)
Day #1 has kicked off with a bang. A keynote that really pulled at the heart strings for the love of freedom and liberty! The notion of technology being involved directly to those pushing for their freedom. Below I’ve snagged a part of the description:
Description
A first-hand talk about the politics, technology and ethics of hacktivism. I’ll give an overview of some of the active groups, including Anonymous and Telecomix and discuss some of the projects I’ve worked on in the past few months. See this blog post and video of lightning talk from Pycon.
- organizing protests in support of WikiLeaks and freedom information. Over one hundred cities in two weeks.
- supporting communications in the Middle East: working 20 hours / day for a week for Egypt without dying
- When the Net is up: proxies, mirrors, VPNs, encryption, retweeting
- When the Net is down: dialup modem pools, fax blasts, ham radio
- Works in Progress: two-way radio HOWTOs, Intranet LiveCDs
This keynote really made me realize I’ve gotten disconnected from a lot of things that pulled me into technology. The connected aspirations of people to change the world for the better is massive. The efforts that are going on around the world were described well by Peter Fein. Putting emphasis on the importance of having cell phones that can take video and get the word out when a regime is getting out of control. Having this immediate communication to call out the evil in the world has grown exponentially.
To learn more about what Peter Fein (@petewearspants) is up to and learn more about hacking for freedom check out Anonymous and Telecomix. Also be sure to check out his blog at http://i.wearpants.org/.
Cloud Scaling: High Performance Even in Virtualized Environments
(Description of Cloud Scaling: High Performance Even in Virtualized Environments)
After the keynote I attended the Cloud Scaling Session by Gavin McQuillan (@gmcquillan) who works at Urban Airship and blogs at Omnifarious.
Gavin spoke about how to design an architecture, primarily using Amazon Web Services, to build for scalability and uptime. Some of the main take home points I tweeted:
#osb11 Only get ~10G of true local storage? <- me: why are you depending heavily on this? Use S3, SimpleDB, or other?
@adronbh interested in the answer to that, if anyone dares
Stay tuned for more coverage of the OS Bridge Conference. Cheers!