Bilal Ghalib (co-founder of All Hands Active hackerspace in Ann Arbor, MI, and hackerspace documentarian) and Mitch Altman (co-founder of Noisebridge hackerspace in San Francisco, CA, inventor of TV-B-Gone remote controls, and recent recipient of the first-ever Maker Hero Award) are going to Maker Faire Africa to create a three-day hackerspace there. This will help the founders of the Cairo Hackerspace establish their forming space into a physical reality which, in turn, will help get other hackerspaces going throughout Africa. We have recently seen how important hackerspaces are in helping people in Africa live more fulfilling lives. Let’s see how much more we all can do with so little!

Bilal and Mitch received seed funding from Maker Faire Africa, and at posting time, 147 backers have raised $6,822 over the past two weeks on their Kickstarter campaign!  They need to raise $200 more in the next several hours (and any amount over their goal will directly help hackerspaces in Africa!). If you can give a $1, please do! If you can give more, please do! Any amount is great! (And they are offering some pretty cool premiums too.)

3 Day Egyptian Maker Space – Expanding the Maker Movement

Why so harsh? For the simple reason that at a certain abstraction level hackerspaces are not that new and unique. They are semi-permanent gatherings of people who share a common interest, namely technology for the sake of technology and unorthodox uses of it. Semi-permanent in the sense that the group has a certain continuity, with obvious turnover of the participants of that group. They also have assets and often liabilities. The assets tend not to be very liquid, meaning that often they cannot be easily sold. After all, take a look around in a typical hackerspace and you see lots of stuff that is not easily replaced but not easily sold either. Which is the same for your average rowing society, student union or scouting club. The liabilities tend to be less complex, usually a long-term lease for the space itself, but sometimes a bit more than that, for example some financing arrangement with particular participants that was needed to buy really fancy equipment such as a lasercutter. Which again is not terribly different from a rowing club (you do not want to know what a carbon composite rowing boat costs nowadays).

One caveat however: I am using the terms foundations and associations a bit loosely and from a mostly civil law perspective. In common law countries other than England, Wales and Ireland (Scotland is a civil law country) your mileage may vary a bit more. Your mileage may vary anyway, even within continental Europe.

First of all look at the problems the typical not-for-profit corporations (foundations and associations)  face:

Especially associations are vulnerable to disproportionate power wielded by a small group of members, or even worse, to a newly elected board that turns out not to be competent to run a prudent ship. Especially student associations are vulnerable to that phenomenon because they tend to rotate boards on an annual basis. On the other hand, the democratic nature of associations fit in much better with anything you want maximum participation from outside the board in.

Foundations are fundamentally problematic because the board is accountable to none but themselves (and the founding charter, but this only becomes an issue when a foundation enters bankruptcy). So you end up with a, in the option of some, arbitrary, group of people who get to decide on issues that have a major impact on the not-for-profit.

Another issue is limited liability. In most jurisdictions being a board member of either an association or a foundation you’re personally and jointly liable together with all other board members. However, being a board member of an association has a slight advantage: if the members of the association decide to overrule the board, which they can to a certain extent, board members cannot be held liable for such a decision. On the other hand, telling board members of a foundation that they should take a certain decision is not unlikely to be met with ‘and will you be held liable for any negative consequences?’, or at least the thought of it.

Basically it is a trade-off between accountability and (certain level of) stability.  But also of participation versus consumption. The nice thing is that it is not an either-or decision. And the issue has been reasonably well solved by my earlier examples: student unions and scouting clubs. The typical pattern used there is that of two entities that work together: a foundation and an association. The foundation typically has one or more seats reserved for representatives, if not board members, of the association. All activities that need lots of participation in terms of time take place under the flag of the assocations. Assets and long-term obligations that are best served by a foundation are put under the flag of the foundation. In case of scouting clubs the club house is typically owned or rented by a foundation, which lets the association use it while the association typically transfers  financial surpluses above a certain level to the foundation in order to let it invest in the club house and associated expenditures.

Translated to a hackerspace the foundation would be:

• renter or owner of the real estate;
• owner of the equipment that would otherwise be called ‘capital goods’, for example CNC equipment, lasercutters;
• provider of said real estate and equipment to the association and in return being funded by the association.

The association would exist for the actual activities, e.g. the actual hacking, running the bar, organising events. Accountability can be introduced by having the foundation’s board having one or more seats appointed by the association. It is however preferable not to have an intersection between the foundation’s and the associations board in order to keep roles clear, if only inside peoples’ heads.

And yes, it is a bit of a hack. It is not terribly elegant, it needs specific bylaws and statutes for both the foundation and the association involved. But it allows for a modicum of accountability for the foundation and a reasonable amount of stability for the association. It works elsewhere, for non-profits faced with rather similar problems as faced by hackerspaces. If you are involved in starting a new hackerspace or running into governance issues at an existing one, consider this option. Why limit yourself to one entity if you can solve issues by having multiple?

Although I wasn’t in contact very much with Len lately, I have chosen to write this blog and let people know what a great guy he was, please feel free to use the comment field as a condolence register.

All the best to Len’s wife, family, friends and everybody else who knew Len.

The world lost another hero….

Rest In Peace Len

*** Update ***
For those who would like to say goodbye to Len, Saturday 9th of July 12:00 (noon) at “De Jacht cemetery in Heverlee” in Belgium there will be the ceremony. Meredith is inviting everybody who would like to come.

To all the people on the good planet Earth, the crew of Tokyo HackerSpace has a message that we would like to send to you:

By now, everyone knows of the crisis in northern Japan. It will still be a few weeks before life is under control here. We are looking forward to the day that the power plants are safe and the tremors have subsided.

Many of our members have been cooped up in our homes waiting out the storm, but not laying idle.

The Japanese government is doing the best that they can to manage the crisis and help people who have lost loved ones, homes, utilities and possessions.

Tokyo HackerSpace has already begun to lay plans for projects which we feel can help the people of Japan, utilizing the best of our abilities and resources.

Our first course of action has been to order up the required parts for 150 solar powered LED lanterns. We will be assembling them here and shipping them up (or delivering by hand) to aid organizations. These lanterns provide just enough light so that people can feel safe at night without power, find their way in the dark, and maintain the sense of community. They charge during the day via the sun, and will help to light the way for 8 hours each night.

We also have on the way several geiger counters and geiger tubes, from which we will be making community sensors, in order to help to keep the public in harms way informed on a minute by minute and hour by hour basis. While the initial exposure has been low, our concern is the long term effects, food and water supply, and ground soil conditions over the next several months.

Or longer term projects include solar cell phone charging stations, low energy cooking equipment, internet, wifi, and laptop loans, and other technical concerns.

We are calling upon Hacker Spaces all over the world, and friends of Hacker Spaces, and friends of friends of Hacker Spaces, to help out.

Soon we will release a list of critical equipment and supplies which we may have difficulty sourcing locally. If you have access to anything on the list, please contact us to make shipping arrangements. If not, please DO NOT ship us anything not on the list (In some cases, it may be VERY specific). Items not on our list will only crowd our space and waste your shipping money and time. If you have something specific or unique you think we could use, feel free to send us an email and inquire.

In the meantime, we ask that anyone who can, please donate to only reputable charities. Or, if you prefer, you may donate directly to us, and we will utilize it for the above mentioned projects, or give the money directly to Japanese aid organizations known to be doing good work in the area.

You can donate via Paypal to theTHSstore@gmail.com

Good night and good luck.

Attention all hackers and hackerspace members! Do you like creating with atoms instead of bits? Would you like to win fame and fortune? The Alternate Power Initiative wants YOU to design and build an alternative energy vehicle! Their second annual “Race for the Future” will be held in August, 2011 in Whiting, Indiana.

This race challenges you to:

Build a vehicle that can travel five miles powered by an alternate power source and race it through the streets of Whiting Indiana.

Here’s a subset of the rules:

Vehicle may not be powered solar energy or fuel cells

Vehicle may not be powered by a device based on existing conventional automotive or truck technology. Piston engines, rotary engines or turbines powered by detonated combustion gasses are not allowed. Piston engines, rotary engines or turbines powered by other sources will be allowed. These gasses would include but not be limited to those created by using gasoline, diesel, natural gas, propane methane or alcohol as fuel.

Vehicle must be self propelled (no pedal power)

Vehicle may not be powered by battery or capacitor stored electricity, (brake lights and turn signals may be powered by electricity).

Vehicle may be charged, (fueled or energized) before 5 mile trial but may not be charged, (fueled or energized) during run.

For full details, visit their website at http://alternatepowerinitiative.com!

Here are the rules and the entry form.

Better hurry! There are only 20 entries, and hackerspace Pumping Station: One has already claimed two of them! Who will be next?

If you sign up, please post in the comments!

The arrested teenager, who was allegedly involved in the attacks on websites of MasterCard and other companies that obstructed Wikileaks‘ activities, was known to visit the hackerspace and was a regular in its online chatroom. This is what motivated members of Revelation Space to bring attention to the subject of ‘ethical hacking’.

Disrupting websites with a ‘Distributed Denial of Service’ attack (DDoS) or by any other means does not align with the ethics of the hacker community. Koen Martens, founder of Revelation Space, responds to the actions of Anonymous, ‘I liken a Denial of Service attack to slapping someone in the face when you run out of arguments to prove someone wrong.’

A hacker is a creative and curious individual, someone who wants to find out how things work and perhaps tries to find flaws in their design. An ethical hacker will act responsibly with the knowledge gained and will not abuse this knowledge. An ethical hacker is aware of the consequences of his or her actions, or the sharing of the gained knowledge, and will always strive to operate within the boundaries of law.

As such, the attacks on sites such as MasterCard have nothing to do with hacking. Anyone can download, install and start a computer program in order to become part of a coordinated online crime. There is no creativity involved: DDoS attackers generally use existing tools without realising how these work.

Although legal action is part of a proper response to the action of this minor ‘script kiddie’, it must be acknowledged, that everyone has made mistakes in their youth they are not proud of. The young man and his accomplices should not be excluded from the community. They should be shown a better way to reach a goal. One of the hackerspace’s members admits, that as a teenager he also did not always consider the consequences of his actions, and explains, ‘What really helped me was the interaction with real hackers, people with a sense of ethics. We can do much more for this young man in the context of hacker ethics, than the people who raise him.’

The event will be held on Saturday, December 18th, from 12.30 till 06.00 PM CET, at the Revelation Space hackerspace, Binckhorstlaan 172, Den Haag, The Netherlands. The meeting is organised in cooperation with the Hxx Foundation, the Utrecht hackerspace Randomdata, and the Dutch chapter of the international hacker collective 2600.

Contributing to the meeting will be, amongst others: IT lawyers Arnoud Engelfriet (ICTRecht) and Walter van Holst (Mitopics, EDRi board member), internet journalist Brenno de Winter (NU.nl, Webwereld.nl, The Security Update podcast), veteran hacker Hans van de Looy (Madison Gurkha), and Jurre van Bergen (ethical hacker with a special interest in government sites).

Everyone is invited to this session. Members of the press are explicitly invited to attend. Please note that the main language will be Dutch.

Why are we doing this?
I know, the word “standardized” sends chills down my spine too, but I assure you that this is a good thing! Deciding upon a common system would enable the following things:

• The ability to share membership between spaces
• Crowd-sourced security enhancements and feature additions
• Easier membership management
• A warm fuzzy feeling of being connected with other spaces

What we’re envisioning (and what many of you already have) is a sort of Reciprocikey or Space Passport system. We believe that the only way to create such an awesome system is to work together on it!

More Focus for your brain meats:

Prize of an Ice Tube Clock from Adafruit for the space who best implements the standardization of interface specification between custom softwares and access control. Each space will review submissions at x time on Sunday and rank the systems they would most like to use (you cannot vote for your own). The runner up will receive a Minty Boost pack.
You can also vote on best hardware system, most elegant code, best independent member management software – the top three of each will receive Minty Boost packs, also via Adafruit.

Systems needed:

• Software for access control (reads from memory stored users and network user databases)
  • Create a functional specification for how authentication can be done securely.
• Software that manages membership rights (grants rights/features to users based on conditions specified by managers
  • Standardize an interface specification for how custom software can talk to the access control software interface.
    • example: 3rd party space has a member visiting, presents auth token.
    • example: someone wants to create a custom trusted UI (web, phone, etc.) for talking to the auth daemon
• Web, phone, etc UI for membership management and access control software
  • Involve user interface management.  See what tools people are using today to manage membership and build hooks in the software to manage access control, or build your own.
• Hardware for reading identity (RFID reader, USB stick, etc.)
  • Build plug-ins to support common hardware (don’t get stuck on any given vendor).

When is the OpenDoor Hackathon?
The OpenDoor Hackathon will begin on Saturday, December 11th at 2pm PST, ending 24 hours later at 2pm PST on Sunday, December 12th.

How do I sign up?
You can register your space’s team at the Eventbrite here!

Join the conversation at http://groups.google.com/group/opendoorhack-a-thon!

Yeah, it’s that time of the year again – Vienna has been turning from the sinister city covered in grey light and fog to the blooming summer oasis it’s designed to be, and people overflow with glee (or so do we, at least)! Time to be looking forward to PlumberCon 10, probably one of the snugliest and neighborliest hacker conferences ever heard of.

So what exactly should you be looking forward to, you might ask?
In fact, it’s hard to tell. In one paragraph of lifeless and almost anti-emotional text, that is. What could be mentioned, for instance, is that there’s not only gonna be a ton of interesting talks by speakers from all around the globe (which I’m really really excited about btw), but also multiple hands-on workshops and trainings. Presenters you’ll meet at PlumberCon 10 include neighbors like Mitch Altman, Jimmie P. Rodgers, Jeff Gough, Barry van Kampen, Kugg, Allessio Pennasilico, or Mike Kemp. Topics range from Information Warfare to fun with microcontrollers.
Basically, one could call it a schnuffeliges meeting of a very large family… I happen to call it a hacker con (but that’s just me )

Now, as of the bare basics I haven’t mentioned yet:
PlumberCon 10 will be held at WerkzeugH in Vienna, Austria from Friday, July 09th – Sunday, July 11th in the year of the hacker 2010. You can still register for the 3rd round of early bird tickets at the registration site until the end of the month, and I’d advise every hackerspace member to use the promo code ‘neighborliness flows’ to get a reduction on the ticket price – that, already as it is, will not lead us to profit but only cover a part of our expenses ^.^
Don’t forget to sign up for trainings beforehand wherever you find this requirement mentioned.

In any way, if you’re in town, make sure not to miss the epoque kick-off party on Friday night, where Phonoelit aka Mumpi and joernchen will provide us with their superior tunez that shall guide us safely through the night!

Make a good hack,
/astera

Last summer at Hacking at Random ( 2009 ), Eric Michaud spoke to me about his plans to develop “Warzone”. Warzone is an international cyber range project, targeted at hackerspaces. Well, as it happens I knew that the CCC had been doing some mesh VPN networking for a fairly long time. In fact, well before I joined NYC Resistor I had been attempting to link my apartment into the very same mesh VPN along with the folks at the HHH. I ran down Mcfly from CCC Hamburg and got us all talking. Next thing we know we’ve got this awesome idea to link up hackerspaces via a mesh vpn network. That was last summer. Today we have fifty endpoints, and some actually functional code for this. Largely thanks to support from all over including Guss from tinc, who pushed a whole release of tinc just for us.

Today NYC Resistor is linked fully to the network. Noisebridge, Nullspace, and Pumping Station One have joined using the Fonera 2.0n images we’ve built. Other spaces are using homebrew setups built from source or debian packages. The warzone VPN is being put together right now so that we can host an international CTF competition using the new network. DNS is becoming available, and many spaces are setting up to do some really cool stuff.

We’re far from our goal of linking every hackerspace. So if your hackerspace or lab is interested in getting involved, we want you! Get in touch with us.

You can read more about all of this here:

• Agora Link Homepage
• ChaosVPN Wiki
• Periodically updated network map
• Twitter: @agoralink
• Enlist: join@agoralink.org

as of yesterday afternoon, our fellow hacker, amazingly talented game and graphic designer, and wonderful friend Florian Hufsky aka oneup (aka geeq, aka no_skill) is no longer with us.

Some of you might remember his beautiful game ideas for Super Mario War or Puit Universe, the 72 dpi Army, and Urban Takeover (later ClaimSpotting), but also the work for GRL Vienna and laser tagging, and Planet; or him being spokesperson of the Austrian Pirate Party, founding member of soup.io, just as well as an amazing graphic designer and comics artist,… and I could maybe continue this unordered braindump of a silly attempt to make a list of all the projects he’d been involved in for eternity and a day, but – never will I be able to embrace the sheer endlessness of his very original, both incredibly inspired and inspiring, geek-artistic output.

Metalab has lost one of its most creative hackers, and the world one of its most beautiful minds.

The one quote of his that came to my mind right after we heard the terrible news was, ‘When in doubt, do it (you have no chance to survive, make your time)’ – and that, I believe, is what held true for all his life.

R.I.P. Florian Hufsky | November 13th, 1986 – December 16th, 2009

While tears choke the words, I have to admit to fail at expressing my deepest sorrow.
Much love and sincerest condolences to all friends and relatives.

And we all go together if one falls down, we talk out loud like you’re still around; and we miss you.

/astera