Aaron Swartz International Hackathon 2014, Announcements

12 Cities Confirmed For This Year’s Aaron Swartz Hackathon

Aaron Swartz Hackathon GitHub site:
http://aaronswartzhackathon.org/

Most hackathons are November 8-9, 2014 – specific dates and locations up soon!

New! Austin! Added October 28th – Now 12 Cities!

Austin – Contact: Shanta Stevens aethyrflux@gmail.com                       (at atx hackerspace)

Berlin – Contact: Samuel Carlisle samuelcarlisle@gmail.com

Boston – Contact: Ali Hashmi a_hashmi@media.mit.edu or Adrienne Debigare Adrienne.Debigare@globe.com   /Center for Civic Media, MIT Media Lab, Wiesenr Building, E15, Room 345, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA, 02139, Nov 8, 10:00-20:00 Saturday.

Buenos Aires – Contact: Nicolas Reynolds fauno@endefensadelsl.org /Aristóbulo del Valle 1851, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina. the hackathon will be held from saturday 8th, 4pm until sunday morning

Houston – Contact: Jeff Richman jeff@januaryadvisors.com

Kathmandu – Contact: Shritesh Bhattarai shritesh@shritesh.com

Los Angeles – Contact: Sterling crispin sterlingcrispin@gmail.com

Magdeburg – Contact: Katha k_holstein@web.de or Alex alex@netz39.de   /Friday – Sunday afternoon, maybe with some breaks in the early morning. Location is our hackerspace Netz39, Leibnizstraße 32, Magdeburg, Germany.

New York City – Contact: Jared Hatch jhatch@thoughtworks.com /Thoughtworks 99 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016

Oakland, CA – Contact: Phil Wolff pwolff@gmail.com /Sudo Room 4799 Shattuck Ave, Oakland, CA 94609

Oxford – Contact: Matt Ellen Matthew.ellen@gmail.com /OxHack which is inside OVADA, 14a Osney Lane, OX1 1NJ

San Francisco – Contact: Noah Swartz, swartzcr@gmail.com /Internet Archive 300 Funston Ave, San Francisco, CA 94118

 

Reform the CFAA, Student Innovator Protections

How Universities Can Lead The Way For Legal Reform and Protection of Student Innovators

This article sets out a straight forward plan for how universities can support student innovation and protect their students from unnecessary prosecution (see very bottom of this post).

Students Who Push Tech Boundaries Should Be Encouraged, Not Punished

By April Glaser for Wired

From the article:

Notably, after faculty members and students circulated an open letter, MIT President Rafael Reif announced plans to support the Tidbit innovators, and MIT sent a formal letter to New Jersey’s Attorney General, asking it to withdraw the subpoena. The open letter stated that the subpoena from the New Jersey Attorney General will have, “a chilling effect on MIT teaching and research.” Soon after, MIT faculty and MIT students wrote additional letters of support, asking New Jersey to withdraw the subpoena. Over 800 members of the MIT community signed onto these letters.

President Reif appears to get it. In response to the outcry over the Tidbit controversy, Reif announced that MIT plans to create a new legal resource for students threatened by legal challenges as a result of their innovative work and entrepreneurial pursuits. “In the case of someone creating an innovative new product and then getting into legal trouble doing something that was a part of their classwork — then, MIT absolutely does have a legal interest to be involved,” Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media, told the press.

Also from the article:

Now is the time for students and campus communities that want to vitalize innovation to speak up and demand university support. There are some simple steps that universities can take to foster inventiveness in their campus communities:

1. Create a legal intake mechanism or program for students who receive subpoenas and are threatened by computer crime laws. Student innovators need to know where to go to receive help.

2. Publish a guide on CFAA and in-state computer crime laws so that students and researchers can better understand the contours of the laws that may be leveraged against them.

3. Universities should be pushing for computer crime legal reform and come out with strong institutional support for reform efforts on the federal and state level.

Just as laws are frequently outdated by the accelerated pace of technology, campus policies often lag behind in addressing the potential legal needs of their most innovative students exploring the frontiers of digital invention. Yet universities don’t have to move at the slothful pace of legal change.

Aaron Swartz Day 2013, SecureDrop

SecureDrop’s Garrett Robinson and James Dolan – At Aaron Swartz Day 2013

Link to video here.

James Dolan and Garrett Robinson at Aaron Swartz Day 2013
James Dolan (left) and Garrett Robinson at Aaron Swartz Day 2013

SecureDrop is an open-source whistleblower submission system managed by Freedom of the Press Foundation that media organizations use to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. It was originally coded by the late Aaron Swartz.

The goal of SecureDrop is to simplify the process of using Tor and an airgapped computer viewing station (decrypted with a private key) to protect the identity of a whistleblower uploading documents.

(From video) Garrett Robinson:

“The impetus behind SecureDrop is that we (FPF) want to restore the balance between governments and journalists who want to communicate with anonymous sources. Historically, the U.S. has had really strong press freedoms. This is essential for a functioning democracy.”

Main page:
https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop

Project page on Github:
https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/

Form to fill out to request help with SecureDrop:
https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop#contact

SecureDrop Development List:
https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/securedrop-dev

SecureDrop FAQ:
https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/securedrop#faq

SecureDrop User Manual:
https://github.com/freedomofpress/securedrop/blob/develop/docs/user_manual.md

MayDay PAC

Lessig Announces The MayDay PAC’s Next Move

Lessig has announced the first two candidates that MayDay PAC is supporting!

One is Staci Appel, a Democrat running for a congressional seat in Iowa.

Staci-Appel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jim Rubens
Jim Rubens

 

The other is Jim Rubens, a Republican in the New Hampshire senate race.

It’s in the NY Times:

Spending Big to Fight Big Donors in Campaigns

By
JULY 28, 2014

From the article:

A major part of the effort, which will first take shape in Iowa and New Hampshire, is to fight money with money. The Mayday PAC will begin buying up to a total of $4 million in advertising for both states, where voters are historically receptive to the anti-big-money message, advertising is relatively cheap and any victories are likely to be noticed by both parties’ future presidential aspirants…

Officials said the PAC is expected announce its next three targets in August.

The ultimate goal is to reverse a series of defeats that advocates of tighter restrictions on campaign money have suffered since the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. That decision freed corporations and unions to engage in unlimited independent political spending on behalf of candidates. In the past four years, court rulings and regulatory decisions have only expanded the influence and reach of big donors at the federal and state level…

 

The Internet's Own Boy - Press

Review of IOB: “A frightening case study in the power of government”

 

The Internet’s Own Boy (Review)
By Norm Schrager for Paste Magazine  on June 27, 2014

From the Review:

The Internet’s Own Boy is Brian Knappenberger’s (We are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists) account of Swartz’s immensely abbreviated life as one of the most vital and controversial contributors to the progress of the Internet and, more notably, the availability of its contents. A distinctively human tale in a world of software development, Own Boy succeeds on many levels: it’s a compact, descriptive history of a nascent Internet, a frightening case study in the power of government, and a collection of interviews with the most prominent voices of the Web Age. But most important—and most effective to the storytelling—The Internet’s Own Boy is about a brilliant youngster who was becoming a brilliant man before he took his own life…

Knappenberger traces Swartz’s growth and burgeoning activism with the eye of an investigative reporter, assembling some of the most interesting talking heads in the industry, including Tim Berners-Lee (yeah, he invented the World Wide Web) and soft-spoken Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig. Brilliant minds themselves, they all recognized Swartz’s smarts and courage, and express it on screen wonderfully.

Aaron's Writings

Afterword By Aaron Swartz for Cory Doctorow’s “Homeland”

Doctorows_HomelandIn the Huffington Post, Cory Doctorow talks about the afterword that Aaron wrote for Homeland (the sequel to the incredible Little Brother).

This afterword is probably one of the best explanations of the spirit behind having an Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon every year.

 

From Cory Doctorow:

I knew I wanted an afterword from Aaron Swartz, who had the best techno-activist instincts of anyone I knew, and who I’d know since he was a little kid, and who was also being savagely victimized by the US government for his principled work. I’m devastated about what happened with Aaron. I asked him to write me a afterword in the form of a letter to a kid like himself, but who was 14 in the year 2013. What he gave me was a call-to-arms that made me want to rush to a barricade, and left no doubt that we both hoped for the same thing from this book: that it would inspire a generation of activists who wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer when it came to freedom in the information age.

From the Afterword to Homeland by Aaron Swartz:

This is your life, this is your country — and if you want to keep it safe, you need to get involved…

The system is changing. Thanks to the Internet, everyday people can learn about and organize around an issue even if the system is determined to ignore it. Now, maybe we won’t win every time — this is real life, after all — but we finally have a chance.

But it only works if you take part. And now that you’ve read this book and learned how to do it, you’re perfectly suited to make it happen again. That’s right: now it’s up to you to change the system.

Let me know if I can help.

 

 

 

 

November 11 2023 – 11 am -6:30 pm PST