Month: January 2013
Gender and tech
Hacking The Gender Gap this Thursday
“Hacking the Gender Gap” is a hands-on workshop for understanding and defeating the gender gap in tech. I helped develop it last March for the Women In Tech Summit with my good friend and Hacktory powerhouse, Georgia Guthrie. Amy Guthrie (no relation, another awesome Hacktory organizer) and I will be facilitating it this Thursday evening at our new space at 3711 Market St. for Girl Geek Dinners. We’ve done it at Adacamp, HOPE9, and HacDC, and if you’ve heard of it, it might have been as “that timeline thing.” In a nutshell, participants share their experiences with technology–both positive and negative–on a physical timeline; identify patterns in the assembled experiences; and discuss ways to make tech communities more inclusive, and ways that awesome people already have. (Many thanks to Katie Bechtold who, I think, wrote that description for HacDC.)
Check out the Meetup … Read the rest
Read MoreMaking stuff
Un-Borked
Erm. So, WordPress had replaced the widgets in my right sidebar with my penultimate post, but only on the front page. If I clicked a post to view it on its own page, the sidebar worked correctly. But it persisted even if I deleted a post or changed my theme.
I managed to fix it, but I’m not sure how. I do know that my web host upgraded WordPress a few days ago and that I only noticed the issue yesterday. Yesterday I did notice that the html editor was adding a lot of div tags that it wasn’t using before. I went through my last few posts and replaced them with the good ol’ P (paragraph) tag. The front page works again. I’m not 100% convinced it’s because of the deleted div tags, but the sidebar in my theme is indeed differentiated with div tags, so maybe???… Read the rest
Read MoreGeekery
Tor basics in plain English
Here’s a cheat sheet that I wrote up for myself about two weeks ago after I’d gotten my bearings with the basics of Tor. I actually wrote it as an informal status update to my mentor and realized that if it was helpful to me, it might be helpful to someone else. If you see any errors, don’t be shy about setting me back on the right path!
First, though, please bask in the glory of this super awesome clickable graphic that demonstrates what network traffic is and isn’t obscured by Tor and HTTPS (encrypted HTTP). This snippet below is just a teaser. Click it to go to a page where you can click buttons for Tor and HTTPS and see how they work.
After a visit to the OTI offices and an overview of Commotion with my project mentor Will Hawkins, I felt like the fog had parted a … Read the rest
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Week three is the new Tuesday
Last week I was chatting with one of the GNOME internship program mentors who asked how the internship was going for me. I said that I felt pretty good, but that I was in a little bit of a lull. I’d learned about all I needed to know to get my feet wet with the technical end of my project, and now I needed to get better clarity on the question I am asking/problem I am solving to be able to really dig my heels in. I was floundering a little, but also having open-ended conversations with people who might be interested in the work. I didn’t know at that moment that those conversations would lead to a significant breakthrough the next day, resulting in a much clearer goal for my internship term.
It was nice to hear, then, that apparently a bunch of the interns in my cohort were … Read the rest
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Deepest Condolences
I’m taking a moment to offer my sympathies to the friends and family of Aaron Swartz, who died on Friday. I didn’t know him, but he was a friend to at least one of my friends and his passing is a blow to many, many people. He was a dynamic, passionate, and creative defender of information freedom, and he will be missed. Here are remembrances from people around the Internet:
Peter Eckersly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Read MoreAppropriate Tech
Geekery
OPW Internship: Organizing My Thoughts
As I wrote previously, I started a work-from-home internship with the Open Technology Institute last Wednesday. The project I was placed with has me working on boosting privacy and anonymity in wireless mesh networks. I spent some time orienting myself with the task and organizing my thoughts.
The stated goal of the project is to integrate Tor with Commotion. More specifically:
Tor Integration:
Commotion mesh nodes are capable of being configured to enter directly into the Tor network. We need an intern to configure, package, and document the process of making a tor-entry node. If the intern completes this task within the time frame they will have the opportunity to tackle custom configurations that will allow for Tor exit nodes on the mesh that allow small bandwidth Tor traffic from elsewhere to be run over the network to further obfuscate it.
Great! So….what does that mean? This … Read the rest
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