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Twiddling my email, calendar, irc, and phone notification settings

January 8, 2013 Liz

Calendar and email notifications may sound very boring but they has engrossed me for at least an hour.

For the first time in life I have a work laptop and a personal laptop. For the last 10+ years I’ve come into a job with an existing laptop which I use seamlessly for work and personal stuff. So far, I like having less “personal” things on my work laptop. It is especially nice not to have the distraction of personal email and non-work related mailing lists. It also feels amazingly luxurious to set aside the work laptop at the end of the day.

I have Zimbra for work email, but prefer to read my email in Thunderbird on my work laptop. Zimbra calendar has my work meetings and Google Calendar has the general schedule for my life. This morning I realized Zimbra was nagging me about missing a meeting. I need to know beforehand in some way that isn’t inside a browser tab!

Instead, I’d like my phone to make a special alert noise for meetings 10 minutes beforehand so I know to open up Skype or Vidyo (what Mozilla generally uses for meetings).

The last bit of information in this scenario: I didn’t want to install some special Zimbra app on my phone.

Here’s what I did:

1. Set up Zimbra to SMS me at (my 10-digit phone number@tmomail.net) before meetings.

In Zimbra, go to Settings, calendar, set up phone number for notifications.
In each meeting there is a checkbox for email notification. This works for recurring meetings as well.

2. Set up my phone so that gmail notifications only make a noise for priority inbox mail. (I realized that my phone makes a noise every time it syncs email. I normally ignore that noise. )

Open Gmail on the phone, Menu>More>Settings>click the email account>Labels to Notify>Inbox ***>Ringtones (set to silent)

*** Tweak the settings for the Priority Inbox too.

4. Go to gmail.com and set up whatever should go into “priority inbox” i.e. filtered to “important”

google calendar already has its own notifications on android phone if you have its app installed. If not you can set up a forwarding address and make the calendar email to SMS you.

5. make sure incoming SMS messages have a different noise than priority emails
Go to messages, menu, then settings, Select ringtone.

It took a little thought to figure out what to use to get the simple result I wanted. And while most of it happens in web services and phone settings, some of it was in my training myself in a different behavior (paying attention to a particular noise on my phone.)

A final note: Long ago I set up voicemail from my phone to Google Voice. I hate listening to voicemail. It takes a long time. Text is so much nicer, and it helps that I read very quickly. All voicemail interfaces suck. The last time I used one, it had a default menu message that took about 15 years to go through that played after every single voicemail. This resulted in my *never* listening to my messages. (Fortunately I have not had a work phone for years; just email.)

People sometimes leave long messages, but the gist of them is just “call me back”. Google Voice is lovely for this as it sends me an email transcript of the voicemail. The transcripts are often hilarious garbled but it’s enough to get the idea of who’s calling, what their number is, and what they want. If I want to hear them, I can press “play”. Their messages are also nicely archived for me in Gmail. Hurrah!

Furminate her!

January 7, 2013 Liz

Had tea with yarnivore and friends yesterday during a weekend of rain, cold, and sick kids. I told her about the awesome, awesome book Home Life in Colonial Days and she talked about spinning. I can’t knit, as it hurts my hands too much, but am something of a knitting/textile/ravelry fangirl.

I suddenly remembered that I’d gotten the book Crafting with Cat Hair for Christmas and so demonstrated cat-combing using this tool called The Furminator, which sounds like something stupid I would invent but which works incredibly well, producing a huge amount of fluffy, sheddy, cat undercoat. It is best to furminate your cat while saying FURMINATE HER like Darth Vader, or FUR-MIN-ATE like a Dalek. Yarnivore astonished us by spinning several feet of cat hair yarn and then demonstrating how to ply it.

Milo and I both tried hand spinning without a spindle. You pull your hands gently apart while spinning the fiber in one direction, which pulls the fibers from the undifferentiated wad of woolly stuff into a triangle called the draft, which leads into the twisted bit that is about to become thread or yarn. Fascinating! We talked about dyeing fiber with local plants like fennel and pokeberry. The thing that fixes the dye is called the mordant; alum sounds like an easy and cheap mordant. I spent some time poking around on Wikipedia to see what it has to say about hand spinning and yarn terminology. I love all the special terminology for textile stuff. Heddle, spindle, roving, batting, loft, worsted, woolen; all very beautiful middle-englishy words.

Yarnivore also told me about FiberShed which is a sort of consortium of Northern California fiber people who are trying to encourage local production of textiles from start to finish. Apparently they are trying to start a maker space and are hoping people in other areas will do the same. I thought again of Kevin Carson’s book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution and may take a look at it in the next few days.

So, I’m hoping to learn to spin with a drop spindle! Wool, though, not cat hair. Though I wonder if cat hair yarn would be as nice and warm as New Zealand possum yarn?

In which I explain Yggdrazilla, the World-Tree, and see some fireboats

January 3, 2013 Liz

Yesterday I headed into the Mozilla San Francisco office with my son Milo in tow. It was sunny and beautiful! We had lunch at the High Dive, a little diner right on the waterfront. He tried out my TV-B-Gone delux and we laughed very hard at the feeling of being super-spies with our spy gadget. Or, he might have just been laughing at me. It’s hard to tell!

On the walk back from the diner I pointed out the old SFFD building and that there was a fireboat on the other side of it. We went round to watch the boat pull out of its berth, apparently giving some non-firemen a tour in the sparkly winter sunshine. On its side it was labeled Guardian, boat #2. There was a sign in front of the building explaining the history of San Francisco fireboats. We both avidly read this sort of thing. The more famous of SF’s fireboats is the Phoenix from 1955, which saved the Marina district after the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. “I guess it’s still useful, even though it’s old-fashioned” he commented. The fireboat is also extremely cute; stubby and with a little striped tower, like a tugboat.

At the office I picked up a B2G test drivers phone so I can help test FirefoxOS. Sights of the office for my son were: my cube (unexciting), the shelves of free snack food (from which, abstemiously, he snagged a banana and two starburst candies), and the roof with its view of the Bay Bridge. The night before, I had read him the first few chapters of Flatland. He had picked it up to read on the bus and while I worked, since it’s lighter to carry than the Draconomicon. He kept interrupting my concentration on email and Bugzilla to read me bits from Flatland.

I figured I would return the favor. “So, would you like to know what I am actually working on?” Yes he would. Whatever I do for my job On The Computer is something of a mystery. Even to me . . .

We read the principles in the Mozilla Manifesto. (“Nice, Mom. That sounds like you. But, no offense, but, well, I’m already reading a book where people explain boring things about politics.”) Okay, moving on. I explained that there is a non-profit Mozilla Foundation as well as Mozilla Corporation, then that there is a greater Mozilla community (Mozillians!), who all work on making various tools better: Firefox in various flavors, which he is familiar with, but also Thunderbird, Bugzilla, and other stuff.

He got that Bugzilla is a product anyone can download, install, and use to track problems, but that Mozilla has its own implementation of Bugzilla, which we call BMO (for bugzilla.mozilla.org). Someone puts a bug into BMO; then a lot of people might look at it and do something with or to it.

My job as the newly-fledged Bugmaster is to help manage the huge volume of bugs in BMO. I pointed out that in a search for bugs filed in the last 24 hours the ID numbers for the bugs are up to 82600. So 800,000 bugs have been reported since Mozilla has been around, over 10 years ago.

(ETA: You need to have a bugzilla.mozilla.org login in order to use the above link. Hmmm.)

I’m taking a look at triaging new bugs, or in this case, adding information to bugs with UNCONFIRMED status and moving them to some new status. Generally, a bug that is UNCONFIRMED has not been triaged. My big question right now is, though there is no natural “end” to triaging a bug, how can we demarcate untriaged and partly triaged, bugs from ones that are… let’s say… good enough for now for a developer to look at? I could encourage people who do something with a bug to move it out of UNCONFIRMED. I could invent a system of whiteboard tags or flags to mark up bugs for the bugmastering throngs who live in #bugmasters.

Anyway, I didn’t go into that for Milo. I gave a very quick, hand-wavy explanation of how FOSS projects tend to have a “trunk” which is basically the code that’s been tested and released, trying to give an impression for him that a lot of people touch that code as it gets committed to branches, tested, and merged in to the trunk, watched over by Sheriffs. I showed him the tinderbox push log page which displays commits and a battery of automated tests that they pass or fail. Milo (who is not into programming at all) commented that there is Mozilla, and Bugzilla, and everythingzilla, so there should be Yggdrazilla, like the world-tree from Norse myth, to describe this cool giant tree of code.

I love the name Yggdrazilla! Though I’m not sure what exactly it would describe!

This morning as I fired up to work from home, Milo came in to show me an amazing coincidence! One of his giant phone book sized DC comics compilations from Christmas has a comic book about Center City and its new fireboat, the Phoenix!

We stopped on the way home at a TMobile store to get a SIM card for the B2G test phone, and then excitedly fought over it to play Little Alchemy on the bus and after dinner. I’m going to set aside time to poke at FirefoxOS (aka B2G or Boot2Gecko) every day but am not sure I’m going to use it for my primary phone. I informally reported one UI issue with it, and today would like to double check on that and will probably put it into Bugzilla. It immediately wanted to import all my contacts from Facebook, and all the contact info for my Facebook friends. Wow. Scary but interesting. FirefoxOS is going to released soon and will make smart phones a lot cheaper and therefore more accessible for people. As soon as I can buy one for Milo, I will — it will be his first smart phone. It’s really tempting to try to write an app for it.

5 Minutes of Fame tonight!

December 20, 2012 Liz

Tonight at Noisebridge, our lightning talk event, 5 Minutes of Fame! I’ll be speaking at 5MoF about Bad Inventions, going back over at least 20 years of my own horrible inventions, some of which came to fruition and some which have not (YET).

As if you needed ANY reminder, Five Minutes of Fame is Noisebridge’s ADD
show-and-tell, squashing octets of human awesomeness into an hour like
booleans in a packed byte.

This week’s seasonal supercompression will include, among others, barring ill fortune, but by no means limited to the following:

* The Internet’S IO9.COM’S ANNALEE NEWITZ on how to apocalypse-proof your city
* Roving cartographer and open wireless fiend SCHUYLER ERLE on galactic empire
* The Center for Applied Rationality’s JULIA GALEF
* The Amazing Inventions of LIZ HENRY
* The Battle for OMNIPOTENCE. Who will win? WOOL, MUSHROOMS, or HEMP?

Join us as we untar the future! Pkunzip the past! Huffman decode your mind!

Thurs, Dec 20, 8PM, Noisebridge, 2169 Mission St, SF, CA, Earth Prime

You can submit talks through the wiki page for future events or MAYBE even for tonight’s talks.

First week at Mozilla

December 20, 2012 Liz

My first week (and a half) at Mozilla has been about organizing information. The HR orientation stuff was mostly directions to mozilla.org wiki pages, IRC, and mailing lists, echoing the “Get Involved” path into Mozilla that any volunteer contributor can take. A bunch of the meetings that I joined are public meetings that anyone can attend over IRC, dial-in, video, or Air Mozilla broadcast. Transparency and community inclusion seem to be the default for everything.

I made up stuff for myself to do for the first week, with fairly modest goals. I signed up on the Firefox support forum, which gave me a nifty profile and a list of user questions that need answers. I tried answering a few, and looked at other contributor’s profiles. A hard problem led me to Bugzilla, where I had already created an account. There are hundreds of thousands of bugs listed in bugzilla.mozilla.org and it is now my job to understand what’s going on in there. In the next few weeks I’ll be writing about that! My focus will be not on fixing bugs, but on understanding how to triage them — how to figure out whether they are valid or not, how to mark them up or get and add more information to a valid bug, and how to route the bug to where it needs to go. Rather than zapping, squashing, or stomping the bugs we will tame and herd them!

As part of my path into Bugzilla I picked an active product and component to watch through bugmail. Bugs in bugzilla.mozilla.org, or BMO, is categorized by product, such as Firefox, Firefox for Android, or Thunderbird, then, within those products, categorized by component. In my preferences on the site, under component-watching, I picked Firefox as the product and Untriaged as the component, and turned on email notifications. Whenever something in that component is added or changed, I get bugmail. So far this is around 100 emails per day. I set up filters to route that bugmail into a folder and am watching what happens to those bugs, occasionally trying to triage them myself.

As I navigate all this I will be breaking down bug triage into various workflows and processes. I’m hoping to expose places where we can write tools to help people sort and triage this stuff. Yes, the glamorous life of a bugmaster! Join our cult! Or, at least, our #bugmasters IRC channel!

The Bugzilla for Humans video is useful as an introduction. And there is a weekly QA triage day that I will be going to.

The Mozillians doing this bug wrangling have a huge amount of expertise. I feel so humbled as I watch the flow of information coming into these systems and see what they’re doing.

As part of coming into an open source project to contribute to it, I have to accept that I know nothing, things are confusing, and it will all come together as I go along. It’s inspiring, and I want to live up to its awesomeness.

Being a contributor to Mozilla is amazing not just for the individual people I’m meeting, but because I’m seeing a huge, organically created, largely self-directed system at work. It has a strange beauty.

Bad inventions: Dead mouse cat treats

December 16, 2012 Liz

I have two more bad inventions to add to the world, both cat-related!

Think how awesome it would be if we had cat treats that had the varied textures of dead mice! Pampered indoor cats could have the fun of chewing on the leathery outer skin made of meat jerky, crunching the fake bones, savoring the squooshy fake guts, and dragging the horrible fake mouse around by its meat jerky tail to leave it on your pillow as a gift. Dead mouse cat treats would be totally amazing and also the worst invention ever.

Except for … 80s sugar cereal cat litter! I thought of this yesterday while cleaning the litter box. We accidentally have an extra-rancid smelling brand of cat litter right now. Imagine a half assed attempt to make cat litter smell pleasant! It could smell just like Lucky Charms, or Frankenberries or whatever, and look like it too… the little blue odor-crystals would be the marshmallow bits.

The cat litter containing boxes could look excitingly like breakfast cereal boxes perhaps even with fun prizes inside for that ultra-hipster retro enjoyment of life… but the prizes would be FOR YOUR CAT.

As an extra bonus, you can combine both these inventions so that your box of Lucky Charms Cat Litter contains a Dead Mouse Treat prize.

Past cat-related inventions include Cat Eggs and the Catula. Other inventions from today: Feminist Bitcoins, the Social Justice Slot Machine, and the charitable causes first person shooter (“Give a hoot, shoot & loot!).

You’re welcome.

First day at Mozilla!

December 11, 2012 Liz

I spent yesterday in the San Francisco Mozilla office, meeting people, setting up my laptop, and getting a general orientation. It’s in the Hills Brothers Coffee building across the plaza from Google, so I went past a hilarious statue (too late from the bus to study it in any detail) into a marble-floored entry hall and into one of those dark woodpaneled elevators with a mirror that are successfully posh, but need cheering up or art on the wall or something to look at other than the reflection of elevator-awkwardness. In elevators I have the choice of lining up my wheelchair or scooter foolishly backwards to back in, then emerge with dignity; barrelling in over-fast to jump the gap and scaring anyone already in the elevator, then waiting facing the “wrong” way; or, jumping the gap forwards and then executing a clumsy or neat 7 or 5 or 3 point turn which definitely scares everyone else’s feet. Sometimes I forget to slow the scooter speed and crash into the elevator wall.

Enough about that! The 7th floor is more cheerful, light, full of colored couches and enormous refrigerators and baskets of candy and snacks enough to feed armies of squirrels. An extremely nice person named Peter gave me a laptop and pointed me at a videoconference set up on a tablet in a sort of tablet holster with headphones so that I could be in the HR orientation, which was fairly painless and lasted about an hour. I am one of the first batch of new hires to go through their new “onboarding” system, which has been bombarding me for a week with exhortations to Join the Glorious Mozillian Cause, Comrade, join every mailing list/newsgroup/irc channel in the world, and fill out my forms. It seems a good system. “Firehose” is too weak of a term.

I kept notes on all the tiny errors in the process, throughout last week, to report them in batches. I felt that I was already working there, without being paid, which, well, why not when they are so awesome and it is free/open source and a huge worldwide volunteer community! Onwards!! I spent some time last week, and then, much more fiercely yesterday, coming up with ways to organize these huge tributaries of information and systems for myself to skim off the bits necessary to move something forward, respond or act. I feel like a little space station way out somewhere, beginning to turn on its ansible and light up, coming online in a giant network of ships and stars.

Right, where was I. I was introduced as a new hire at an amazingly competent video conferenced short Mozilla weekly meeting. I had already looked at past meetings while studying up on what was going on at the company, to interview. Then was on irc, on the #qa and #ateam channel, then meeting the Bugzilla team who are in town for the week and who were very amiable. I wonder if they would like to come to Noisebridge? It is amusing to work at a grownup job where people are introduced to you with names like “glob” and “potch” and it is normal for me to be named “lizzard” since it has been my irc name for forever. I listened to the Bugzilla folks for a while. They super nicely offered to take me with them tomorrow on a datacenter tour, where I will arrive as a sort of wheely cyborg surprise to whoever is squiring us around. Then had lunch (free, catered, very nice lunch on Mondays) with Lukas Blakk, ran into Tantek, met Boris and Dave and the guy with the purple mohawk, and Heather who showed me around the building. My cube is in a somewhat depressing cube farm on the 3rd floor, but everyone was super nice and I decided to work in the community room on the 7th floor where there is a beautiful view of the Bay Bridge and the water. There are couches on the roof, and tables to work at. Lukas and I hung out (we know each other from geekfeminism.org already) and I got to see a lot of great and promising stuff built on top of Bugzilla’s API, just the sort of thing I was hoping to (someday) build to visualize Mozilla’s bug data.

This is more about first impressions and my enjoyment of them than an organization of facts and information and my systems to keep them neat. Those systems, right now, live in my private TiddlyWiki instance, a new lizzardZilla wiki separate for work where I brain dump, then organize everything. I will try to convey actual information later today! But, in short, I am the Bugmaster, and on “The Ateam” and cannot wait to order business cards that say “Bugmaster” on them. Maybe with this picture on the back, shopped with some extra -zillatude to it:

All shall triage bugs with me and ~~despair~~ make awesomeness possible!

Rebecca West kick, and some poetry

December 11, 2012 Liz

In the last week or so I’ve read a lot of novels by Rebecca West. I tried to read her nonfiction about Mexico but couldn’t stomach her archness. Maybe later. But I loved The Birds Fall Down, and The Saga of the Century, enjoyed bits of Return of the Soldier (seeing the promise of Saga of the Century in it, thought it made me angry) and The Judge. There must be good biographies of Rebecca West, surely!? Her work ought to keep me going through the holidays, or lead me somewhere else just as good.

This morning I read a little zine or booklet from my poetry shelves called New Work by Corrina Bain. It might have come from a zine library, or from the poet if we met at a reading, or from the free box at a bookstore like the excellent poetry bookstore near Harvard with the steps and the very kind lady who brought out some boxes from the back of beautiful old “chapbooks” (a word I loathe because it sounds like chapstick, greasy and cheap, and trivializing) The poems are a little prosy for my taste (like a memoir told in verses) And there are some poems of the style of bald statements pounding one after the other to form a sort of holograph. Bain has a good sense of line breaks, so that even when I am protesting internally about the prose bits (which most people like and which speak well at poetry slams; it is only me who bridles at them…) I see her mastery of art and am pleased. The stories are of gender(queerness) and the City; the densest one is called “Uterine”. I would read more!

Morning reading

December 4, 2012 Liz

I am reading “La ciudad deshabitada” by Ernesto Cardenal and the translation by Steven F. White, in Poets of Nicaragua. Cardenal’s long lines, and long thoughts, are very beautiful, mind-expanding to encompass. Ciudad deshabitada: anti-colonialist, utopian, revolutionary. Though I am an atheist I am also enjoying reading about his utopian/consciousness-raising/cooperative colony, Solentiname. I can’t read Cardenal’s poems thinking of religion either… I just think about science fiction and space, moody novels of failing space colonies, dystopian warnings about technological solutions to social problems. I wonder if that is outrageous? Anyway, I’d like to read the entire book La ciudad deshabitata to see the poem’s context for Cardenal and what else was going on in his mind at the time. Solentiname sounds a bit.. touristy now… Huh.

Meanwhile, I’m thinking of going back to translate more poems by María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira. The thought of tackling something long form attracts me. Maybe something from the Cardenal book, if I can get my hands on it. I still wish I could find more poems by Nydia Lamarque. Someday I’ll go to Buenos Aires and find them in a library in crumbling old literary magazines…

Off to Kiwicon!

November 11, 2012 Liz

I am preparing to go to Kiwicon 6 in Wellington, New Zealand! I’ll be speaking on hacker communities. I’m super excited to meet people, hear all the talks, blog about everything, scoot around town, and see lots of people I know from geekfeminism.org, linux.conf.au, and DrupalSouth. I’m also speaking at the Geek Girl Dinner along with Laura Bell of in2securITy!

Kiwicon 666

It is the end of days; the sky has torn asunder, for it is Kiwicon six hundred sixty six.

Organised by and for the NZ hacker community, Kiwicon brings together hackers, their whitehat chums, and curious bystanders who are interested in the very very thin veneer of robustness spackled over our technological world.

First priority, fixing my scooter. So I want to talk about that before talking about the con and non-hardware hacking! Zach from the hackability list helped me again, bringing over all his tools. I have a tiny travel multimeter now, but am probably not going to have a tiny soldering iron before the trip. After 3 separate things broke on my scooter on day 1 of my trip to Mexico, I swore never to travel again with a scooter without the stuff to fix it! Though I was very smug that my Spanish was good enough to have a long conversation with an electrician that went far beyond “No sirve” as we opened up my dashboard. Fortunately guessing words like “voltímetro” worked well.

One problem was that a diode blew. It is in between the two 12-volt sealed lead-acid batteries and once Zach and I had tested everything else we opened up the heat shrink tubing and found this giant useless diode. I think (after discussion with Susan, Zach, and some very nice engineer from the fab lab in China that makes the scooters) it may in theory serve to stop you from draining your batteries by accident. In practice it underpowers the motor so we just snipped it out and didn’t replace it. The hacked smart charger we made for the scooter may have blown it out.

Another problem was that some wires came loose in the dashboard from the cruise control potentiometers despite that I had covered them in tons of hot glue. (The electrician in La Paz and I fixed that bit.) The third thing wrong was that the main throttle potentiometer shaft, which is very long, was out of whack or bent, so the scooter just wouldn’t start, because the motor controller checks to make sure the controls are centered before it will let you start. The driver who loaded my scooter into the back of his van in Los Cabos for the drive to La Paz did not take the seat off the scooter’s frame before bending down the dashboard on its pole. So the acceleration lever (forward and backward) and thus, the throttle pot shaft, was resting directly on the seat and got screwed up. I had a great time in La Paz anyway in a janky rental Everest and Jennings manual chair pushed by Oblomovka and spent the rest of my time in bed (properly as I should, but boringly), on the beach 50 steps from the hotel, or in the tiny front sidewalk table of the hotel cafe writing and sketching.

The Malecón (walkway or boardwalk along the sea) of La Paz was lovely, nicely paved for wheelchairs or scooters, very flat, and very long. It is level in some places with the beach and in others looks out over riprap or extends to piers. At the Science Expo we saw this otherworldly sculpture of a ballena tiburon, or WHALE SHARK. I think of WHALE SHARKS in all caps, always.

Also awesome in La Paz: All of La Paz and the people I met! The lovely, fascinating, kind, people of the Hotel Mediterrane, a small LGBT hotel in La Paz that felt like a bed & breakfast. And the beaches, especially Tecolote and Balandra!

Then Hurricane Sandy happened and I contributed a little bit to this massive group effort to help out and felt a lot of love for the extended “cripfam” of my friends.

We continue our Anarchafeminist Hackerhive meetings at Noisebridge and are looking closely in what’s happening at HackerMoms, LOL, and Sudo Room! Everyone should read Jenny Ryan’s article on co-operation amongst Bay Area hackerspaces:
Hacking the Commons: How to Start a Hackerspace as it conveys the fabulousness of the Bay Area hackerspaces & the synergy that is building these days.

Oh, and I made up a version of The Internationale to sing at Noisebridge and other hackerspaces, The Hackernationale, for a hackerspace anthem, because the Free Software Song is a bit hard to sing and play. The Hackernationale is especially suitable for singing to sleeping hackers, and I plan on writing many more verses for it!

So, Kiwicon! I will talk about mildy subversive things which hopefully will not sound like “buzzwording buzzword for buzzwordists” since I could not call the talk “How to Conspire to Do Illegal Things”. It will be thought provoking, odd, scary, and wildly entertaining for 9:15 in the morning as I bounce around a stage in the Wellington Opera House ranting and waving my arms wildly like a tiny wheeled Wizard of Frobozz!

Bootstrapping InfoSec for Hacktivists
As hackers and activists, we have a lot of power and many vulnerabilities. And as we act not just as lone hackers but in working groups, our infosec practices can expose not only ourselves but our associates. Acting with power, responsibility, and as much safety as possible means we need good operational security for whole communities, whether they’re publishing citizen journalism and leaked information, challenging censorship and copyright law, or taking direct political action locally or internationally. This talk will walk us through some cultural frameworks and technical tools created by and for emerging hacker communities. Who are we? Who will dislike our actions? What channels might they use? And how can we treat them as bugs, and route around them?

Before giving that talk on Saturday morning I will be at the Arduino thing on Friday, then maybe the Surviving Kiwicon orientation if I’m not falling over from jet lag, then the ~~clambake~~ Geek Girl Dinner, then the speakers’ party. On Saturday I’m especially interested in Alex Kirk’s talk on Master Phishing, Leigh Honeywell’s talk “Firehoses and Asbestos Pants” on the security incident & response life cycle, the web app recon talk and the talk where 3 guys with ponytails talk about security. On Sunday, I really want to go to Open Source Security Response, The tale of a Firefox bug by Thoth and the Wi-fi attack cycle talk which I believe will actually take place with the souped-up motorcycle on stage and which MAY INSPIRE me to stuff more electronics and another large deep-cycle battery into my mobility scooter. Also this seems like the quintessential Kiwicon talk since their Secret Cabal clearly LOVES METAL. This is the best conference talk description ever!!!!!

War driving has been around for a very, very long time, however it has been missing a few key things. Mainly leather, Judas Priest and Motorcycles. ‘Ghost riders in your LAN’ is a talk based around overclocking the wardriving game by introducing gasoline, angle grinders, cheap wifi gear and a build price smaller than your slightly more exorbitant weekend bender. This talk is a collaboration between Security-Assessment.com and Stray Rats Custom Motorcycles. I will be covering the details of how to build a wifi-attack-cycle from ground up – from electronics and cheap-and-cheerful heads up displays to the bike modifications required to mount all the tech and look awesome while terrorizing your local neighborhood TP-LINKs. Ride the metal monster, breathing death and fire. Closing in with vengeance broadcasting high. This is the WifiKiller.

OMG! I want a ride on this beast!!!

Actually, Sunday has more talks than I can possibly sit up for, so if you see me lying down in the back of the theater please don’t be alarmed, I am just resting my back, or have taken too many muscle relaxants. Carry on!

After the con I am going to veg a lot and go to the indoor swimming pool for some physical therapy and hang around Wellington for a few days. Maybe with Joh and sundry, maybe with hyp4t1a if she doesn’t disappear off into some sort of skiing, rock climbing hinterland!

Say hello if you see me, I look like this and am on a little blue scooter or hobbling slowly around on a cane: