On February 18 2012 the Internet Society’s New York Chapter (ISOC-NY) participated in the first ever FreedomBox Hackfest, held at the Columbia School of Law in New York City. The FreedomBox is an initiative “to create a network of personal servers to protect privacy during daily life, maintain beachheads of free network access during times of political instability, and open lines of communication during natural disasters.” The project is a direct consequence of the “Freedom in the Cloud” talk that Eben Moglen gave two years, almost to the day, earlier for ISOC-NY.
David Solomonoff
ISOC-NY Event Sat 6/18 @NYU: Beyond the Bleeding Edge: Confronting the Ghosts in the Machine
Where: Warren Weaver Hall NYU, 251 Mercer St NYC, Room 109
When: Saturday, June 18, 1-5 pm
Who: Public Welcome. Admission Free.
Webcast: http://bit.ly/isoctv
We have designed our civilization based on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up inour faces.” – Carl Sagan
Never has a clear comprehension of the technology surrounding us been more critical than today. We tell machines what to do and hope they’ll do it, and when they don’t they leave us vulnerable to technological accidents and acts of malice we cannot comprehend. This event will bring together technologists from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds to explore technology on a granular level, from perspectives ranging from user behavior in virtual environments to the exploitation of functions at the hardware level.
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David Solomonoff on the perils and pitfalls of Internet Freedom
ISOC-NY President David Solomonoff writes about the pitfalls of prescriptions for Internet freedom: Hackers Fight For Freedom With Net Tech; Ignore Politics, Psychology At Their Peril
Internet freedom initiatives must be independent of political connotations, run on a decentralized infrastructure, and use technology that is subject to public review by security experts. Most importantly, users must have complete trust in the skills and integrity of the people providing those tools and services.
If they don’t the cure could prove worse than the disease.
Video: David Solomonoff – Taking Back the Edge: Freedom and the Internet Model
David Solomonoff, President of the Internet Society of New York (ISOC-NY) gave a talk at the August 2010 monthly meeting of the Manhattan Libertarian Party. David’s theme was ‘Taking Back the Edge: Freedom and the Internet Model’. The meeting took place in the back room of the Ukrainian East Village Restaurant (famous in alternative music circles as the site of a legendary New Order show in November 1981). David spoke about the importance of maintaining the end-to-end principle and the open internet, threatened today by repressive political forces and monopolistic interests. There was some lively discussion with the libertarians about whether regulation was preferable to unwelcome consolidation. David emphasized the bottom-up standards making process that has stood the test of time.
Video/audio is below.
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