SOPA not stopped

January 18, 2012

I put on my $DAYJOB CTO hat for Midas Green Tech and facilitated a conference call with Sean McLaughlin, the Chief of Staff for the Judiciary Committee, and executives from CoreNAP and DataFoundry today. Sad to say, it’s not dead yet.  The “Internet experts hearing” that the Oversight committee was planning has apparently been canceled, so [...]

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Judiciary Committee May Study Cybersecurity Provision Before Implementing It As Part of PIPA

January 13, 2012

EFF-Austin just received this press release from the Computer and Communications Industry Association: Contact: Heather Greenfield 202-783-0070 ext 113 hgreenfield@ccianet.org Ed Black 202-783-0070 ext 110 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 12, 2012 Washington – Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy has put out a statement may add a provision to study the impact of DNS blocking before [...]

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Police to Use Iris Scans from iPhone App; FED Form Nat’l ID Center at UT

January 13, 2012

Guest post by Mark Boyden Found this recently (from July 2011, read article for full text, images, videos, documents, and deeper links): Police To Begin Using Iris Scans From Controversial Iphone App, FED Forms “Center For Identity” At U-Texas Austin Campus ~ Alternative News Report – July 21, 2011 Representatives from private industry and the US [...]

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Not a war on computing

January 11, 2012

Former EFF-Austin Director Cory Doctorow thinks that there’s a war on general purpose computing. Transcript at https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcript.md But it’s not as bad as all that. It’s not a “war” on GP computers–in fact things would grind to a halt rapidly without a continual supply of the very speedy and infinitely mutable CPUs that make modern tech [...]

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Unredacted APD #OpWardrive Documents

January 11, 2012

This post concludes EFF Austin’s investigation of DART’s #OpWardrive; here’s our initial post, announcement of operation cancellation, and update on the open records request. In our last post, we summarized our inquiry into the City of Austin Police Department’s Digital Analysis Response Team’s (DART) Operation Wardrive, concluding that it was now up to the City [...]

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APD #OpWardrive Open Records Update

December 15, 2011

In late September, the Austin Police Department (APD) aimed to identify open residential wireless access points around the city and educate their owners about the risks of providing free Internet access. The initiative, dubbed Operation Wardrive, was announced by an APD Public Information Office press release which was quickly picked up by local ABC-affiliate KVUE. [...]

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Austin Web Bash

November 22, 2011

EFF-Austin is joining the rest of the Austin web community for a giant geek holiday party. Come escape from the stress of end-of-year deadlines and impending familial obligations with some great drinks and awesome people. Each year participation has grown, and what started out as a small gathering now includes 14 active groups spanning a [...]

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Steven Levy in Austin

November 8, 2011

Steven Levy, author of In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, will give a free talk in Austin this Thursday, November 10, at 7pm at the Jewish Book Fair.Orignally Steven was going to give a second talk to EFF-Austin Friday, but he couldn’t stay over, so EFF-Austin supporters are encouraged to [...]

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Sandy Stone at EFF-Austin

October 11, 2011

View “Sandy Stone at EFF-Austin 10/6/2011″ on Storify

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Next Meetup: Sandy Stone on “Online identity and the fight for cyberfreedom”

September 26, 2011

“How in Hell Did We Get Here?: Online identity and the fight for cyberfreedom in the age of the Military-Industropolitical Complex” by Allucquére Rosanne (Sandy) Stone A fast-forward, semifictional history of online identity, with particular attention to the present collisions of massive political power and individual and collective agency, including how the speaker was transformed [...]

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