This year’s Wizard of Os conference theme is “Information Freedom Rules”. See Reports Below. Speakers include:

Lawrence Lessig, Yochai Benkler , Volker Grassmuck and a whole host Of Brazillian free culture reps , including Fernanda Weiden ( Founder of Women Free Software Project in Brazil), Felipe Fonseca ( MetaReciclagem, Sao Paolo) and the MimoSa project ( Sao Paolo ), etc, etc.

See the the full program here:
http://wizards-of-os.org

Berliner Orgs like Tesla and C-base naturally on hand / dabei…

WOS4 Report #1:

Finally made it to the conference, and the first session I walked into there was Stefan ?? from Freenigma.com telling us that Echelon is in fact recording OUR EVERY EMAIL and still more than 99% of us are not using encrypted mails… because as anyone whose ever been to a privacy lecture or workshop knows … it’s complex! And even when we’ve taken the steps ourselves, we have to convert our average non-geek friends to “get on the (red) pill.”

As an example, Stefan mentioned guiding a friend through current encryption tools and even with his on-call assistance it took his friend 4 DAYS.

Well now Freenigma has created a fairly easy system which adds privacy technology (with strong e-mail encryption) to your favourite webmail service (google, yahoo, etc. etc.)

And well there’s still plenty of issues for those who get into the gritty details, but this seems like a pretty informed tool worthy enough to spread the word about and perhaps even lend assistance to its further development.

Btw, in every security workshop/presentation i have seen, every expert will eventually come to the point that security is never an indefinite, and one should never consider anything they write and do online as uncrackable, in the longrun… but WE all can make the efforts for any corporation, any govt. to crack our communications simply unsustainable by increasing the use of these tools amongst an ever expanding community.

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Freenigma is a small but sincere crew who have some privacy tools for the hi and lo-tech people alike. There were some pretty sharp folks who asked questions, though Q+A was too short to get very deep. But one logical question came from an italian journalist (who knew well the story of confiscated indymedia servers last year) about one company/org being forced to hand over such a collected and concentrated database, and Stefan explained that the system relies on the fact that client passwords and other information is not logged and therefore impossible to hand over.

Of course the experts need to assess these issues in fuller detail, but here is the beginning of a more general public tool that can be built upon. i.e. One thought was that this could evolve in such away that these do not necessarily become big server hubs, but something that local communities utilize.

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To emphasize the need to spread the conciousness on just how critical these steps are, Stefan pointed out that whatever country you are in, you may not know who will be running your country in 10 years. And even though Germany still has some strict legislation on privacy, the international audience chuckled just a bit in regards to imagining such a distant scenario, as if NOW was not already dire enough. And perhaps in the meantime, cause it’s still going to take some time to develop any ubiquitous defense, the last time i went to a workshop on privacy was at Station 40 in San Francisco ( Thanks Moxie et al !) and one lo-tech radical suggested that we simply infuse our communications with more POETRY, so that we will force all those intruding spy primates to learn the mother-tongue of humanity and its evolutionary subversive acts, and/or merely to leave all those corrupt and criminal lackeys without a clue.

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WOS4 Report #2 :

Already up are some Ogg and Mp4 acrhives from Thursday and Fridays: http://wizards-of-os.org/index.php?id=2905 … including Lawrence Lessig’s keynote which contains a fantastic meme regarding a Read-Write Society. Lessig says the last century was the only “Read Only” period in history and the 21st century will return to “Read / Write”, through deconstructing the copyright obstacles that have been implemented around information, culture, and communications and providing alternative structures.
There’s some critique among more radical copyleftists that has begun to swell around the Creative Commons premise, which may indeed have some effects of legitimizing the Copyright Hijack. ( One can read an example here: http://de.indymedia.org/2006/09/157271.shtml )

My take has begun to take the shape of comparing the current struggles in Latin America in creating alternatives to imperialist agendas. Lessig may in fact be playing the Hugo Chavez-role in the arena of creator/producer rights. That is with his expertise (and the Stanford Law community’s full weight ), he is a kind of “military wedge” that cracks the shell of a powerful entertainment/mass media industry. In other words, it’s a voice and a logic that can’t be f*cked with. As far as unseating the entirety of the illegitimate controllers of culture, well there’s plenty of work that the creators and jammers at the grassroots have already laid as a hefty foundation for imagining and producing further subversion. But really don’t anticipate that you will ever remove the gun from the grip of a bunch of goons going down in flames.
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WOS4 report # 3:

Coming soon, an analysis of Free Culture in Brazil