December Goodies

What a great meeting! Last night, we found out that Emmanuel Goldstein talked about our adventures with mall cops on the most recent episode of 2600's Off The Hook. It came up in the last few minutes of the show. 

Tonight, Sam from London2600 showed up and facilitated a lightweight version of CryptoParty, and many of us signed one anothers' PGP keys. 

 

As always, a lot of other random topics came up, like Occupy, Open Source Ecology, ham radio and the differences between the way HSMM and Free Network Foundation meshes work.

Finally, most (not all) of us got together for a group shot.

December 2013 meeting

Join us on Friday, December 6. Bring your projects and questions. As always, there's a standing key-signing arrangement for those who wish to exchange and sign crypto keys. So far, it doesn't look like we're going to have a dedicated topic, but there's always guaranteed to be something interesting discussed.

Hassled by mall cops once again!

It's been 15 years.

Way back in 1998, some of us were gathered around the payphones at Oak Park Mall back when the KC2600 meetings were in the food court and payphones were a thing you could find at a mall. One of us had an acoustic coupler hooked up and had dialed in to a UNIX server at a nearby college to turn in some homework for a summer class. Some lady freaked out at this scene and made quite the ruckus. Security escorted all of us out of the building. There were a few other times before that where mall security hassled us in some way or another, but it's been a good solid 15 years. I guess we weren't trying hard enough.

Last night, 8 folks met on the top floor of the east parking garage to look at the surrounding terrain in hopes of testing out a wireless mesh setup that we've been tinkering with the past few months. Our hope was to find a spot far away with line-of-sight for some high-gain directional antennae (operating under FCC Part 97 rules), with some folks on the parking garage, and some others out in the distance. Maybe it was the laptops on the roofs of cars. Maybe it was the camera with a 2-foot-long telephoto lens being used as a telescope. The interdicting mall guard seemed nice and interested in the experiment once we explained it to him, but apparently the property management powers that be weren't happy with a bunch of 25-60 year-olds hanging out in an unused, far-off part of their precious parking structure.

We headed indoors to the 2600 meeting for a while, then took the wireless mesh equipment to a nearby park before sundown.

For what it's worth, there are no hard feelings. What we were doing looked a lot like loitering, even though we were mall patrons, looking to experiment with technology we plan on putting into place for public service.

October 2013 Meeting

Just a reminder: Tomorrow is the October 2013 meeting.

As always, bring any projects you're working on. Some of the local meshers will be playing with HSMM again, but we're also discussing ways to get computers directly onto the mesh, and how to set up an OLSR mesh that's unlicensed on FCC Part 15 rules (e.g. not just for Ham radio folks).

September 2013

I almost forgot about this month's meeting!

Show up and bring whatever fun project you're working on. If interested, we may do an informal (yet proper) key signing party and discuss various cryptography tools. The basics of OpenPGP (demonstrated with GNU Privacy Guard) and key signing can be found on HiR Information Report.

August 2013 - Mesh networking

rsaxvc, ax0n and (hopefully) a few others will be playing with HSMM-Mesh at the KC 2600 meeting this Friday. HSMM, Also called Broadband HamNet, is the use of modified commodity WiFi hardware and some other technologies for use in mesh networking under FCC Part 97 (Amateur radio) rules. Chiefly, we'll be working on a quick and easy way to get laptops directly connected to the mesh, which is, so far, an unsupported feature, despite being fairly easy to do once you understand a few underlying protocols.

Sneaky February 2013 meeting

When the first Friday of the month falls on the first day of the month, it seems like 2600 sneaks up on us. We'll see you at Barnes & Noble in Oak Park Mall on Friday. The official meeting start time is 5:00 PM, but most of the regulars can't make it there that early. People usually start showing up at 5:30 or 6.