I’m happy to tell people that we did find a space and moved into it at the end of July. We’ve been there for an entire month now. It is at 6050 Lowell Street in northern Oakland, which is the tri-border area where Oakland, Emeryville, and Berkeley come together. We’re a 20 minute walk from the Ashby station in Berkeley or a quick bike ride. I don’t have any great photos of the space except some I took of the space when were were examining the building.

We have 800 sq ft in two concrete floored rooms downstairs and 800 sq ft in one larger room upstairs (pictured below) giving us a fairly large overall space. The build out of the space has taken a little longer than we initially expected but we’re making progress. Right now, we have a conference table, a couch, and about 10 desks upstairs along with a packet radio station, a broken makerbot, and an unassembled makerbot. The downstairs is full of tools from building our desks (which is an interesting project in and of itself). Soon, we’ll have at least one more couch and conference table upstairs as well. It took us a few weeks of fighting to get high speed Internet but it is finally working (Comcast sucks, by the way) so people can actually get work done while in the space. Dr. Jesus, one of our board members, also built an electronic entry system for our door, giving us 24 hour access to the space. Another member, Dennis, who is an architect, has been working on designs in Google Sketchup for the space but we’re kind of jury rigging things as we go right now.

AMT has somewhere between 16 and 20 active members and seem to be picking up a few a week right now. We continue to meet every Monday night at 7:30 PM for a general meeting, demonstrations, and workshops. Our first quarterly meeting is in two weeks where we will induct new members officially into the organization. You can join our e-mail list if you’re interested in the group or go to the wiki for more information.

My next personal projects at AMT are:

• Finally building my makerbot
• Building my Zen Toolworks CNC mill (from a kit)
• Beginning to work on my DIY Drone using a megaduino and some off the shelf electronics inspired by DIY Drones and a Defcon 18 talk that showed how easy it really is (by some definitions of “easy”)
• Building a trike with Mike G. (who is building a tandem trike) using plans from Atomic Zombie (This will involve a bit of welding so we’ve been delayed by ventilation needs)

Other people are working on far more interesting projects as we get tools into the space.

I encourage anyone local to the Bay Area, especially the East Bay, or coming through to contact us and stop by.

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While I was in Seattle visiting friends and family the other week, I had a chance to visit Metrix Create:Space and Jigsaw Renaissance. These are two of the public hackerspaces in the Seattle area. Metrix is run along more business and less club lines. People can show up and work on things, rent tools or time on the makerbots or the laster cutter, and generally sit around developing projects. Jigsaw Renaissance is a hackerspace on more common lines, as a sort of member-based social club. In that model, which we were also using for Ace Monster Toys, people pay for membership in the space and can use it as they wish. When more expensive items need to be purchased, the group raises funds internally in order to facilitate things. This kind of space also builds a bit more of a community, in my experience, as it isn’t being run as any one individual’s personal profit making business.

That being said, both spaces look to be interesting places to check out. I definitely felt more at home with what Jigsaw Renaissance wants to do. You can find both spaces near Capitol Hill.

I put up photos from Metrix Create:Space and Jigsaw Renaissance up on Flickr in order to help people get a sense of the spaces.

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The effort to get Ace Monster Toys, the East Bay Hackerspace, off the ground continues.

We continue to meet on Monday nights at 7:30 PM, often at Berkeley Coworking. This last Monday we took another step towards becoming official by electing our board of directors. This consists of:

• Al Billings (that is, me)
• Christian Fernandez
• Shannon Lee
• Mike Gittelsohn
• Dr. Jesus (a man of questionable virtue)

Our next task is to appoint our three officers, the president, the secretary, and the treasurer. Neha volunteered to be secretary on the spot (a thankless task!). We have candidates for the others though it is also possible that one of us may resign from the board to become president because, in a fit of civic theory, we made board member ineligible to be officers and then elected most of the membership willing to be in charge of things to the board. (Oops!)

The reason why we need officers immediately to go with the board is that I will be filing California non-profit incorporation papers for us. These papers require us to name our board and officers, along with our by-laws. The incorporation process is quick, taking only a week or two, and will allow us to rent a space and receive donations from people. Once that is returned, we will be filing for 501(c)(3) status with the federal government.

In the meantime, we are constantly looking at various potential spaces in the East Bay. You can follow our progress on the wiki if so inclined. We have several good candidates in Oakland and Berkeley.

Now that we have a board, I expect that our weekly Monday meetings will transition to something a bit more fun and a bit less organizational. We’ve spoken about having a visit and maybe class by the local chapter of Toool, the Open Organisation Of Lockpickers, as well as doing some electronic project instructions. I encourage anyone interested and in the East Bay to come out to one of the Monday meetings.

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In any case, I have interesting news to report. There is a hackerspace-in-formation in the East Bay now. (For those that don’t know, the “East Bay” is the area across from San Francisco that contains Berkeley, Oakland, and a few other cities). There has been a hackerspace in San Francisco for almost two years now, Noisebridge. I was involved in its founding but immediately after we got the space for it, I went to Egypt. When I came back from that trip, I developed a viral illness that laid me up for three months and put me in recovery for at least six after that. Needless to say, I found that a hackerspace in San Francisco was not ideal for me since I live on the Oakland/Berkeley/Emeryville border. I found myself less and less inclined to go when I wasn’t feeling well and it took me an hour or more to get there. It is hard to feel connected to a space that isn’t nearby, especially when you aren’t feeling connected to much while being ill or recovering.

I have been wanting to see about getting a hackerspace going more locally and since many Noisebridge members live in the East Bay, it has seemed like something that would be doable. Once I dropped out of my doctoral program (abandon ship!), I even had time. I started an e-mail list a year ago but didn’t do much with it, lacking motivation. I ran into a number of people in the last few months who were Burners, engineers, etc. who seemed find a local hackerspace to be of real interest. I got a few of them to sign up to the e-mail list and on April 21, I sent out an e-mail to the list to kickstart things again. It turns out to have been a resounding success. I think it has been just the right time for a bunch of people and the reaction has been quite positive. A few people are Noisebridge members but more than half of those currently involved are not, being local engineers, geeks, and makers.

With the positive response, people decided that we should start meeting in person instead of just online. During the first physical meeting, we decided to meet every week in order to try to coalesce a critical mass of people. This has worked very well and we’ve had three meetings so far with the next being tomorrow. Each meeting has had a revolving cast of people but we’ve had a pretty consistent turn out of 15 or so people. We have an e-mail list (soon to move to a new location), a wiki, and an irc channel (#acemonstertoys on Freenode). We were using the HackEastBay.com domain that I’d set up last year but last meeting we voted on an official name. We’re now “Ace Monster Toys,” which is an anagram for “Setec Astronomy” and “Too many secrets”, both used in the hacker film, Sneakers. (Sneakers was filmed right here in Oakland.) We’ve taken over AceMonsterToys.org now and are gradually moving our infrastructure to that location.

The group has decided to put a pro tempore structure into place, until the end of August, so we can have time to determine how we wish to organize. We’re specifically avoiding the anarchistic (literally) model that Noisebridge decided to use for governance based on consensus. We’re likely to go for a much more traditional model of dues paying members electing a board who, like good Roman senators, decide things for the good of the organization during their limited terms. Our next steps are to determine what this structure will be, incorporate as either a non-profit (preferred by many) or standard organization, and find a space to rent. Realistically, we’ll probably talk and talk until a good space turns up and then we’ll quickly scramble to incorporate and then lease it. When Noisebridge was organizing, it met in coffee shops a couple of times a month for more than a year before, suddenly, a good space was found in the Mission, and we scrambled, over the course of about 48 hours, to get the funds together to get it. When groups have spaces, potential members tend to start appearing, probably because the group seems more “real” than it did when it was just a bunch of people meeting in a coffee shop.

Right now, the membership of the group seems to be heavily interested in things related to physical fabrication. This ranges from electronics to CNC mills to makerbots and the like. There are already two makerbots in the group, a mill or two, and discussions of what could be built with more. Ideally, we will initially organize as a space for people to have workspaces for projects and share tools and purchase more expensive equipment. From there, we will probably branch out into having classes and working on projects in small or larger groups as interests pull at people. It is all long on ideas and short on details at this time.

I encourage people who are interested in becoming involved or even in following our efforts to join our e-mail list or follow us on the wiki. If you are in the East Bay (or anywhere in the Bay Area), feel free to drop by a Monday meeting and give your ideas. This is a joint project amongst anyone interested in getting their hands dirty and participating.

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Cory spoke for about an hour. He did a short reading from the book (actually reading a section that I had just read last night) and then did a brief talk on copyright and why it matters to more than just authors. It was actually a bit different than the “standard” speech on it that I’ve heard from him before and was classic Doctorow in covering a bit of the current landscape in copyright and why people should care, given that most of what happens on the Internet is affected by this fight.

I freely admit to being a huge fanboy of his work. I’ve been reading Boing Boing since at least 2004 (and I’ve even been boingboing’d once) and have read all of his novels as they’ve come out. Being a professional computer geek that got his start in the late 1980s running a BBS and hacking into the local university’s unix machines and network, I’m probably his ideal audience in many ways. That said, I think that he has a lot to say and the Internet is everywhere today, affecting everyone in our society. FTW is about union organizing amongst third world gold farmers in MMORGs but the economics and the ideas about labor and individual freedom and self-direction are applicable to anyone. I’m planning on getting my daughter a copy of it now that she’s 14 and old enough to be reading his YA works.

I contacted Cory about recording his reading the other day. I’ve previously recorded him at SF in SF with Rudy Rucker and at the late Cody’s Books of Berkeley when he was touring for “Little Brother,” his last YA book. This was the first time that he was heavily microphoned and the audio is clear but hardly ideal quality because it was coming from large speakers and not simply recording his normal speaking voice. He offered to have me plugged into the sound board but, unfortunately, my current Edirol R-09 device can’t handle XLR inputs so I was stuck with it on the table next to him.

I plan to post my review of his book in the next day or two when I finish it. So far, I’m enjoying it quite a bit though I believe that “Makers” will continue to be my favorite by him.

I have made the audio available at the Internet Archive. I have also embedded it below for playback for those that wish to listen to it now.

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Much of the open source community uses Freenode for IRC communication. The entire Ubuntu project uses it. I know that the Python community uses it quite heavily. The local hackerspace, Noisebridge, even has a channel (#noisebridge). In fact, every project that I know of that has a public face on IRC uses Freenode except Mozilla projects.

Given the cross-group nature of open source, where people often participate in many projects depending on their interests, I really think that Mozilla should move to Freenode. The current situation with irc.mozilla.org feels like a semi-private walled garden. It is a public server, yes, but it is cut off from many of our natural allies. Let’s face it, people are fundamentally lazy in many ways and the extra work that it takes to join another IRC server when someone is already active on Freenode means that many people probably don’t bother to come to the Mozilla IRC server.

A while back, as part of my work in the Mozilla QA organization, I set up #mozilla-quality on Freenode and submitted the paperwork to reqister Mozilla QA as the owner of that channel. We don’t have a lot of people drop into the channel but we get a few irregularly, often looking for help. I have personally seen that when, in response to questions that they want to direct at developers, they are directed to irc.mozilla.org, most of them do not go to the directed channels on the server.

It would be quite easy to register ownership of “mozilla-” on Freenode and to move the bulk of IRC conversations to that network. I think it would be a win-win situation for working with community there and would make Mozilla a lot more accessible to others.

This is something that will probably need to be debated and discussed in newsgroups but I wanted to post something here before beginning that discussion in order to see what the readers of planet.mozilla.org felt about the matter. If you have thoughts on this, please comment.

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All of this makes me a good candidate to go all digital, along with being a complete computer geek. I spend most of my time reading words on a screen for my day job. When the Kindle DX came out, I bought one because the high DPI screens are much nicer than reading an LCD (you do really have to see one to appreciate it) and because the DX had native PDF support. For my school program and scholastic interests, I wound up with a lot of PDF files of articles to read and this way I didn’t have to print them out. I’ve bought a lot of books for the Kindle since I got mine and I really have enjoyed using the device. One of the big problems of the Kindle and similar devices is the non-transferability of the books. I’d rather have books in an open format like EPUB or even PDF than the DRM-laden Kindle format. As has been pointed out, when you buy a Kindle book, you are really long-term leasing the book, not owning it. I’ve worked around this to some degree by seeking (and often finding) pirated versions of the same books that I own in more open formats. I don’t even feel vaguely bad about this. After all, I have already paid for the book. I’m just getting a more suitable archival copy of it. In fact, I’ve been doing this for paper books that I own as well. This gives me more room to clear out my shelf space from many pounds of dead tree.

I have been expecting for a while that the Kindle format would be cracked. Given the cracking of DVDs and even Blu-Ray, I knew it was only a matter of time. No DRM scheme will survive the interest of enough talented individuals. Only one person has to be smarter than the creators, as Cory Doctorow has pointed out, and then everyone else can learn from that person. Well, that day has come, at least partially. It has been reported recently that the Kindle DRM has been hacked. As it turns out, this is not entirely true. Kindle books, while externally looking the same, come in more than one format. The Kindle supports (and Amazon sells) books using the Mobipocket format without DRM (.mobi), Amazon’s topaz format books (.tpz), and Amazon’s DRM-restricted Mobipocket format (AZW). The Amazon topaz format has not been hacked yet. What has been hacked is the Kindle form of the mobipocket format that added DRM. This format is a format based on the Open eBook standard. Most Kindle books are actually the same .mobi books that you can possibly by from other retailers but tweaked for Amazon DRM. (Well, actually, Amazon has a LOT more than any other retailer but they are still mobiformat books for the most part…) Some publishers use the topaz format but it seems to entirely be up to the publisher to choose what they want to create based on the instructions for creating a Kindle book that I’ve read. There are a lot of tools for working with mobipocket format, which is basically just HTML with some special additions and tweaks.

The hack uses a combination of the Amazon for PC application for Windows and two python scripts. One script extracts the books from the Amazon for the PC application when it creates a session for reading the book and the other script strips off the mobipocket DRM, leaving an unprotected mobipocket format book. I tested this out by firing up a Windows XP virtual machines (since I run OS X), installing python and the Amazon for PC, and downloading the two scripts. You fire up the main script (called “unswindle“), which then starts the Amazon for PC application. You then open the book that you want to extract and close the application, unswindle grabs the book and fires up the mobidedrm script to strip off the DRM. I looked at my bought content, as an experiment, and it turned out that out of more than 50 books that I owned, only five or so were in topaz format. The rest were mobipocket books with DRM. I was able to extract a book that I had bought and then fire up Calibre, an open source ebook reader and reformatting tool, and view the book completely outside of any Amazon application.

It will be interesting to see what Amazon will (or can) do to stop this. They’ve updated their PC application once but the author of the script simply made an update and it worked again. While the Amazon application updates by default, users can turn this off. At that point, Amazon will have to make a choice between cutting off users who haven’t updated the application or letting the hack continue to work (since they can’t change the way they do DRM without cutting off users unless they update the application).

It is an interesting problem. As a number of people have pointed out, having no ebooks doesn’t really get rid of piracy either. There have been text file or PDF versions of popular books floating around the net for more than ten years. You can’t really stop a dedicated person from either typing a book in or scanning a book and running OCR on it. For a lot of people, a scanned OCR’d book is “good enough” for them. There is no DRM in the world that can stop that from happening, which makes books an entirely different problem than say music or movies. The printed book is not an analog hole that can be plugged. I’ve ripped the spines off of paperbacks and scanned them before, not for distribution but simply because I was tired of having the paper copy of a reference book on my shelf taking up space. I never bothered to OCR mine, just leaving them as high dpi image-based PDFs. Most books are still under 10 megabytes in size and this isn’t much in an age when people have giant music collections where a single song is easily three to to eight megabytes in size. Print is cheap. I found the process to be tedious but pretty easy if you own a scanner.

Like I said, it was only a matter of time until the DRM was hacked and this is probably the first salvo in what will be another ongoing DRM war between publishers of media and their own customers.

Update: Updated to clarify that there are two book formats, not three. I was confusing Amazons mobiformat with DRM with unprotected mobiformat. The only currently uncracked format is topaz.

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Towards the end of helping Iranians get access to the Internet, I want to link to some resources, both specific and general.

Here are two ways to set up proxies (one for Windows, one for OS X):

1. How to setup a proxy for Iran citizens (for Windows!)
2. How To Set Up An Anonymous Proxy For Iranians Using Squid on Mac OS X

I would also suggest the easy option of setting up a Tor node. This adds to the overall goodness of the Tor network anyway.

Anonymous, strangely enough, seems to be interested in helping as well (http://iran.whyweprotest.net/). Their site has a nice forum with all sorts of information geared more towards the less skilled (which is really necessary), as well as helping people track what is going on. They are using Tor Hidden Services as well, which is a sort of parasitic Internet running within the Tor network.

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He said:

“I don’t know if Tor is the end-all-be-all, but the basic point would be: browser-based, quasi-auto-configuring anonymous darknets (that set up and tear down without a trace), and look something like other (e.g. HTTP) traffic would be a boon to free speech.

Until the government decided that it was aiding and abetting pedophilia, and banned it. Thankfully the first amendment does not apply there.”

On Twitter, Vinay Gupta, of Hexayurt fame, suggested:

“http://guptaoption.com/cheapid == identity backbone for dealing with things like distributed voting. You want timestamping and good, clear access to the HTTPS certificate chains to be able to encrypt messages to other users using client side certs.”

I had figured that I’d get more commentary than that on something that is very relevant to current news. I mean that this is blue sky territory, people. I know that there are more ideas on enabling openness and freedom through Firefox, Thunderbird, and in the platform than none at all. There have to be ideas out there on how to extend these to enable, for example, anonymous communication, routing around censorship, etc.

Meanwhile, I heard two stories while driving from work in the car on NPR yesterday relating to the use of Twitter, social networking, and the Internet in the current protests. I found the pieces immediately brought to mind the importance of the Internet and enabling openness as a core necessity.

Check out In Iran, A Struggle Over Cyberspace and The Challenges To Turning Off The Internet In Iran. The latter story even has the obligatory Jonathan Zittrain quote.

Update: Now Zittrain has posted in relation to this matter as well. I seem to be timely as this just went up: Why the PC matters.

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Watching the twitterstorm around the current situation with the Iranian elections has been fairly thought provoking. The Iranian protesters are completely shut out of the official media in the form of newspapers, radio, and television in Iran. These are under the thumb of the state at the service of a man that may (or may not) have stolen an election for himself. The only viable option is the use of the net and other direct media communication, such as SMS. Of course, the state can block access to net resources and has turned off the cell networks at various points. Like the situation in China at times, people have found ways around these blockages to continue to report and communicate with each other.

Going back to my day job here at the Mozilla Corporation, I wonder what role, if any, we, the Mozilla community, can play in enabling freedom and openness. We aren’t specifically political as a group in the sense that we have no vested interest in battling specific governments. In fact, it is often in our best interest to be and be seen as neutral in such things. That said, we are also interested in an open Internet and an open Internet, by its very nature, has a political component because it is the antithesis of the state controlled firewalls and mechanisms of control that various authoritarian regimes like to put into place.

To the end of promoting an open Internet, is there more that Mozilla could do with software to help enable that process? Opera Unite has gotten some press during the last few days for facilitating the direct sharing of information over the net, though it reminds me of the defunct AllPeers software that went away last year. I have friends that work on the Tor Project, which has the explicit goal of allowing anonymous communication between people. Tor actually targets itself to helping dissidents, bloggers, and others that need to route around state blocking and tracking.

What kind of tools could Mozilla incorporate into Firefox, for example, with its more than 100 million users, that could help people in the future? I’ve advocated for Mozilla to support the Tor Project before (which didn’t really get beyond getting more Firefox bugs fixed). I’d like to see us help create the next generation of tools or even support and build in the next generation for anonymous communication, networking, encryption and other mechanisms. I’ve pointed out before how painful it is to send and receive encrypted e-mail within Thunderbird (or through webmail services like gmail) even though it has become clear that governments routinely snoop on e-mail (even the American NSA) well beyond what people have suspected.

One of the reasons that I work at MoCo is that we aren’t driven by a profit motive, being owned by a non-profit, and have an idea of social good built into what we do. I’d like to see how that could be explicitly expanded. I’d love to hear suggestions as I have only the most basic of ideas (such as making encryption for communication easier or transparent or adding jabber support into the Mozilla platform) and I’m sure others have far better thought out ideas.

Of course, I could be out to lunch and most people don’t care about such things. I somehow doubt if this is true though.

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