[tor-reports] About Backbone 409

[Lunar]

Hi!

A little bit less than two weeks ago, I was in Calafou, near Barcelona,
in Spain to participate in Backbone 409 [1]. This was a two days event
to gather “projects actively building infrastructures for a free
Internet from an anti-capitalist point of view: autonomous servers, open
networks, online services, platforms, open hardware, free software,
etc.” The event peaked at around 150 participants.

I had many different hats so it's hard to give a good account of the
event. So a few highlights:

Every session were made accessible to Spanish and English speakers by
simultaneous translation, thanks to the Coati collective [2].
Participants could listen to the translations using small pocket FM
transmitters. This was the first time I had experienced such setup, and
it was a lot smoother than what I had anticipated. Even if the ratio of
English/Spanish speakers was probably not balanced enough, I hope it
improved general participation in the discussions.

One of the roundtable was about resilient hosting and strategies on
where and how to host content in face of legal and extra legal
repression. I took the opportunity to mention Tor hidden services as
a possible solution, especially now that the Tor Browser is getting more
usable and ubiquitous.

DrWhax facilitated a session about “secure operating system by design”
where developers from Freepto [3], SubgraphOS [4], and Tails [5]. All
these systems use Tor to protect part or all of their users'
communications.

Based on the experience of Nos Oignons, I did a workshop on how to setup
legal organizations to run Tor exit nodes. Around 30 people attended,
with presence from Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Italy, and Greece. We
exchanged on legal, financial, technical, and social aspects of running
Tor exit nodes. Some participants were motivated to dig deeper into the
legal situation of Tor in their country at the end of the workshop.
Hopefully we will see new organizations joining Torservers.net.

  [1]: http://backbone409.calafou.org/
  [2]: https://coati.pimienta.org/
  [3]: https://www.freepto.mx/
  [4]: https://subgraph.com/sgos/
  [5]: https://tails.boum.org/

-- 
Lunar                                             <lunar at torproject.org>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 836 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-reports/attachments/20140625/a789502f/attachment.sig>