Cryptoparty3 Smashed It!

The general impression I am getting from twitter and IRL is really glowing feedback from everyone that attended the Cryptoparty, we smashed it! however I was wondering about getting some kind of structured feedback... but at the end of the day, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and that makes all the difference.
I will, however, email out an anonymous feedback form so that those people who felt it could have been better can really say what they think. :)

Encrypt All The Things! #cryptoparty

source: https://encrypteverything.ca/

Have a look at some of the articles that have been written there. Here is one about firefox config https://encrypteverything.ca/index.php/Browsing_Safely_With_Firefox
Here is another about stripping EXIF data (useful when you want to upload photos more privately) https://encrypteverything.ca/index.php/Uploading_photos_privately_%28removing_EXIF_data%29

It will be a sincere pleasure to see lots of people coming to the London Cryptoparty. See you there! https://cryptoparty.org/wiki/London #cryptoparty
@cryptopartylond

Free Event: CryptopartyLondon 3 by White Hat Hackers and Makers that care about your right to Privacy and Anonymity online!

An invitation to CryptopartyLondon 3!
=================================
It is a sincere pleasure to invite you to an event that some friends and I are hosting next Wednesday at the Mozilla (as in Firefox) Offices. Please bring your laptop and cake. I hope to see many of you there! ^_^

Please note that registration via eventbrite is mandatory but you can use a pseudonym if you like :p
https://cryptopartylondon.eventbrite.co.uk

Why do we do this?
=================
We are a collective of white hat hackers, engineers and makers who believe in disseminating information that empowers people. We also believe that a person's human right to privacy and a family life should extend to the digital domain although this is, evidently, not the understanding of the government and many companies. Furthermore that the right to personal anonymity, pseudonymity and privacy are basic human rights and should be regarded by all people that are responsible for handling our sensitive data. It is also noted that these rights also include life, liberty, dignity, security, right to a family, and the right to live without fear or intimidation. No government, organisation or individual should prevent people from accessing the technology which underscores these basic human rights.
We want to help tech you, the people, how to stay safe against governments and companies that are constantly pushing to erode our civil liberties and snoop on the most intimate of our private communications. So please spread the word by word of mouth, twitter, email, facebook and please try come and join us at our free event and  last but not least, please bring cake!!!

For more information about why we do this, please read (and edit!!! if you wish) a Cryptoparty manifesto: https://github.com/cryptoparty/handbook/blob/master/src/chapter_00_cryptoparty_handbook/01_a_cryptoparty_manifesto.md
#peace #love #solidarity #hacktheplanet
@samthetechie

What to Expect?
===============
We will be covering the basics of PGP encrypted emails, privacy-protected browsing using TOR Browser Bundle, OTR encrypted chat messages, hard disk encryption using truecrypt, encrypted SMS messages on Android, encrypted voice calls on Android and anonymity techniques like oyster card swapping and swapping sims/mobile phones.

We are not financially or politically aligned and everyone is welcome to attend for free. (well you can bring cake)

Suggested Conduct at Cryptoparties
================================
Thank you to Noisebridge Hackspace for these!

Excellence
----------------
Be excellent to each other is a guiding principle of CryptoParty. Wikipedia uses a somewhat similar rule, which they call "the fundamental rule of all social spaces. Every other policy for getting along is a special case of it." Unlike Wikipedia, CryptoParty takes a positive approach, and avoids the practice of officially enumerating the myriad potential special cases; "be excellent" is enough.
(bringing cake is considered excellent behaviour)

Do-ocracy
----------------
Doing excellent stuff at CryptoParty does not require permission or an official consensus decision. If you're uncertain about the excellence of something you want to do, you should ask someone else what they think.

Sudo Leadership
--------------------------
Leadership is taken by individuals for specific projects. This is called "sudo leadership" after the *nix command sudo which allows a regular user to do one root-level, or superuser, task. In other words, if you want CryptoParty to do something, start doing it. At times someone may take sudo leadership to take a tutorial, fix the wifi, update the wiki, or organise the next CryptoParty.
($sudo bring us some cake)

The CryptoParty Handbook
========================
Also, you might want to take a look at our Creative Commons licensed book (available for free in .pdf and .mobi for kindle or cost price in paperback).

This 392 page, Creative Commons licensed handbook is designed to help those with no prior experience to protect their basic human right to Privacy in networked, digital domains. By covering a broad array of topics and use contexts it is written to help anyone wishing to understand and then quickly mitigate many kinds of vulnerability using free, open-source tools. Most importantly however this handbook is intended as a reference for use during Crypto Parties

NEWS: The CryptoParty Handbook v1 has been released! https://cryptoparty.org/wiki/CryptoPartyHandbook

It would be great to have some of you guys review and crunch through the book and pointing out what we got wrong or what could be added.

Download the book here: get this book now. Read it. http://www.hostb.org/97/download
NPO (not for profit) harbook purchse here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/the-contributors/the-cryptoparty-handbook/paperback/product-20427875.html

Cryptoparty Handbook

UPDATE: https://www.cryptoparty.in/documentation/handbook 

I am thrilled about this initiative and the book is going to be great.

Aims

IMHO the first aim of this book should be to aid comprehension of
these tools and how to use them for as many people as possible.

Collaboration

I see the book as having many revisions (probably through rounds of collaboration and calls for contributions via twitter and on the wiki practically) but to a group of programmers this would look more like Git commits. We can just accept that git is not the perfect platform for non programmers but commit to accepting all contributions and trying to work them into the book. So we can push the issues system / bug tracker for this https://github.com/cryptoparty/handbook/issues and I like also the properties of forking and branching as one author may choose to go away and rework substantial portions of the book and then request a review which we can do as a team. Again, git is perfect for this because well as hashing to preserve data integrity it is also a great way to make sure there are no malicious edits that have crept in without being noticed.

Distribution

I have started seeding a torrent: https://cryptoparty.org/wiki/CryptoPartyHandbook#Torrent

Here is an idea for viral distribution of the ebook: https://occupywiki.org.uk/wiki/Projects/DiffusionEbooks

If we use this approach we can then distribute the printing costs and supporting the movement can be a simple act of printing out 5 booklets or maybe even just individual chapters for reading on the train or something and dropping them off somewhere or putting them in a cafe or some
other interesting alternative meetup spaces (for me that is London
hackspace for sure). Maybe people can even just print out individual chapters? 

Virality

I think this level of virality and outreach is really what we need to
keep growing and getting our message and this good information to more
people. It is also nice to be able to give something to people that
attend the parties something to take away in order to help them learn
from home. 

Added to which, git might just be the most non hierarchical and most advanced
collaboration platform that we all have so I think that we should
 give it a shot and we can always switch to another platform if it doesn't work out.

Github

UPDATE: I posted more thoughts about the use of GIT on the Liberation Tech Mailing List

https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2012-October/005172.html

 

I am pleased to say that the book can now be found here: https://github.com/cryptoparty/handbook/

We're glad you liked CryptopartyLondon

Thanks to everyone that attended the event, it was a great success. Since it was our main aim that people had fun, we are very glad that so many turned up and had a good time. We have yet to have our organisers post-event debrief but we just wanted to keep in touch in the meantime by spamming you with some links :)
Edit us: https://cryptoparty.org/wiki/London (has the slides)
Like us: https://www.facebook.com/CryptoPartyLondon (so the whole world knows that you want to learn how to hack, joking)
Follow @cryptopartylond

p.s. there is another one planned for 19th October.

p.p.s. we are happy to promote any blog posts or upload user-contributed content related to cryptoparty so please send us any graphics, presentations, slides, pdfs, blog posts or photos. Thanks!

p.p.p.s. http://samthetechie.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/a-quick-retrospective-inaugural.html

Observations of Alecm's Observations of @cryptopartylond / #cryptoparty

Alecm,
thank you for your observations expressed in your blog post: http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/article/8623

From reading your post I believe you perhaps have not quite grasped what Cryptoparty is. Please read this page which holds the currently held view of what cryptoparty is: https://cryptoparty.org/wiki/CryptoParty
 
It seems that you are evaluating this event in terms of a format (the Bar Camp) and a culture that we have never subscribed to or endorsed. So please take care to read our documentation to see where we are coming from before comparing us to something which is largely irrelevant.
 We have been very clear about our culture on our documentation and when explaining the idea to people, Cryptoparty London has inherited a culture of Do-ocracy, Sudo-Leadership, and Excellence from here https://cryptoparty.org/wiki/CryptoParty#Suggested_Conduct which derives from Noisebridge's 'Tripartite Pillars' https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisebridge_Vision#Tripartite_Pillars and, ancestrally, from the international hackspace design patterns (from the 24th CCC in 2007, http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/Design_Patterns). You now have all of the references to correctly inform yourself of our culture and our aims.

Regards,

samthetechie

A quick retrospective: Inaugural Cryptoparty London

Hi everyone, here are a few brief thoughts about last night's first ever  Cryptoparty London meetup.
Audio (3:31): http://snd.sc/OxFMv6

do you dig sks.mit.edu

Random thought as we were doing cryptoparty, apparently MIT's Keyservers were updated a while back from http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/ to an 'sks' server. I think I prefer the old service, IMHO it is better for teaching.

xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxx:~$ dig sks.mit.edu

; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> sks.mit.edu
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- 11741="11741" br="br" id:="id:" noerror="noerror" opcode:="opcode:" query="query" status:="status:">;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;sks.mit.edu.            IN    A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
sks.mit.edu.        3585    IN    A    18.7.76.74

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mit.edu.        121597    IN    NS    strawb.mit.edu.
mit.edu.        121597    IN    NS    w20ns.mit.edu.
mit.edu.        121597    IN    NS    bitsy.mit.edu.

;; Query time: 4 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Sun Sep 30 06:48:54 2012
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 106

xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxx:~$ dig pgp.mit.edu

; <<>> DiG 9.8.1-P1 <<>> pgp.mit.edu
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- 10526="10526" br="br" id:="id:" noerror="noerror" opcode:="opcode:" query="query" status:="status:">;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;pgp.mit.edu.            IN    A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
pgp.mit.edu.        3600    IN    CNAME    CRYPTONOMICON.mit.edu.
CRYPTONOMICON.mit.edu.    3600    IN    A    18.9.60.141

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
mit.edu.        121588    IN    NS    w20ns.mit.edu.
mit.edu.        121588    IN    NS    bitsy.mit.edu.
mit.edu.        121588    IN    NS    strawb.mit.edu.

;; Query time: 273 msec
;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1)
;; WHEN: Sun Sep 30 06:49:02 2012
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 134

xxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxx:~$

CryptoParty London: First London Cryptoparty Confirmed

CryptoParty London: First London Cryptoparty Confirmed: 29th Septermber, London Hackspace 7:30pm Hi everyone, welcome to the first blogpost from the London cryptoparty