Random Hacks of Kindnesswas attended in Portland, OR by a few of us and was a good experience. We made progress on the Dead man's Switch mobile application. We hope to be able to integrate this work in with the openwatch fork thet is under active development.

The March-Hare Communications Collective was at the 2011 SF Anarchist Bookfair tabling along side a few folk from Hackbloc who were presenting issue #12 of Hack this Zine.

Apologies to all those promised an alpha release of OD today. It has been a day of testing and bug fixes and the project is still not ready for alpha. The code for the project is available on github, and the log of project issues / feature requests is available here. Alpha will likely be ready in the next couple of weeks.

I gave a pre-alpha presentation on the Operator Distribution at the SF Anarchist Bookfair and at Evergreen earlier this week. At both locations people were supportive, and had good feedback and criticism. Check out a recording of the presentation here.

A few of us were interviewed for the February 2011 Episode. The excerpt including only our interview is here and the full program here.

For many people, it's a strange notion that an online service provider would ever care about the privacy or security of their users. Taking a quick look at the top 10 most frequently visited sites in the world[1], nine of them have based their business model off the accumulation of private information for the purposes of targeted advertising or sale. The exception here is Wikipedia and this speaks to the way the ethics and goals of an online service provider play into how they treat their user's privacy.

A slow but interesting week for march-hare development. There was some planning for presentations at the upcoming SF Anarchist Bookfair, and the Bayarea hackmeet, a meeting with Jenka Sodenberg of the IMEMC project, and some random testing of Ushahidi_Android and the Ushahidi fullscreen map plugin.

The Operator Distribution is a tool that we are working on to help deploy and create secure and autonomous environments and networks to communities organizing in hostile environments.

When we say secure we mean that use of each environment and network is resistant to eavesdropping (via openvpn), and resistant to loss of data that could compromise the security of the group and allow for infiltration (via full disk encryption with luks).

The Operator Distribution: explanation and humble begining from March-Hare Collective on Vimeo.

Qik is a tool for collecting and broadcasting, publishing, and archiving video, with a focus on mobile devices as a source, with support for viewer access control, community interaction, and republishing. The March-Hare Communications Collective is looking into evaluating it for our needs.

Ushahidi has a call to report feature for Ushahidi that integrates an Ushahidi deployment with the Cloudvox hosted Asterisk service (on-line demo here). The benefit of this service is that it allows for the collection of voice messages into the Ushahidi management interface and the ability to manage the IVR interface of the voice system from within the Ushahidi admin panel. Interfacing with Cloudvox also has the added benefit of auto scaling for call volume increase on demand as well as having a single point for obtaining a number (including tool-free numbers).

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p>From the perspective of a communications deployment I am not convinced that this is a value added service. A single skype account has traditionally been used as it allows for all operators to log into the same account and incoming calls to be answered by the first person with load auto handled. Unanswered calls will go to voice mail which cal be later added into the system. The Cloudvox plugin will submit audio recordings with the report, but it does not parse out the text from the message which would be a significant added value. Another issue is that neither solution Cloudvox, or Skype adds privacy for users from authorities with warrants, and protecting the privacy of users should be a inherent requirement of all our applications.