LXNY General Meeting:

Marc Waldman on Publius
a tamper evident
censorship resistant
fault tolerant
web publishing system


Tuesday 1 August 2000

LXNY will have a general meeting Tuesday 1 August 2000.

This meeting is free and open to the public.

In particular, all members of FBUNY, NYLUG, LUNY!, AnyNIX, the Brooklyn Bunch, and all other Free Software Groups are welcome!

The meeting starts at 6:30 pm and runs until 9:00 pm.
Enter the IBM building, 590 Madison Avenue, on the corner of 57th Street and Madison Avenue and ask at the front desk for the room number.

At exactly 9:00 pm many members will repair to our traditional place of refreshment.

Marc Waldman will speak on Publius, a tamper-evident, censorship-resistant, fault-tolerant web publishing system. Publius is today a project of Lorrie Faith Cranor, Aviel D. Rubin, and Marc Waldman. Code will be released shortly, at which point Publius will be tested by thousands of hackers and freedom fighters of Planet Earth. If you want to look at code today write to the Publius Project at publius@cs.nyu.edu .

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~waldman/publius
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/07/circuits/articles/27next.html
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1004-200-2183852.html?tag=st
http://www.techserver.com/noframes/story/0,2294,500223018-500319451-501797953-0,00.html
http://slashdot.org/yro/00/06/30/0614232.shtml

Publius is one of many systems in process of dream, design, coding, testing, deployment, and/or massive enthusiastic use today which are based upon a superior grasp of the old but often misunderstood Internet. The Internet is a large system of communicating powerful computers. It is not a loose congeries of "client server pairs". It is not even a system of "large servers serving the same stuff to many people in hopes of persuading some to send money to the owners of the servers".

Why are Publius and the many other similar/supporting projects so important right now? Because these projects, if completed, deployed, used, and defended, are powerful weapons in the war to keep the Net free. Everywhere private, individual, and native tribal use of computers and the Internet itself are under direct attack by forces whose declared objective is precisely to stop all free use of computers and the Internet.

Last week I had a good answer to the question:

"Jay, how can I help the Free Software Movement? I do not code, I do not know any program well enough to do documentation, but I want to do something."

I said "Come to the courthouse and stand beside a man whose offense is to point out that you can watch a DVD movie, on a disk that you own, on your own operating system, using whatever code you want."

This week and for all of this year I and you and we are again fortunate to have a good answer:

Learn about systems that protect and encourage free use of computers and the Internet. Most such systems require much testing by non-experts in order to increase their fire power, accuracy, defensibility, etc., in short their fitness for use in battle.