Here’s an archive of all TA3M Montreal events in 2013 and 2014:
August 18th
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Speakers: Open*
Public record databases empower citizens and cut through otherwise unnecessary bureaucracy. Dozens of federal and provincial databases scatter the Canadian net and can be a powerful tool for research and activism. This monday’s TA3M we will showcase various public record databases – chosen and presented by you. Please come with your favourite governmental databases in pocket ;) Friends from http://opennorth.ca/ will join and lead some of the discussions.
July 21st
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Speakers: Sirocco Blacksmith*
An identity is important to give credibility to your activism, but it should not trace back to you. Anonymizing your IP and encrypting your data is not enough; this might actually trigger alarms and attract more attention. This presentation proposes steps to ensure your identity is not traceable and not too suspicious.
* Sirocco Blacksmith is a name that was generated randomly to demonstrate the importance of anonymity. The person behind this identity is a programmer who learned from free software and the members of this community. He sometimes participates by giving presentations and organizing events about free software in Montreal. He currently works in a startup to make security more accessible to web developers.
Une identité est importante pour conférer de la crédibilité à votre activisme mais elle ne devrait pas être retraçable à vous. Anonymiser votre IP et chiffrer vos données ne sont pas suffisants; ceci pourrait en fait déclencher des alarmes et attirer plus d’attention. Cette présentation propose une démarche pour assurer que votre identité n’est pas retraçable ni trop douteuse.
* Sirrocco Blacksmith est un nom généré aléatoirement pour démontrer l’importance de l’anonymat. La personne derrière cette identité est un programmeur qui a appris par les logiciels libres et les membres de cette communauté. Il participe parfois en donnant des présentations et en organisant des événements concernant les logiciels libres à Montréal. Il travaille présentement dans une start-up pour rendre la sécurité plus accessible aux développeurs web.
June 16th
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Speakers: Marc Laporte
Tiki Suite is a selection of Free / Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) server, web, mobile and desktop apps with a concerted effort for greater interoperability, security and adaptability, which is aimed at small & medium-sized organizations
This month’s TA3M will be dedicated to discussing the challenges and problems Tiki Suite is addressing through its latest release as a software suite
April 24th
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
For several years now, the holy grail of a secure group chat protocol revolved around ways to implement OTR in a multi-party chat room scenario. The mathematical complexity and computational requirements have kept this issue out of reach till now. eQualit.ie and Cryptocat have joined forces to create the first specifications for mpCAT – an OTR like protocol for multi-party chat. Next week, a team of renowned cryptographers will be in town to review and make recommendations on the initial draft.
This week’s TA3M will be dedicated to presenting the work on this issue to date, discussing problems and challenges moving forward. We invite everyone interested in provable cryptography, OTR, secure chat, Cryptocat, TextSecure and those who like the idea of Montreal becoming an important hub for crypto in 2014. Tell your friends, tell your profs, don’t miss this one!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging
https://github.com/cryptocat/cryptocat/wiki/mpOTR-Project-Plan
March 17
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Program: Leap.se
Like free speech, the right to whisper is a necessary precondition for a free society. Without it, civil society and political freedom become impossible. As the importance of digital communication for civic participation increases, so does the importance of the ability to digitally whisper.
This Monday, March 17th, come hear Micah talk about the LEAP project (https://leap.se) a non-profit dedicated to giving all Internet users access to secure end-to-end communication tools that are both reliable, easy to use and widely available. Learn and inquire about why they are doing it, the challenges and the current state of their VPN and email services.
Some media on the project: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/leap_email.php
Speakers: Micah
February 17
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Program: Reversing the panopticon
The panopticon is an institutional design whereby authorities can watch any subject with a minimum of effort. A reverse panopticon makes it possible to better track the actions of those in positions of authority.
David Mason will discuss a system designed to collect semantic content and link it to documents as they’re browsed. For example, it can determine connections between people mentioned on a current page – those involved in politics, big business or crime. Content can be collected and annotated through automated crawling or by a user browsing their topic of interest. An investigative journalist can easily edit and annotate semantic links of people and their association as they follow a line of inquiry. General questions can be asked from the repository of all the links they visited, such as ‘politician’ and ‘Saguenay’. The tool’s flexible design and open source nature could allow anyone to participate in creating annotators and add meaning, connections to content. The system can support individual or federated instances.
Speakers: David Mason
January 20
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Program:
This month’s TA3M in Montreal will be in the format of a group share and discovery about authentication and encryption. We’re calling it an Auth Camp, for short. Folks interested in strengthening online trust and hardening access controls should bring their devices (USB keys, crypto dongles, biometric devices, smartcards, etc.). Those that know a thing or two about such topics already are very welcome to share their knowledge and share best practices with beginners and experts.
Speakers: Fabian Rodriguez and Mallory Knodel
December 16
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Program:
The Jack of All Trade Universe’s mission is to provide a robust platform of value exchange for the individual while simultaneously promoting community-centered projects through a direct democracy-inspired decision-making model. Through a community-generated complementary currency, JoatU can use the power of a community-supported marketplace as the backing for a values-based currency for which to generate wealth within that very same community. This can later be grown, open-sourced, and forked into a decentralized self-supporting cryptocurrency. Simultaneously, the direct democracy-inspired decision-making model can be used to allow for communities to begin testing the grounds of self-governance.
Speakers: Jamie Klinger
November 18
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Program:
The Syme project is an experimental social network that aims at bringing more privacy and security to online communication through end-to-end encryption. Syme’s mission is to provide an accessible, private and secure sharing environment that serves as an alternative to Facebook groups or email.
The Syme team will present at TA3M Montreal on the need for accessible and user-friendly encryption tools. They will explain their approach to filling this need, and discuss the strengths, limitations and challenges associated with such a project.
Speakers: Jonathan (@jonhershon), Louis (@louismullie), Chris (@chris_marois), from Syme (@symeapp)
October 21
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Program:
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The Internet Governance Forum is a multi-stakeholder summit in its eighth year. It’s being held this week in Bali, Indonesia and the theme is “Building Bridges – Enhancing Multi-stakeholder Cooperation for Growth and Sustainable Development.” What’s important about the IGF is the way it brings civil society, governments and the private sector to the same table to talk about global governance of the internet. Mallory Knodel from the Association for Progressive Communications will be talking about the most interesting topics up for discussion at this year’s event and how individuals and organisations can participate online.
Speakers: @malloryknodel
September 16
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Program: We welcome two speakers to share their experience and thoughts regarding video games that mobilise social action and civic participation, as well as going beyond fun to understand play as a means to address our cultural crisis of engagement.
Speakers:
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Eric Gordon http://engagementgamelab.org– studies civic media, mediated cities and playful engagement. He is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and he is an associate professor in the department of Visual and Media Arts at Emerson College where he focuses on the design and research of digital games and social software that foster local civic engagement. He is the co-author of a new book about location-based media called Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (Blackwell Publishing, 2011) and the author of The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google (Dartmouth, 2010).
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Matthieu Rheaume http://metacollabmontreal.com – is cofounder of MOBmontréal and founder of Métacollab Montréal, a human process design R&D lab, where he and others experiment with the evolution of creative facilitation in trans-disciplinary environments. His studies of communications, developmental psychology and cultural sociology have come to blend with his experience as a video-game designer, creative director, business strategist, youth empowerment agent and social artist to awaken within him a more organic world view. His mission is now to contribute to the construction of this growingly global culture by facilitating immersive learning experiences in holistic humanis
We will set-up some tablets and laptops for a little (social) gaming before and after RSVP: https://ta3mmontreal.eventbrite.com/
August 19
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Program:
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Summer Lightning madness! Because it’s August, we’re going to give the two-speaker format a little summer vacation and make this a Lightning Talk Special. All ideas and proposals are welcome and we look forward to wherever the discussion takes us.
Speakers: You! Us!
July 15
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Program:
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[anarcat] A 25-30 minutes talk about the mass surveillance around the globe especially conducted by the NSA with its PRISM program. We should all be concern on the extent of this data collection and the importance of privacy in our society.
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[Jacob Cook] A 10-15 minutes talk on arkOS. A platform for easily managing and running server software, initially geared for the Raspberry Pi. It gives end users the ability to “decentralize” their cloud data, and will allow them to easily host webapps, email, chat accounts and much more from the security of their own home. The project’s homepage is at arkos.io.
This is of course followed by questions, open discussions and some lightning talks as well if anyone jumps in! :)
Speakers: anarcat, Jacob Cook
June 17
Location: Station C (Google map)
Time: 18h00 to 20h30+
Language: English and/et Français
Program:
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A review of Internet filtering and censorship in Iran during the 2013 June elections
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An overview of new circumvention and obfuscation technologies, including Flash Proxies and Pluggable transports
Presentations: Censorship circumvention with pluggable transports
Speakers: asl19.org, vmon