It’s been quite a 2011 year already:

Anonymous and Lulzsec showing themselves as “defenders of the (net)people” , attacking and compromising FBI’s Infraguard of Atlanta, showing professional videos that could be featured in V for Vendetta. Grassroot DDoS on unfriendly/unfair internet companies such as Paypal. Secret services endorsing nearly openly the use of offensive hacks against each other and third party countries. Wikileaks being dismembered, with CCC firing one of its member on some “doubts” of his integrity because he’s starting OpenLeaks, and then the community nicely forking the effort to come up with the great Globaleaks; still with the regret that people couldn’t get it right with Wikipedia. Is it war out there?

Not enough? Bitcoin emerging as the de facto standard for anonymous, hard to trace, peer to peer electronic money on the net. Drug and grey-listed material online supermarket “SilkRoad” using only bitcoin for transactions. Plenty of undercover people showing up at hacker and security conferences to ask “innocuous” questions to so many people. Some “security” companies such as HBGary getting massively owned. Some others such as Endgame systems building cyber-offense software. Woooowwww…. That’s getting a bit downright scary these days. It looks like corporations, governments, secret agencies are getting into a big nuclear race without regard for progress and positive research happening on the net, thus eclipsing these behind a stinky and dodgy smoke wall.

But amidst all this crazyness, positive actions are continuing: so many more hackerspaces (Electrolab, LOOP, Fabelier), specifically plenty in Paris, enabling the community to go “up” and target more skilled/elite/precise topics (synthetic biology, network hacking workshops, 3d printing, …). Open source Bitcoin clients. Software Defined Radio hacks. Telecom & network research tools. Artificial Intelligence (2) and Machine Learning study groups.

Now what is needed is that this distributed effort continues: that people feel that they can start anything, feel justified to enter the hackerspaces and start any new project. And that comes only from your liberation: feel liberated to start what you love, and to open it to anyone. This open movement, and only this, will free us from the shady tactics of dark forces, and we’ll show we can make a better society without their creepy tactics.

So to get started, you can join the mailing list, come to events, share, do prototypes and code, propose workshop, get to know the community, ask for an account on the blog. Connect!