[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: XBMC; Why You Should Care About Security and Privacy

[Paul Nijjar]

This month's presentations are largely beginner-friendly.

Privacy is dead. You have nothing to hide if you have done nothing
wrong. Surely there is no cause to be clandestine about attending this
month's KWLUG meeting, right? How could learning about XBMC and/or the
need for privacy possibly be added to the dossier about you that is
stored on the hard drives of assorted three letter agencies around the
world?

This meeting might be worth the risk, in any case. We have two very
different presentations lined up this month. To make you anxious,
Sarah Harvey will talk to us about why we should care about security
and privacy. This is a version of the talk she presented for the
Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo, and the
scuttlebutt is that it was well received. 

Once you are good and paranoid about the state of digital
surveillance, it's time to kick back and relax as Charles McColm talks
to us about the XBMC media server. He will show us about how he set up
XBMC in his home, and how he set up streaming audio and video to
assorted devices in his home. Charles recently published a book on
this topic (available at 
http://www.packtpub.com/build-entertainment-system-with-XBMC/book ),
so he is quite familiar with the topic.

In addition to the presentations, Bob Jonkman will be holding an
informal keysigning party. Bob has posted some instructions to the
kwlug-disc list here: 
http://kwlug.org/pipermail/kwlug-disc_kwlug.org/2013-November/011140.html


In other news: the local Hackademy group is putting on a large number
of courses: introductory workshops on Wordpress, PHP, HTML, and SQL
databases. The courses do cost money, but scholarships may be
available. See http://hackademy.ca/events for more information. (The
first course is on Nov 3, so you will want to act fast if you want to
get into the intro to HTML and CSS course.) 

The Computer Science Club series of lectures concludes this month with
a seminar on Public Key Cryptography, which might be useful if you did
not understand anything I wrote about Bob Jonkman's keysigning party.
That will be held on Nov 5:
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/events/MC_3001_%28Comfy%29-2013-11-05-6:00PM


There is a LOT of other neat stuff happening this month, but much of
it is not directly related to free software. There's the NIGHTSHIFT
festival happening Saturday evening
(http://nightshift.alternativesjournal.ca/) which is featuring quite a
few makery things, a neat "Repair Cafe" happening on November 9
(https://www.facebook.com/events/214649022043297/) which is an
opportunity for people to fix stuff and get stuff fixed, and a lot
more. You can find a bunch of interesting events on the WatCamp
calendar: http://watcamp.com/calendar 


And that is it, except for tracking you and reporting your whereabouts
to various surveillance agencies. (I did include a Facebook link; does
that satisfy that requirement?) Oh, and I forgot to tell you where to
go on Monday: 

St John's Kitchen
97 Victoria Street North
Kitchener
(Corner of Victoria and Weber)

The meeting starts at 7pm. Set up starts around 6:30pm, and setup
helpers are greatly appreciated. 

You can park your privacy cars in the thrift store parking lot, and
your security bicycles along the side of the building. Maps and photos
of the location are available here: http://kwlug.org/node/709

- Paul

-- 
Paul Nijjar - http://pnijjar.freeshell.org
Does Canadian Blood Services Have an Image Problem?
http://youtu.be/vRfzDPKI9U0