[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Emulating the Tor Network (Oct 2016)

[Paul Nijjar]

Do you have some Internets kicking around? They seem to be pretty
common. Somebody says something witty and/or insightful online, and
all of a sudden other people are like "You win an Internet today!". As
someone who takes great pains never to say witty or insightful things,
I don't have any extra Internets of my own. It's just as well, I
guess. Don't they take up a lot of storage space? I can't even handle
the shared Internet I have access to now. What would I do with
additional ones? 

Fortunately for us, Nik Unger has some extra Internets and enough
imagination to put them to good use. As a grad student at the
University of Waterloo, he is using Linux to emulate the entire Tor
network at scale. (Tor, as you may recall, is "The Onion Router",
which is used to implement anonymized network communication.) I guess
the Tor Internet is smaller than the real Internet, but that still
sounds like a lot of emulation. How does Nik do it? Why does he do it?
Why does he use the Linux kernel to do it?  We will find out at this
month's KWLUG talk.

There is a lot of other events happening this month! Here are a few
that may be of interest.

Do you use free software? Would you like to give back? Andrew Cant
would like to turn you into a Rubyhead who makes contributions back to
the greater Ruby community, mentoring members of the group through the
free software contribution process. The inaugural event is Tuesday,
October 18. Although I expect that some familiarity with the Ruby
ecosystem would be helpful, I am guessing you do not need to be a Ruby
expert to be useful. Learn more and sign up here:
https://www.meetup.com/kw-ruby-on-rails/events/234273702/

Do you use Wikipedia? Would you like to give back? The Hive WR and the
KPL are holding a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon to promote female editorship.
This event is being held on Thursday, Oct 13 at the Central library.
Register for the edit-a-thon here: http://www.kpl.org/guestlibrarian

Do you support nonprofits, small businesses or other small groups of
computer users? Would you like to talk about it? The
Kitchener-Waterloo NetSquared Group's next meeting is all about
promoting open source within such organizations. This meeting will be
held on October 17, and you can find out more information here:
http://www.meetup.com/NetSquared-Kitchener-Waterloo/events/233388573/
. (Disclaimer: I have ended up organizing this group. On the bright
side, that means I can tell you that we don't really care whether you
RSVP on Meetup, so long as you show up.) 

Do you like laptops? Would you like to help refurbish them? After a
summer+September hiatus, our monthly(?) laptop rescue missions are
resuming. The next one will be held on Saturday, Oct 22 from
approximately 4-8pm, at Computer Recycling. Contact me offlist if you
would like to participate. (Do I really need to disclaimer this one?)

Do you like Bitcoins? Would you like to watch a movie about them? CIGI
is showing a Bitcoin movie called "The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin" on
Thursday, October 20. You can RSVP here:
https://www.cigionline.org/events/cigi-cinema-series-rise-and-rise-of-bitcoin

Do you like conferences? Seneca College in Toronto puts on the FSOSS
conference every year in Toronto, and it is coming up. It is in
Toronto and it is not that cheap (for regular humans: $75 until Oct 3,
then $150 after) but people on the kwlug-disc list seem excited about
it? In any case, it is running on October 27 and 28, and you can
register here: http://cdot.fsoss.ca/ . (They are looking for
presenters as well.) 

Do you like meeting announcements to eventually end? How about we
tell you where to go on Monday: 

St John's Kitchen
97 Victoria Street North
(at Weber)
Kitchener

Find maps and photos at http://kwlug.org/sjk . The meeting starts at
7pm; setup starts at 6:30pm or so (and helpers are always appreciated). 

- Paul 

-- 
Electoral reform submission deadline: Oct 7
http://canada.ca/democracy to make a submission.