We invite you to participate at the 27th Chaos Communication Congress, focused on advancing the state of the art in hacking, making, and new perspectives on politics and privacy in the information age. Proposals of about 300 words for talks lasting either 30 or 45 minutes should be sent to our Pentabarf submission system by October 9, 2010. A notice of acceptance or decline will be sent out until November 9, 2010 by e-mail.

The Chaos Communication Congress is an annual meeting of the international hacker scene, organized by the Chaos Computer Club. The congress features a variety of lectures and workshops on technical and political issues. The theme and details of the 27th congress can be found here.

Submission deadline: Saturday, October 9, 2010.

Anyway, find a nice public proxy server is difficult. And once you got it, it’s possible that it will gone away very soon. So it’s a good idea to set up your own. And it will be even better if you can have it FOR FREE

This video tutorial by Digital Inspiration, shows you how to create a free proxy server with Google App Engine. In short, App Engine is a Google’s service that let you run a computer code on its server, for free. So we just put a code for proxy service into our App Engine space, and we will got our very own personal proxy server.

Spud is the name for the world’s lowest power consuming web server that runs on raw potato power. That’s right Spud uses potatoes for power, about 5-6 of them and serving around 0.2 hits/sec, which means it will not survive any kind of digg effect unless it uses toothpicks

The instructions for making one are here. It uses Microchip PIC16F876 as a CPU.

via !space mailing list

Kannel is a compact and very powerful open source WAP and SMS gateway, used widely across the globe both for serving trillions of short messages (SMS), WAP Push service indications and mobile internet connectivity.

Kannel works on Linux free software platform.

Universal design refers to a broad-spectrum solution that produces buildings, products and environments that are usable and effective for everyone, not just people with disabilities.

It emerged from “barrier-free” or “accessible design” and “assistive technology” and recognizes the importance of how things look. For example, while built up handles are a way to make utensils more usable for people with gripping limitations, some companies introduced larger, easy to grip and attractive handles as feature of mass produced utensils. They appeal to a wide range of consumers.

In the Web context, W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) works with organizations around the world to develop strategies, guidelines, and resources to help make the Web accessible to people with disabilities. BBC’s Future Media Standard & Guidelines also provide comprehensive guidelines to accessibility (designed for their websites, but applicable to yours as well).

Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University outlines the principles of universal design, these principles are broader than those of accessible design:

The authors, a working group of architects, product designers, engineers and environmental design researchers, collaborated to establish the following Principles of Universal Design to guide a wide range of design disciplines including environments, products, and communications.

1. Equitable use
2. Flexibility in use
3. Simple and |intuitive
4. Perceptible information
5. Tolerance for error
6. Low physical effort
7. Size and space for approach and use

Read more on Wikipedia for universal design and web accessibility.

Sahana is a Free and Open Source Disaster Management system. It is a web based collaboration tool that addresses the common coordination problems during a disaster from finding missing people, managing aid, managing volunteers, tracking camps effectively between Government groups, the civil society (NGOs) and the victims themselves.

Sahana has been selected as a finalist in the SourceForge 2009 Community Choice Awards in the Best Project for Government section. Development of Sahana is supported by Lanka Software Foundation in Sri Lanka.

It has been deployed in many places and situations, including Sri Lanka (tsunami 2005), Pakistan (quake 2005), Philippines (mudslide 2006), Indonesia (quake 2006), and New York City (pre-deployed for coastal storm plan 2007-08).

Open Mobile Consortium reviews GeoChat and JavaROSA:

GeoChat is a flexible open source group communications technology that lets team members interact to maintain shared geospatial awareness of who is doing what where — over any device, on any platform, over any network. GeoChat allows you and your team to stay in touch one another in a variety of ways: over SMS, over email, and on the surface of a map in a web browser.

Examples of GeoChat applications are disease surveillance and community healthcare, with possibility to be used in diaster relief as well (provided that mobile phone network is still working, or being ad-hoc-ly setted up on the site). There’re already several sites in Mekong sub-region that deployed GeoChat for disease surveillance, including Mukdahan-Savannakhet (Thailand-Laos) border area. Technical works on two pilot sites are supported by Mekong Basin Disease Surveillance (MBDS), InSTEDD, and Opendream. InSTEDD also houses an R&D lab in Phnom Penh for regional developments.

Apart from field communications, data collection is essential for fieldwork. JavaROSA, a project of OpenROSA, is an open-source platform for data collection on mobile devices. It is based on the W3C’s XForms standard.

JavaROSA has been designed for a wide and ever increasing variety of applications including taking survey data, following disease management, guiding health workers through treatment protocols at point of care, and collection of longitudinal medical records. JavaROSA’s framework architecture is flexible and modular, allowing the development of wholly new applications with minimal new code.

JavaROSA is being used in a project that support community health workers with their data collection tasks during home visits with patients.

The digital archive aims to build an online collection of historical documents, books, photos, publications and personal memoirs that is open to the public in order to build a better understanding of Malaysia’s recent political history, contributing towards a healthy and informed discussion of Malaysia’s political future.

While there’re many national archives which collect lots of historical documents, there’re very few that focus on recent history, say, in the range of 30 years time. National archives or commercial archives run by mainstream media also often neglect materials from grassroots movements. Access to these recent histories of local communities are in many aspects essential to civil society development, nationally and regionally. Citizen journalists will also benefit from availability of such documents for their investigative news reporting.

Civil society organizations could use ICT to archive their materials in a systematic way and made them accessible to the public, enhance the understanding about the issues they concerned.

From table of contents: introduction, radio physics, network design, antennas & transmissions lines, networking hardware, security & monitoring, solar power, building an outdoor node, troubleshooting, economic sustainability, with 9 case studies, and 5 appendices. You have everything here to start your own community wireless network.

More free materials on wireless network can be found on WirelessU.