Course Overview
Dates, Time & Location
- Thursdays @ 6-7:30pm
- No class on Canada Day (July 1st)
- 10 Summer St., St. Catharines, Ontario
- Past Lectures Overview
- FreeSkool Files
- Additional Resources & Readings
What is FreeSkool?
As part of the OPIRG St. Catharines FreeSkool. I’ve been teaching a course on basic digital rights and hacktivism. FreeSkool is best described by someone other than me:
The opirg freeskool is a project that is designed to challenge the hierarchical and institutional way learning is primarily conducted in our community. We reject the notion that only some kinds of knowledges are valuable, or that only certain people are ‘accredited’ enough to share information. We embrace radical accessibility, critical consciousness, and student-centred learning.
As an organization committed to the relationships between research, education and action we urge all participants – teachers and students – to think about how learning and skill/knowledge-sharing without borders will help us foster a more just community.
If you are interested in enrolling in a course, please contact Brian at opirg.freeskool@gmail.com. In order to participate enrollment IS NOT required, but it will help each teachers to prepare for their course.
All the courses are running out of our community infoshop, located at 10 summer street, unless otherwise noted.1
Course Outline
The speed at which the internet became intertwined with our lives, our infrastructure, and our planet hasn’t allowed for public knowledge and legislation to keep up. We’re at a point now where mass surveillance and censorship isn’t Orwellian fiction but reality. The entertainment industry is moving towards implementing Digital Rights Management schemes that reduce your purchases to rentals. We’re losing the ability to take the things we buy and change them, manipulate them, and learn from them without being criminals. We’re on the brink of a virtual “data pollution” problem as we pump more and more personal information into the hands of companies that have no legal requirement to manage it safely or allow us to take it back.
The goal of this course is to inform at a higher level, and recommend solutions or techniques that are accessible to the average person. Ultimately awareness is the primary objective.
The word hacker has been sullied by popular culture to the point where the original meaning is lost. An unfortunate evolution of language that can’t be undone at this point. Hacktivism is a prime example of where fear can be replaced with support. Groups like the Cult of the Dead Cow’s Hacktivismo arm work to develop tools that can be used by people in countries like China to talk freely without fear of Government intervention. During the student protests in Iran, hacktivists were able to set up secure anonymous relays to let repressed citizens reach out to the world via Twitter and other websites blocked by the Government.
Ideally I’d like to cover a smattering of topics:
- Censorship, Privacy and Anonymity
- Hacktivism (Wikileaks , the EFF , etc)
- Free Software (Free as in freedom, not in the pricetag sense)
- Digital Rights Management (the defective by design movement)
- Maker culture (Recycling technology, repurposing it, DIY hackerspaces)
Course Format
- Minimal slides each week. I’m going to be posting the slides here, but they’re not going to be especially useful on their own. In the spirit of FreeSkool I’ve been doing minimal slides to keep me on track and offering more of the content via spoken word and the blackboard.
- InfoShop Box. At the OPIRG Downtown InfoShop you can find boxes underneath the Chalk Board for each FreeSkool course. I’ll be putting hardcopies of the slides as well as some interesting readings & resources in there. Feel free to photocopy them, but please leave the originals in the box.
- Participant guided. If you have ideas or content requests let me know. Jump in with questions!
- Zero-assumed Knowledge. I’m doing my best to keep this interesting and high level. Things that average people can expect to do, no computer science knowledge needed!
- “In-class” projects. I have some ideas for some informal projects we can undertake during class. Bootable encrypted USB Keys, key signings, linux installs, etc.
- License. The course content that is produced by myself will be licensed under the Creative Commons license unless otherwise noted.
- Mandatory fun! I’m easy going and we should be enjoying ourselves above all else.
Disclaimers
- Technical Disclaimer: I’m a hobbyist infosec nerd. I do not claim to be an expert on anything, but in theme with FreeSkool I think I have knowledge worth sharing and would love to learn more in turn. The content of the course (so far anyway) has been geared towards a non-technical crowd and thus might have glazed over some corner cases. Above all I’m trying to inspire the idea that nothing is ever 100% secure. You need to question things for yourself and remember there are always caveats. Feel free to contact me with any glaring inaccuracies so that I may fix them!
- Legal Disclaimer: You won’t learn anything illegal, but knowledge is dangerous when handled improperly. You’re ultimately responsible for your own actions, not me.
1 Taken from the Brock OPIRG FreeSkool page
Transmissions:
