The Circle of HOPE: A Hacker's Dozen
July 20th - 22nd
New York City
On Thursday before the conference I met up with Alex Wykoff, who some of the community may know from his Twitch TV I2P tutorials he has been doing every Friday evening at 9:30 CST here: https://www.twitch.tv/alex_the_designer
Alex was at HOPE in 2010, when zzz was invited to talk about I2P during Adrain Hong's talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADiZ32CkEao We talked about I2P's content problem and lack of funding, and also about raising the profile of I2P.
On Friday, I introduced Alex to str4d and we discussed improving our documentation for researchers among other things. The following day we met with Taylor who works on Tor Private Tabs at Brave and discussed how, if at all, there could be I2P integration. We also discussed monetizing strategies for I2P.
On Sunday, after brunch with Alex and str4d, I was introduced to members of Secure Drop and Freedom of the Press by a friend at EFF. There was discussion about the visibility of I2P in the privacy community and how to improve it. In the next few weeks I will be discussing more of these suggestions with our team and with the community.
Some takeaways from the weekend were that we need to focus on integration with other privacy and security projects. Just like the I2P network where every user is a relay and every relay makes the network stronger, we who are working on censorship resistant and anonymizing technologies need to work together to improve the safety of our tools and consider where one may do a better job given a specific use case. We need to be sharing ideas and supporting each others work in order to provide the best usability and security for our users.
I2P needs to - and will - continue to focus on outreach, training, translations, and improving access for less tech savvy people who may need secure communication options. We are grateful to be working with Ura Design on usability testing and look forward to sharing these results and working on any improvements based on their recommendations. We are hoping to move forward with Ura in the Autumn to make recommendations on our router console. I am also working with activists in Cairo to better understand their needs and to see where I2P could be part of a solution.
Thank you to everyone who joined me for food and conversation!
Sadie
The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it. - John Perry Barlow