Applications are now open for the 2012 Google Policy Fellowship!
The Google Policy Fellowship program was inspired by Google's Summer of Code with a public policy twist. The Google Policy Fellowship program offers undergraduate, graduate, and law students interested in Internet and technology policy the opportunity to spend the summer contributing to the public dialogue on these issues, and exploring future academic and professional interests.
On a nice and sunny, though windy day, we climbed the lookout tower on Pohorje with our antennas and set up two test links. One, 42 km long one to a church on the hill Wolfgangi in Austria where Robert OE6RKE set up antennas towards Pohorje. We have established the link successfully, reaching real throughput up to 35 Mbps, further motivating us for a permanent installation of this link. Including today and on the previous testing we have three tested links with Austria and will be setting up them permanently soon.
Furthermore, a test link was established to our new backbone extension in Haloze, where Ubiquiti AirMax Omni antenna is used for the first time in our network. It performs very well indeed.
More results from this testing can be found here.
Between 27th and 30th December 2011 a traditional Chaos Communication Congress is taking place in Berlin. An international meeting of hackers with a wide range of lectures and workshops of technical and political nature. One of the workshops will be also on topic of free (open) network architectures and wlan slovenija network will also be presented there, together with our nodewatcher system which helps deploying such networks. In our name it will be presented by Aaron from Austrian network FunkFeuer. Thank you! And thanks also to Moritz from torservers project for organizing this workshop.
The last day and most interesting, challenging day in Kyrgyzstan. In early morning, I have returned back to the Manas university, modified the test network wlan slovenija and took part on a quick coffee meeting with the adviser of president Atambayev, rector of Manas university, government institutions representatives, head of telecommunication agency and a few other Kyrgyz IT forum speakers, where I have in a few words presented my topics for the forum.
Kyrgyz IT forum had about five topic groups, one of which was Telecommunications, also including my two presentations. Firstly, a company Beeline presented their products and 3G devices. Although the prices of their services and charging per transferred data do not make such access affordable, their market is rapidly expanding.
My first today presentation was titled ...
Bishkek welcomed me to the new day with warmer -15 degrees and a range of interesting activities for the day. Before the press conference for Kyrgyz IT forum, I have managed to visit The Historical Museum with collections ranging from nomadic ancestors to the revolution of 2010, in memory of all who lost their life, definitely putting every visitor to the real ground. The museum itself is a nice stone and marble building, albeit cold in the winter, with bronze statues from soviet times, Marx, Engels and Lenin being very well represented. The entrance offers an super view on the main – Ala-Too square with the parliament and the national flag with a permanent guard.
In the press conference...
Bishkek, the city of a variety of races, low buildings with rectangular avenues, a surprising amount of trees and very kind people, has awaited me with freezing -22 degrees Celsius. The travel from Ljubljana via Istanbul to Bishkek has been surprisingly fast, as I was occupied by preparing presentations for Kyrgyz IT forum, further improved by mouthwatering Turkish airplane food, the mood tampered a bit later by more then an hour long wait for visa and the search for luggage by employing some gestured Russian.
Kyrgyzstan is...
wlan slovenija network will be presented by Luka Mustafa on 22th December on Kyrgyz information technology forum (KIT) organized by Civil Initiative on Internet Policy in Kyrgyzstan. Participants will learn about wlan slovenija history, used technologies, best practices and through real life examples discover how community established networks bridge the digital divide.
You probably know that in USA a new legislation has been put into the consideration. It is called SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and its proponents say it protects the intellectual property market, including the resultant revenue and jobs, and is necessary to bolster enforcement of copyright laws especially against foreign websites. But on the other hand the legislation restricts the free flow of information, negates the safe harbor protection provided in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, requires websites to comply without verification or judicial intervention and even introduces DNS (Domain Name System) filtering, which would effectively break Internet into separate regional networks.
Based on this issues, which would negatively influence the operation and nature of Internet, civil society and human rights groups have prepared a letter urging Congress to reject the Stop Online Piracy Act. Among signatories is also wlan slovenija open wireless network.
More about the letter on Access website.
On 22th and 23th October 2011 there was Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit in Mountain View, California. Google Summer of Code is Google's program for encouraging students to work on open-source projects during their summer break. Because this year wlan slovenija network participated in this program for the second time, we decided to participate also in this summit and get to know other mentors, other open-source projects and organizations, exchange our experiences, learn something new, and improve our connections and collaborations with others.
ImageFlasher is a GSoC 2011 project that aims at building a GUI flasher tool. This is collaborative effort between wlan slovenija and Freifunk wireless networks. This project is being mentored by Mitar. The main objective of the project is to make the process of flashing simpler by offering a step-by-step GUI that requires only minimal technical knowledge. The design document of project is available on the development wiki. We encourage any comments or suggestions from the community.
Youngsters on the Air, a summer camp intended for young HAM (radio amateur) operators from all around Europe was held in Campina, Romania, from 27th July to 3rd August. HAM operators Musti – S56MC and Gregor – S53SL that are also participating in wlan slovenija network took part in this week long opportunity to present ideas, learn and get to know people, cultures and HAM stuff.
The concept of wlan slovenija was introduced through a presentation Wireless mesh networks for community, ham and emergency use, that boasted the idea of connecting versatile networks in a common system, that is decentralized, unmanaged and organic, therefore likely to be operable also in emergency situations and can then be used by all parties.
As a result of wireless link testing day, a 41 km long link between Sveti Urban above Maribor and Slatina in Haloze has been successfully established. Both sides boast beautiful painted antenna dishes while they provide Internet access for a HAM radio operator in Slatina and his SID Monitor for VLF frequencies, set up in cooperation with Stanford Solar Center.
We have participated at Slobodni Festival 2011 in Čakovec, Croatia, presented the notion to wirelessly connect Slovenia and Croatia and collaborated in debates on other projects. Our idea was selected as the best one, hence we have further developed it with other participants over two days and established that an active partner in Croatia is required to create the link and buld/expand a wlan slovenija like network in Croatia.
