004 : What Did I Learnt at IFF

At the beginning of the month I attended the first Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia (which took place over the Circumvention Tech Festival last year) for a week in the sunny Valencia.

Thumbs up to Open Tech Fund and IREX teams for making this happen and bringing such a crowd of wide range of people connected to the online freedom fight space. I’m going to quite a few of these events during the year and it’s the only event with such an collaborative atmosphere. I find here participants taking more time to share what they are doing, and take the time to make sure other people in the room really understand them. I will come back next year for sure.

A first couple of things I learnt/noted/discussed that week.

• Signal’s case has been discussed a lot. It’s the go-to messaging app used by a lot of people in the sphere for safe mobile messaging (probably more than Telegram) , especially on safe mobile communications.
• It’s innocuous enough (as not clearly flagged as being used by targeted populations) and the name is quite easy to understand (I’ll signal you)
• In that extent, we should move away from making secure apps (communications, mobile phones etc) for at-risk populations only. Real life analogy of security tools for cars are seatbelts, which are available for everyone and not only activists. Security should be made available for anyone.
• Finally, Apple has been raised to the lord for fighting for the privacy of its consumers. Let’s not forget this security has initially been motivated by financial interests (to control any financial transaction / installed app on the device).
• I’ve discovered a safer Internet.

I will update this post as often as some other comments pop up in my brain.

Also some people I met / was happy to meet again.

• Freerk, which I spent a week writing a book in a previous life.
• Paige from Maidesafe for the crash test course on decentralized networks.
• Brian Conley from Storymaker, always nice to put a face on apps and projects I’ve been following for a while.
• The eQuali.ie team, which protects some of my websites
• Jun @ iilab, always nice to catchup with.