We’re under way at the Internet Freedom Hack and we have several teams and projects in each city. All of these teams are open to new participants, and have plenty to do, so if you couldn’t make it yesterday but are still thinking about turning up today, we’d love to see you!

Brisbane projects under way

  • Infinite Monkeys. Combating fake news by analysing where it came from. Find out the genesis of an idea by finding copy-pasted or very similar wording between different online news articles. A browser add-on could show the user a map of where information came from, and the team could determine how trustworthy each source is.

  • Charlie. Charlie sees a price for a flight. It can be a different price to what other people see. And no matter what he does, he might never see a lower price. Someone else might see a different price. Airlines’ pricing algorithms are a notorious black box. This project aims to shine some light on them.

  • Phone Case. Do you think the datenkrakens of the world are listening to you? Or do you just want to be certain that no malware can ever record your conversations? The Phone Case team aims to build a phone case that prevents your microphone from hearing what you say.

  • Decentralised Private Instant Messaging (DPIM). You may have seen how Telegram recently got blocked in Russia and Syria. DPIM aims to make it impossible to be blocked by being decentralised and private. All the participants on the network are unlinkable.

Melbourne projects under way

  • Limited Information Tetration Encryption (Lite). Encryption that is 100% unbreakable, it involves quantum computing and tetration.

  • AuData. AuData is a protocol to help track the origin of a piece of information. If an advertiser has your number, you can track where they got it from. AuData by itself is not enough, we need legislation to make sure the protocol is used.

  • eHealth record opt-out campaign. Preparation for the forthcoming 3 month opt-out window for the government’s My Health Record database. The purpose is to develop campaign materials and a website to demo what an opt-out campaign website could look like and help bring people on board as a starting point for building a campaign.

  • FaceWhatever. People are not aware of what information they’re leaking to Facebook or what can be inferred from it. FaceWhatever is an offline quiz where you can test what you think Facebook knows about you and find out what Facebook really knows.

Ideas on standby

These ideas are on standby for now because the people who pitched them didn’t get the team they wanted. They have joined other teams in Brisbane, but we think these are great ideas that could still start up if people want – in either city.

  • Incognito on Steroids. Many people believe that when they enable private/incognito mode on their browser, their web browsing can’t be tracked. This is not true. They can be “fingerprinted” based on their connection and browser identity (see also: Panopticlick). The Incognito on Steroids project aims to build a browser extension that obfuscates your identity by obfuscating your digital fingerprint.

  • Anti-IRA. The Internet Research Agency (IRA) were a very active producer and distributor of misinformation and propaganda who have recently been disallowed by Facebook. The Anti-IRA team aims to analyse connections between social media accounts and build a graph of “who knows who” in the same way as the social media companies themselves can, but make this data publicly available and easy to analyse.

Posted by Robin