Tuesday 10 August 2010

Beta Testers Required



Katabasis has left the following comment on my EU Mass Surveillance Project post. It deserves to be given a higher profile. He requires beta testers. I know most, or even all, of you have greater understanding of computer technology than me, so could I ask you to consider his request.

Subrosa - thanks for drawing people's attention to this - in particular for the link to INDECT.

For anyone who is interested, the outline of Work Package 4 in the INDECT project - which covers:
"the development of key technologies that facilitate the building of an intelligence gathering system by combining and extending the current state-of-the-art methods in Natural Language Processing"

was leaked to Wikileaks some time ago. You can
download it here.

For anyone who doesn't know how these EU funded research projects work - each project is broken down into specific work areas ('Work Packages'), usually with one particular institution in the research consortium taking the lead on that WP if they have a specialisation in that area (in this case, the University of York - bastards).

This document does not give the final specification to INDECT - the project is still ongoing and this is simply unknowable until it comes to an end. However the above document is very detailed and gives great insight into INDECT's methodology - sufficiently so that it is possible to counter it.

Sorry to use your blog as an advertising platform for this Subrosa - however there's no other way to get this information about:

For anyone interested I am working on two applications that will provide the basis for beginning an active resistance to this kind of passive surveillance.

The first - which is almost ready for beta testing and will be available within a few weeks at the domain: censoring.me - I still need beta testers however. The application is a reporting mechanism for people to report when they have been censored online; the primary targets are mainstream news websites and blogs run by people who hold high office (MPs and above). Any help testing would be appreciated; I pretty much have the technical side in the bag but really need to tune the user interface and work out the specific functions the site will offer.

The second is a very in depth piece of computer science. I have been submitting it as a research proposal to several universities and have been getting a lot of interest. I can't share many details of it openly because it is a novel idea that hasn't been capitalised on yet. If I can get this application working as a prototype I can expand its capabilities to provide a distributed piece of software that will enable its users to run active interference on any attempts - such as INDECT to passively monitor them. I'm happy to share the proposal with anyone interested in working on it with me - *please note* - I am actively seeking funding for this project and aim to do so (if I am persistent) within a year. Also I'd ask anyone who reads it to give me a promise of confidentiality until a prototype application is ready to roll.

Anyone who is interested in either of these, please contact me on:

katabaticwinds AT gmail[NO SPAM] DOT com

^ remember to removed the [NO SPAM] from the email addy above (email farming spiders are continually improving).


4 comments:

Witterings from Witney said...

Have commented and posted on my own.

See what you think of the idea.....

subrosa said...

On my way WFW.

johnson said...

Beta testing is the tough part of testing and for getting expertise in it,you can get the help from online software testing tools.
-online testing

subrosa said...

Thank you John. I'm sure Katabasis has read your comment.

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