Day 1 at CUWiN Summit May 18
Our first day at the Loyola campus in Maryland was kind of seemingless. We enjoyed our breakfast at the Marriot with some fresh waffles. Afterwards we headed over to the campus, which we found easily. Only thing to mention here are the ducks that seem to mark their territory by shitting around the lake near the CCI site. However we headed over and were cordially received by Faith and Cecille. We picked up our name tags and went over to see who was already there. We hooked up with 2 guys called Bogdan and Nemanja from BGWireless in Serbia. Amazingly we never had any contact with them before. We had to travel over 7000km to do this. 
They gave us a short intro in their current network and their philosophy which is mostly fixed on team-play. We were impressed what technically impressive network they have built. They run “only” 35 nodes but they are mostly interconnected with high-capacity links which means they have about 13 Megabytes(!) per second transfer rates in their network.
Some hours later also Ramon and Jordi from guifi.net finally arrived after an over 30h flight from Barcelona. Normally they would have arrived yesterday evening as we did. But they were lucky to catch a flight via Atlanta from Barcelona where their original plane could not depart because of some technical problems. So they had to wait for a machine coming over from Rome. As this caused several hours of delay they weren’t able to catch any connection to Baltimore on the same day any more. As we had informations how big their network was we needed to get confirmation on that - and, yes they really have over 2000 nodes. They’re going the KISS way of freenetworking. Resulting in partners in the commercial sector who sell their packages (Router, Antenna, T-Shirt). Great work indeed.
At the same time the Commons Strategy Workshop was held with kc from CAIDA. As i was very interested in this project it was great to have all the people involved in this project there. There were several groups formed according to their topics. We joined the group Peering and Privacy which we thought would be most beneficial to be participating in. There was also Steve Mansour from Canada, Josh from CUWiN and Daniel from CUWiN which i remember. We held some talks about the current problems with data retention laws coming up in Europe. Mostly i remember that we should keep out privacy issues from the Peering Agreement itself because peering agreements are about the interconnection. I’m not so sure if this is the case, but agree that it comes to misunderstandings between providers and community networks here. Therefor i would suggest to choose another name like Community Connection Agreement which covers this topics and probably reference to the Pico Peering Agreement in it. Just a first thought.
After our small workgroup discussions we dropped in the big round where Steve was presenting our talks. I guess everyone was most amused about the Dutch “Anti-Data-Retention demonstration” which is already kind of a legend in Europe.
However kc’s talk caused most controversational positions. As far as i remember there was one big point in there which can be given back as like Privacy in the 21st century where there were some voices saying something like “As everyone gives his data to Google, flickr, co. we should think about privacy in our century” - i hope i don’t lay any unappropriate words in someones mouth here. My oppinion is that it’s something absolutely different if someone is registering for a Google Account and therefor should know that this data will be used in some way for profit of Google too and if we’re logging data from our networks and provide researchers with them. Even if the user knows about it, it would be hard to make them agree on that. So i suggested to think about a transparent entity which can be placed between the researchers and the network providing this data. To achieve faster processing in this entity it would be necessary to have standardized formats for the anonymous or aggregated data. As kc mentioned there is already a proposal on that out there. I’ve looked at the CAIDA homepage, but couldn’t find any details on this, if someone could provide me with these i would be very happy.
Another point was privacy and people who think that everyone who is not encrypting his mails, etc. is a fool himself - because the internet is insecure. I tried to point out why the postcard comparison here is not sufficient. Postcards are kept private by law - which does not mean that no one will ever read them (and i’m sure that people from postal service do) - but, and that’s the main difference they are forbidden by law to give this information to someone or use it in what kind of context ever, except the address for delivery purpose. For me this means, in the closed way a postcard has to travel it’s kept private (as long as everything works right, which i assume here). In the internet i don’t see this currently. However i think people who say that “Everyone should know that the internet is insecure” are right - but the accent lies on should. Think for some non-techie you know of and try him to use current encryption methods - he or she will just fail, because it’s way too complicated. As he or she don’t see so much sense in that topic they will also not further investigate. From my view there are two possible solutions:
- Regulate it by law,
- Make encryption as easy as everyone could use it.
In the evening 3 keynotes were held and so the Summit was officially started. The first panels would start at the next morning 10am. Our panel What’s happening in europe is one of the first. Looking forward to it.
The evening social at Green Turtle was not my kinda thing. We already have been there yesterday and i was kinda surprised that it was described as Irish style. However i had a very nice talk with Laura Forlano from NYCWireless there which made the evening way more comfortable (thanks Laura!).