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Founder of Relay Anonymous Messenger (2023 - present). Designer of Voltair, a new programming language (2022; see https://revolutionize.dev/posts/voltair ). Cofounder of Santa Barbara Hackerspace (2010).
## Personal Site + Social
https://tryingtobeawesome.com
https://github.com/elimisteve
https://x.com/elimisteve
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdphillips
This project was envisioned by Barrett Brown, whose 2011 crowdsourced investigative journalism endeavor, Project PM, was so successful in uncovering corruption (involving Palantir, WikiLeaks, and the DOJ) that he was targeted by the state and was sentenced to 63 months in prison.
We won the National Magazine Award when in solitary confinement.
In this Wired article[1], Barrett says that he, Project PM, and Anonymous could have been even more successful if they would have had better tools.
Pursuance is that tool.
We just began a closed alpha, with the focus being on improving the usability and nuances of how the features work for users trying to use this for real-world (but not-yet-super-high-security) use cases, so not all the encryption has been added yet.
Main repo: https://github.com/PursuanceProject/pursuance
Our Kickstarter, which ends today: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/85883596/barrett-browns...
The Kickstarter video includes our clearest explanation of what Pursuance is and what we're trying to enable.
I'm the tech lead and I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.
P.S. We're not rolling our own crypto, of course; the libraries we're using have been audited by a 3rd party and/or were written by a cryptography expert (like https://github.com/dchest ).
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/12/anonymous-barrett-brown-free-r...
Projects
Underwater ROV: We've begun constructing an underwater ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) capable of surviving depths of 150 feet. It will house a camera, plankton catching net, and connector for future scientific payloads. Its primary purpose is to collect plankton samples for later analysis of species, population, and other factors.
We're writing a Python script to take the joystick data and feed it to the laptop/netbook which will then send it to an Arduino on-board the ROV. The Arduino will be programmed to read the joystick data and control the motors accordingly, adjusting the orientation of the craft. More ROV info -- http://sbhackerspace.com/wiki/index.php?title=ROV
For other Project info, check out http://sbhackerspace.com/wiki/index.php?title=Projects.
Software-wise, we've got 2 Linux servers up and running. SSH access is granted to all General Meeting attendees, which occur on Saturdays. For more meeting info, check out our calendar at http://calendar.sbhackerspace.com.
Classes
Our two weekly classes are...
1. Intro to Hardware Hacking (meets on Thursdays @ 6:30pm)
2. Ethical Hacking with Linux (meets on Fridays @ 6:30pm)
For more information about each class, see http://sbhackerspace.com/wiki/index.php?title=Classes and the calendar at http://cal.sbhackerspace.com.
Contact Info
0. Blog: http://sbhackerspace.com
1. Email: sbhackerspace@gmail.com
2. Twitter: http://twitter.com/sbhackerspace
3. Facebook Page: http://fb.sbhackerspace.com
4. Google Group: http://gg.sbhackerspace.com
5. IRC Channel: http://irc.sbhackerspace.com (#sbhackerspace on FreeNode)
We hope to hear from you soon! At least a couple of us are always in IRC so feel free to drop in and say 'hi'.
Who else around here would be interested in co-founding a hackerspace?