The March-Hare Communications Collective was at the 2011 SF Anarchist Bookfair tabling along side a few folk from Hackbloc who were presenting issue #12 of Hack this Zine. A pre-alpha setup of Operator Distribution was setup for presentations throughout the day demonstrating what it might look like having authorities tap insecure calls and how our solution protects against that.

We received a lot of good feedback on the work so far and here are the main points I took note of:

• It would be nice to have a feature to allow for multiple operators to act as admins. That is with the ability to create new accounts on the secure network.
• There is a need for a decentralized model for the network to protect against outages and raids.
• Integration of a phone directory into the webmin app that can be made accessible to non-admin users that will allow users to see who is connected and available as well as allow users to initiate a call from a click on the webpage.
• A well known security researcher advised that there has not been a "really good" security audit of openvpn.
• Was advised that we may want legal support as authorities may want us to implement CALEA support. This seems unlikely because we are not adding new tools but leveraging existing ones. In this case asterisk's implementation of the sip protocol.

The next day of the bookfair we were able to give a presentation on the history of comms and the direction that the March-Hare Communications Collective is taking. We have a local recording of this presentation here which was mirrored from a indybay report back on the bookfair, the presentation slides and notes are here. After the presentation we gave another demonstration of the Operator Distribution.

Throughout the weekend we promised an official release to be available a few weeks ago, but there have been some setbacks with the availability of our developers. We are still planning to have an alpha release before the end of next month.

Images and recordings provided by dave id on indybay.