About Me

I am a Computer Science/Psychology undergrad at the University of Maryland. I am deeply committed to software freedom as a path to social justice and social change. My interests include privacy-enhancing technologies, strong cryptography, peer-to-peer and friend-to-friend systems, the psychology (and philosophy) of anonymity, software freedom (obviously), GNU/Linux, and anarcho-transhumanism.

Ubuntu Involvement

DC LoCo

I'm active in the DC Local Community Team. We try to meet up around once a week at Taste of India in Woodley Park to bugjam. I am one of the members with no other commitments (unlike Daniel Chen who does audio bugs, Maco Morgan who does KDE bugs, and Brian Curtis, who does Empathy/Telepathy bugs), so I tend to work on the GNU Image Manipulation Program, which the DC LoCo adopted in 2010.

Ubuntu Youth Team

I am a member of the Ubuntu Youth Team.

Free Software Involvement

Free Software Foundation

I am member number 7164 of the Free Software Foundation. I wholeheartedly support the Free Software Foundation in its struggle for user liberation and tend to agree with its analysis of the software freedom struggle as a whole. I highly encourage you to join and support software freedom.

Given this, it may seem contradictory that I use Ubuntu, a GNU/Linux distribution infamous for making non-free software easy to install and recommending it at times. While I do not enjoy the fact that Ubuntu does this, Ubuntu remains the distribution that is easiest to use and easiest to secure. It is perfectly possible to use Ubuntu without using any non-free software - I am able to do so on my System76 laptop.

GNU Social

I am a contributor to the P2P effort of the GNU Social project. Our goal is to compose privacy-enhancing technologies to create a social networking system where data is truly private, and users control their own data and relationships, rather than a ruling class of server operators, or worse, proprietary service administrators.

gNewSense

I am working (sporadically) on a new installation image for gNewSense 3. This image will support encrypted installations. I began working on this when I got a Lemote Yeeloong netbook from Freedom Included.

GNU Generation

I am a member of the GNU Generation initiative, though I graduated from high school just as the initiative was launched. As a result, I try to step back from the project and offer guidance when I can, drawing from my experience running a GNU Users Group at my high school.