[Powerstation-discuss] Internet Kiosks For Occupy

[Rubin Abdi]

More emails to catch up on while on a flight with no net.

Corey McGuire wrote, On 2011-12-04 14:37:
> So, I've been working on turning some old, 486 laptops in to xterms for
> Occupy.  They are uniquely suited because they have detachable keyboards,
> meaning the brains, peripherals, and cabling would all originate from the
> "screen".  They also have two PS2 ports making for easy use with-in a kiosk.

I hate those machines. Glad someone's doing something with them, awesome.

> The user experience, I would like to limit to a single "tabbed" browser, or
> more accurately, a non tabbed browser limited to one window.  Who has seen
> this?  What can we do, here?

More or less did this for the touch panel netboot image. Have X just
dump into Firefox with a couple plugins preloaded...

* Tab Mix Plus to force single window mode
* One of the kiosk plugins
** Restrict tampering with settings
** Force a home page, return to that page after an idle time out
** Prevent exiting out of the browser (which'll make X barf)
* HTTPS Everywhere to force SSL on common sites (Gmail, Facebook, etc)
* One of the private browsing plugins, hopefully with a clear
history/cache button
* Something else to do a private browsing garbage collection after a set
idle

> Networking...the eternal question.  I think wired locally so they are hard
> to disrupt, but after that?  I don't know what you've got.

Wifi there is pretty awesome, totally works when the Noisebridge
internet box has 12V power. Also it's less hardware to deal with, tho
these machines are fairly old right? Doubt they'll have any built in
802.11bg.

If you can feed your box 2 wifi cards, drop one into access point mode
and the other into client, that would be most optimal. Additionally you
can burn some money and buy one of those CLEAR Wimax USB dongles, use
that for internet access, all built into your server's box.

> Installation...how and where?  I am thinking about getting a sheet of
> steel, plasma cutting some bezels, bending it in to shape, and throwing a
> pad lock on it.  But that's just one idea.

The main concern here is providing them with something that can be
package away easily and quickly due to raids. Sticking a bunch of these
machines together would kind of suck, or making theme extremely
klunky/heavy, etc.

> security, what unobvious things should we think about?

Software security:

I wouldn't bother with encrypting anything on your X server as that
would problematic to debug later on and you would have to setup a key
within a partition that machine can hit. I would say create a bootable
live image, dump that onto a CF card as read only (USB drives tend to
walk away) and use that. If shit gets broken the machine can be rebooted.

We can push all traffic through Tor but I honestly don't feel like
that'll be any helpful. Running HTTPS Everywhere is key.

Care should be taken to wipe privacy data when the machine has figured
out that there's been an idle timeout (or even at 30 minute intervals
and have the users deal). Having the machines boot a live image that's
read only helps since all personal data quickly disintegrates after the
power is pulled.

Physical security:

Good luck with that.

One major problem I would recommend attending to first before working on
anything else is power. There really isn't much of it there. Batteries
tend to run dry fast there while people are plugging in their cell
phones, other laptops, dead air wifi gear, lights, sewing machines. It
would also be in your best interest in looking how to power your stuff
directly from 12V DC instead of using a power inverter.

It would be great if you didn't actually have to depend on occupy power
for any of this. What if you took your terminals and the server, a car
battery and a nice high gain antenna, strapped it all to a bike trailer
or Bikefaust/bike cart) and we pedaled the thing out there every night
for a bunch of hours. Hurm, writing another email about this.

I'm kind of really strapped for time before the end of the year, but
what little of it I do have free and if you're around I wouldn't mind
hacking on some live boot stuff. This would be a good project to be very
public about, a simple live boot image that provides everything you need
to netboot other machines as internet terminals.

Got a name for this?

-- 
Rubin
rubin at starset.net

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