Speaking at Defcon 19

So this post is sort of overdue. A while back I submitted a paper to the DEFCON 19 computer security conference in response to their annual call for papers. They were looking for papers on the subject of how to deal with situations like the Egyptian uprising that started in January 2011. Basically the Egyptian government did the unthinkable and basically turned off internet access for the entire country because citizens were using their cell phones to send messages to Twitter with accounts of the violence taking place.

At the time, I had been actively using APRS (a digital ham radio protocol) to send and receive messages with the International Space Station. After doing some research, I discovered that it is possible to send an email via APRS to any email address in the world. I realized that certainly if you could send an email via APRS, you should also be able to post to Twitter except that there were no working services to accomplish that.

Because of this I built HamRadioTweets.com including a piece of software to act as an APRS to Twitter gateway. Now you are able to send an APRS message to “TWITR” (without quotes) and your message should be posted to @hamradiotweets on Twitter.com almost immediately.