Wild Unicorn Herd

A POC/non-white/mixie nerd scrapbook. Because we’re awesome.

#cancon

atopfourthwall:

mad-scientist-hououin:

smartaleckette:

February 13, 2013 - the day Canada’s Parliament debated the zombie apocalypse. (x)

Canada, the only nation discussing the most important issues of our day.

See? Canada has a zombie plan and so should you!

i want to emphasize that this is not from a comedy movie, it literally happened, like in real life, in parliament, between real people

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UBC student Isabel Chen holds up a watch that could be equipped with a panic button.

The Keep-Safe project is a group of students, sex work advocates, and public safety officials who are designing a GPS panic button for sex workers. Pushing the button, which could be installed in a watch, pager, or another sort of device, will send a pre-recorded message and the user’s location to an emergency contact.

The focus groups and pilot project will involve sex workers in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side; Keep-Safe is working with local organizations like the WISH drop-in.

They’ve estimated they need $8,140 to cover the entire project, but suffered a setback when thousands of dollars donated online were found to be from fake accounts. They actually only have $1,368 so far. If you’d like to contribute to Keep-Safe, you can do so here.

Hamed Al-Khabaz Update · Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013, 11 AM

Here’s Ethan Cox’s latest article. The gist:

  • Al-Khabaz and the Dawson Student Union have called Dawson College’s bluff with a legal waiver that permits the college to release normally private information about his expulsion.
  • Al-Khabaz released a short video asking for support. He wants his grades back and his transcript clean so he can continue his academic career.
  • Dawson College is threatening to sue media who contact them. This always goes well.

Follow Hamed at @wololodev and Ethan Cox at @EthanCoxMTL. If signing petitions gives you warm fuzzy feelings, add your name at Hamed Helped.

(Previously.)

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So Hamed Al-Khabaz, a computer science student at Dawson College in Québec, found a massive security flaw in the software that colleges use across the province to keep track of students’ personal information. He told the software company, who promised to fix it. Days later, when they found him scanning the site for vulnerabilities, they threatened him with arrest and jail time and forced him to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Then Dawson College expelled him and changed his grades to zeroes, effectively ruining his academic career.

(This is in the wake of recent security leaks by the federal government, by the way.)

The National Post has a good story on the whole thing.

Hamed helped. Help Hamed.

Update, Tues. Jan. 22, 2 pm: Al-Khabaz [the Post now spells his name Ahmed, I’m so confused] has received several job offers, including one from Skytech, the company that he “cyberattacked”. The college director maintains that “The other side of the story is related to [personal] facts that we cannot divulge.”