FreakNet Medialab

Born in 1998 as phisical place for our "FREAKNET BBS" Network, active since the end of 1994, it's a free open lab, where people can work with computers and connect to internet for free. The basic idea was to offer computers and network for people that CAN'T have one: students, viados, extra-comunitary immigrants, clochards, travellers, and so on.

• Free software used
• all computers recovered from trash
• many services offered.

legal problem: the italian law "Legge Pisanu" for anti-terrorism, a real shame, for wich people using a computer connected to a network MUST BE IDENTIFIED by a copy of a document.

Some project of FreakNet and FreakNet MediaLab:

• Netsukuku - Una rete p2p decentralizzata e separata da Internet adatta a sostenere una illimitata quantità di nodi con un minimo spreco di CPU e memoria.;
• Xchestival - è un insieme di vari pezzi: uno script per xchat ed irssi che lo interfaccia a Festival, i fonemi italiani, ed altre cose, che messe insieme, permettono a xchat ed a irssi di parlare, leggendo ciò che viene scritto sui canali e sulle query.;
• Polli Fritti - (Poetry Hacklab) Sperimentazioni e hack hardware/software su tecnologie Wireless 802.11x;
• Antica biblioteca digitale - Digitalizzazione fotografica di testi antichi tra cui Historia di Sicilia e Messina citta' nobilissima (di Giuseppe Bonfiglio) e Historia di Sicilia (di Fazello) a cura di igloo e asbesto;
• PDP-11 emulator - Un'emulatore software per il PDP-11/34 che gira Unix Version 6.;
• F.E.S. - Free Eyes to the Sky. Progetto di telescopio motorizzato su internet, a cura del gruppo Primavera Freaknet (sito del progetto attualmente in costruzione);
• VGPD - Virtual Gateway Protocol Daemon - A daemon implementing virtual routing on a linux router (beta);
• Bignum - Una calcolatrice a precisione infinite, scritta in Miranda;
• Emerde - Porting di EMERGE per distribuzioni diverse da GENTOO;
• NOCONNECT - Un modulo per il kernel linux 2.2.x per controllare l'accesso di utenti in internet;
• VIP7200 - Termcap/terminfo per il terminale seriale Honeywell VIP 7200;

More resources on http://freaknet.org/research/ (ITA only, sorry)

Past and Actual Problems

• In the past, the Municipalty of Catania arose many problems by trying to shut us off. You can read here all the story. This caused about 2 years of troubles due to the fight against local municipalty, police breakings, main power disconnections by the electric company, and 1 year of full stop due to the consequent eviction: in this way service continuity was interrupted; a great damage in terms of image, capabilities, and specially for the local users.

• Italian Law "Legge Pisanu" prohibits access to any kind of network without identification of users, and imposes logfile conservation for some years. This imposes a big cost in terms of burocracy related to respect of privacy of the users (because we must collect copies of ID documents for identification). So, we had to temporary stop public access to terminals due to this "incredible" law.

• http://www.arci.it/ ARCI hosts FreakNet Medialab site in Catania. They have to move their offices to a new place, when this will happen, Medialab will not have a location anymore. We are looking for new possibilities.

• Due to the lack of funds, reduced space and relative problems, many people of the community is forced to dedicate less time to freaknet and work for standardized jobs by companies. This produces a big delay in the production of the activities and researches.

GOAL

Go back to the initial idea: to offer public services for the community, being a phisical place where people can meet, share and enjoy using free hardware and free software, better than we do in the past, giving help and assistance.

TODO LIST

• Recover all historical documents about our fight against Catania Municipalty
• Try to organize better all the documents in our main site (history, the old webpages documents, ecc. ecc.)

• Write a list with all the meetings, speechs, etc, in which FreakNet was involved in. (e.g. Hackermeetings, Asbesto @ Linz (Ars Electronica), Jaromil, Martin, Igloo @ Makrolab, etc...);

• Do we need to write also teaching activities such as courses, activity into the high school? Is this important to describe our projects?

... this page is under development.