But if there were ever a need to make sure I remember to post, this would be a reason. CISPA.

What is CISPA?

Check out the YouTube video below for a quick run down on the scope of what it can do.

So who would want something like this passed?

Specific Organizations Supporting H.R.3523

• COMPTEL
• Verizon
• Tech America
• USTelecom
• CTIA – The Wireless Association
• Sprint Nextel Corporation
• T-Mobile USA
• U.S. Cellular
• Leap Wireless International, Inc./Cricket Communications, Inc.
• Cellcom
• Bluegrass Cellular, Inc.
• Boeing
• Business Software Alliance
• Business Roundtable
• US Chamber of Commerce
• CSC
• Edison Electrical Institute
• Financial Services Roundtable
• Exelon
• Cyber, Space & Intelligence Association
• EMC Corporation
• Facebook
• Independent Telephone & Telecommunications Alliance
• Information Technology Industry Council
• Intel
• Internet Security Alliance
• Lockheed Martin
• National Cable & Telecommuications Association
• National Defense Industrial Association
• Symantec
• Oracle
• AT&T
• IBM
• Microsoft

Be very out spoken and write to your senators expressing how we cannot let this bill pass. You can EASILY and QUICKLY write a short letter to your representative expressing this in hopes that they listen by going to OpenCongress.org and clicking on the “OPPOSE” button on the right hand side in blue. It will then guide you through the process of sending a letter to your representative. If you are unsure of what to write, something along the lines of what I sent should suffice:

I am writing you because I am concerned about the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act currently making it’s way though our Congress. I oppose H.R. 3523 and urge you do the same.

The full title of the bill is “To provide for the sharing of certain cyber threat intelligence and cyber threat information between the intelligence community and cybersecurity entities, and for other purposes.”

It’s the “and for other purposes” part that I have the most problem with, sir. Now, I know national security is of the utmost importance to most Americans, but I feel that such security absolutely can NOT come at a cost of personal freedoms. I am not willing to trade any part of my freedom for such a false sense of security.

I am afraid that this bill, in it’s current form, contains too few limits on how and when the government may monitor private information. I also feel that here should be should be stronger safeguards included as to how the data may be used. This legislation and the vast powers it will grant could easily be used to persecute and spy on innocent US citizens and infringe on all of our civil liberties.

Yes, I believe that cybercrime is an important issue in today’s technical society, but unfortunately, this law is not the answer. It was written by those who have no true knowledge of the digital world they are trying to regulate and are painting with too large a brush. Rep. Rogers has said “..because we’ve listened to people’s concerns and incorporated them..”, but he’s not listening to the PEOPLE, he’s listening to companies that may look to take advantage of the bill’s vague language to serve their own purposes.

I fear that this bill will be seen by members of Congress as a step towards protecting us all from so-called “cyber attacks”, but it will end up becoming a tool to pursue anyone seen as a bludgeon and free pass to pursue “pirates”, and protect “intellectual properties” without the need for due process.

I thank you for your time and hope that you will consider the far-reaching implications of this bill before supporting it. To date there are already many petitions representing millions of concerned people expressing opposition to this bill. Please listen to us.

Thank you for your time and hard work.

Thats it! Click send and OpenCongress.com will create an account for you if you do not have one already. Once you verify your email, your letters will be sent and the whole process should have only taken a few minutes.

When: Tue Jan. 31st, 2012 7:00pm to 11:00pm
Where: Golden Road Brewing (@goldenroadbrew) located at 5430 W. San Fernando

Barcamp usually lasts 2 days straight, however this year the venue aquired cannot accommodate this, so it begins around 9am-5pm Saturday and then Sunday again. Each session/demo is usually about 30 minutes – 60 minutes long with smaller ones in between.

Breakfast will be served in the morning, and beverages/snacks will be on hand throughout the day. Barcamp LA also plans to have a couple of food trucks during lunch time that will be arriving for a no-host choice of food!

If you decide to come, keep in mind this is an un-confrence, which is a volunteer-organized type of confrence. Myself, and a few other people all collaborated since November of last year. The team has been incredibely passionate and resource-helpful to make this happen. We promoted it though Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Groups and other social media online sites over the past few months. This year we’ve received sponsorships/donations from:

Guidance
Fortis
Microsoft
PickAnExcuse.com
BlogDowntown.com
CorporateEspionage.com
and others

Although this is the 8th Barcamp LA, it has not happened in the past 2 years because of the bad economy and lack of sponsorship so its been a challenge for sure to get it off its feet again.

Attendees who come are encouraged to bring something that might help such as:
Powerstrips
Extra Snacks/Soda
Your own water bottle
Internet Hotspot ability

Tickets are still available and can be purchased in advance on Eventbrite:
http://barcampla8.eventbrite.com/event/1234980861
Prices are now $55 for a normal ticket & $20 for a students.

If you enter in the promo code “ILOVEBARCAMP” you will get 50% off the normal ticket price

If you absolutely cannot pay the full amount PLEASE contact Barcamp LA to work something out for you, we really want everyone who wants to come to do so, as this is an open event.

Experiencing Barcamp LA is a unique and educational experience. People you meet there are always the most helpful and passionate with the topic they represent. I love to learn about technology, so to have an unconfrence right here in Los Angeles of people with the same like-minded passion for it is amazing to support. Past Barcamp session favorites of mine include Mac OSX, WordPress, Lucid Dreaming, Social Engineering, Hacking, Geocaching and iPhone Jailbreaking sessions. The tech oriented community is one of the most fascinating/interesting types of people and when they all come together, great things happen. I look forward to seeing you there!

Ecto - Download

A very small and lightweight app that lets you post to any blogging system you might be using. I use WordPress and this app fit my needs perfectly. Of course theres always MarsEdit as an alternative that WordPress announces on their site but I liked the very straight-forwardness of Ecto. To each his own. (Ecto is also cheaper)

These apps have found their way onto my Mac and have proven themselves worthy for my uses, I hope they do for you as well! If you have any suggestions for what apps should be in Part Two of my “Handy Mac OSX Programs” let me know in the comments!

Do you buy Amazon Kindle books a lot? I love them, not only do they have a great price usually but its the instant gratification of knowing you’ll be reading it within seconds of buying it wherever you are. Many of you might have a Kindle Device but what if you also got an iPad for reading?

If you have an iPad, I’m 99.9% sure you most likely already downloaded the Kindle app and iBooks app for it by now. It was great at first, until I started to realize one small ever-growing problem. That I will eventually have TWO sets of digital book libraries on my iPad. Not good! So how to resolve this problem?

First, I had to decide which app I was more comfortable reading in. For mainly aesthetic reasons I chose iBooks over the Kindle app because of the fancy page turning graphics as well as the built-in store behind it if I ever did want to buy a book on the spot. (As opposed to going to a browser from the Kindle app) The *only* thing I would like to see iBooks do that Kindle does is the ability to choose a black background for night reading. Although the lowest brightness setting within iBooks does just fine for me.

So, my journey began like all journeys now’a days – with Google. Searching and reading up on how I can get my books from the Kindle app to my iBooks app. There were a lot of different helpful websites but none really had all the information I needed in one place, hence this blogpost for you.

For now I will be focusing on iPad users, and how to get the Kindle books from the Kindle app to your iBooks, and NOT Kindle Device users specifically (however with a little know-how you can use this same guide anyway without much changes to the later instructions)

Formats

First let’s start out with what you need to know – iBooks uses a format called .ePub which is basically a text document that can have re-flowable content (which means you can make text larger/smaller, etc) has embedded metadata, inline raster and vector images along with CSS and XML functionality. And yes, it also unfortunately supports DRM.

Another format you need to be aware of is .PRC which is a format that the Kindle devices and Palm eReaders are familiar with. For those Kindle device/Palm users out there you might also recognize this format as .MOBI, it is the same exact thing.

One last format to note is the .AZW format which is a Amazon Kindle specific format for the ebook. Note that all of these formats can be converted assuming that they do NOT have DRM on them. There ARE ways around the DRM but that is NOT what I will be discussing on this post. You will have to find out how to do that yourself.

Software You’ll Need to Convert:

Thankfully, this is a post I don’t have to spend too much time talking about the programs you’ll need for various Operating Systems. “Calibre” is a multi-platform program that allows you to convert many ebook and text documents to another format with a few clicks of a button. You can download it here.

METHOD 1:

With your jailbroken iPad (or iPhone/iPad – whatever your using for the Kindle app) your going to need to sFTP into it and locate the Kindle folder within the Applications folder. Usually, its not named “Kindle” but rather a long string of numbers. My Kindle folder is located in

/private/var/mobile/Applications/

If you don’t feel like sitting there and going through every single folder to find out which one holds the Kindle.app, a quick workaround is to delete the app from the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch and then go to the AppStore and re-download it. This way, when you go back to your FTP program you can sort the Applications folder by “Modified Date” and the newest modified folder should be the Kindle.app folder. (You might need to open the Kindle app first)

Once the Kindle folder is found, you will want to navigate to:

/Documents/eBooks/

In this folder you will see a bunch of paired files with the same name twice, for now your only interested in the .PRC and .AZW files. Go ahead and copy them to your desktop (or wherever you want on your computer) and you can close out the FTP program once finished.

Method 2:
But what if you don’t have a jailbroken iPad/iPhone/iPod touch to do this? Well, where there’s a will theres a way. Basically your going to need to extract the contents of your back-up’s from iTunes. To do this you’ll need special software:

Windows users can use – Reincubate Download Here
Mac OSX users can use – iPhone Backup Extractor Download here

Once you’ve extracted the Kindle folder to your desktop look for the eBooks folder with your .PRC, and .AZW files inside. From here you can continue to the instructions below using Calibre.

Converting the Files

Now that you have the PRC and AZW files, you’ll want to open up Calibre. If you need some help configuring Calibre you can watch the below YouTube video the developer made which helps guide you through the process.

Simply drag the PRC files into Calibre and select the ones you wish to convert. Select “Convert e-Books” at the top panel and you will be able to edit the Metadata if you desire.

Make sure the output format on the top right is set to “EPUB”. If all the settings are set to how you wish (I chose the default setup) click on “OK” in the bottom right.

It shouldn’t take very long and after Calibre finishes, it will place the new EPUB version of the eBook in the folder you specified Calibre save them to. Now, its time to open up iTunes and drag n’ drop that ePub file into the “Books” section of iTunes.

You are now ready to sync those books up and they will “magically” appear on your iPad iBooks app!

One last note: There are .PRC and .AZW files out there that have DRM locking it down, making Calibre unable to convert it. There are ways around this but that is not what this post is about. If you really truly want to get that nasty DRM off, I will say that Google, is your best friend as always.

Enjoy reading your books!