MLH Ethical Tech Initiative Scholarship

So after starting school, and before I could really get settled into any sort of schedule, I was putting together teams for these two hackathons. Hack the North was a rush. Located in my hometown of Waterloo, Ontario, it attracted more than a thousand hackers from across the globe. I met some really awesome people and built a cool piece of software after having to pivot a bunch of times. MHacks X was a totally different experience.

The bus didn’t happen. While I managed to get a hold of one of the free bus tickets, the entire set of them was taken within 12 hours and Ace missed his opportunity. We suspected shenanigans with the ticketing system, and were worried that Ace wouldn’t be able to come. I didn’t want to travel on my own either… so Ace borrowed his parents’ car and we ended up driving 5 hours south on our own.

At MHacks we had no idea what to build. The sponsor prizes were not to our taste, and we were a bit lacking on inspiration. The drive was long, we got lost trying to find parking, and were late to registration. We grabbed some food and got acquainted with Salem — he’d come on his own from Chicago and was looking for a team. We decided to work with him, and had someone to bounce some ideas off of.

“Stegamsg” is a shitty portmanteau of “steganography” and “messaging”. We created an anonymous group messaging platform that allowed one to trade messages with peers in a channel, while only sending image data (and HTTP headers) over a network. We thought it was cool, and so did a representative from the NSA who was at the judging area. He gave each of a card, probably not knowing that Ace and I were Canadian (and thus would never be able to work for them).

These details are a bit fuzzy for me since Fall 2017 was a bit of a blur for me, but post-hackathon I received a survey from MLH about ethical tech. With my proposal for Starcon on my mind, and the hackathon still fresh in my head, I filled it out once my immediate school commitments were taken care of. The survey asked about MHacks, and requested an abstract and a few short responses to questions like:

Late one night I drafted some responses, wrote up an abstract, gave them a couple quick read-overs, and pressed that big ol’ “Submit” button. I subsequently forgot that I had even done so, save for the draft document that I later found on my computer when I was cleaning up my file-system.

I am also incredibly happy to announce that — to top off all the events of the past year — my submission was selected as the winning response for the initiative. While I don’t have all the details yet, the $10K prize will be used to fund travel to any tech conference in the world for myself and my team from MHacks.

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