By Cory Doctorow at 10:54 pm Saturday, Jul 22
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The "95 Theses of Geek Activism" is a great list of 95 ways to use knowledge for good, and to defend freedom with technology.
1 Reclaim the term ‘hacker’. If you tinker with electronics, you are a hacker. If you use things in more ways than intended by the manufacturer, you are a hacker. If you build things out of strange, unexpected parts, you are a hacker. Reclaim the term.
2 Violating a license agreement is not theft.
3 All corporations are not on your side.
4 Keep in touch with everyone you can vote for and make sure you know where they stand on the issues you care about.
5 More importantly, make sure they know where you stand on the issues you care about.
Link
(
Thanks, Devan!)
By Cory Doctorow at 10:52 pm Saturday, Jul 22
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Karl Schroeder, the author of many fantastic sf novels (most recently the swashbuckling space-pirates post-Singularity book
Sun of Suns) has written an excellent vingnette for the WorldChanging series on sustainability in Canada,
CanadaChanging. In it, Karl writes about the way that Inuit communities in Nunavut might find the Internet to be a force for independence and a threat to their identity all at once. This is a heartbreaking, bittersweet and visionary piece -- pure Schroeder.
Under the rose-and-peach of a northern sunrise, the town's mountie found Amaruq looting his own library of its books.
Ross watched as Amaruq defiantly heaved another heavy cardboard box into the back of his truck. Then he sauntered over to peer through the door. "Enlarging your collection?"
Amaruq scowled at him. "They're throwing out the books today. After the legislature voted to close the place I did a book sale. Nobody wanted to buy them. I couldn't just sit there and let it happen. Couldn't sleep."
Ross stared at the canary-yellow band of light on the horizon. Then he grinned at Amaruq. "I could say, 'everything's on-line now' so what's the loss?"
Amaruq just shook his head. "We were the only library for two hundred kilometers. Where will the community meet? --And don't say, 'on-line.'"
Ross shook his head and walked up the wooden steps. "I said I could say that. But I won't. What I was going to say was, need some help?"
Amaruq grinned at him. By the light of a canary-yellow band of sky they emptied the contents of the little library of Bell's Lake.
Link
By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:37 pm Saturday, Jul 22
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New York Times has an interesting article about the work of two university professors from Harvard and MIT/Princeton who say savvy people take advantage of good deals by avoiding the hidden costs that suckers pay.
The smartest strategy, they say, is for the sophisticated consumer to choose the service with the most hidden charges and highest add-on prices, but then avoid paying those added costs. “The sophisticated consumer takes advantage of that,” Mr. Gabaix said. “The naïve pay all the fees.”
For example, you see an offer for a room at Nontransparent Hotel for $75 (which costs the hotel $100 to provide). The guy checking in behind you also rents a room, but will rack up $70 in fees from the minibar, the phone and garage parking (all of which cost the hotel $20 to provide). You, on the other hand, were not tempted by the minibar, used your cellphone for calls and took public transportation to the hotel. The other guy subsidized your room.
Link
Reader comment: Robert says:
Since I just read the study, let me add my $0.02. It seems somebody along the chain to boingboing missed the main point of it - most economic theories predict that the hotel without hidden costs would benefit from making its opponents maneuverings public. Instead, it turns out they're better off adding hidden costs themselves.
That shatters the whole myth of the 'rational consumer', a core assumption of econ theories. Then again, if you look at spam and realize that there must be some people buying the offered goods, you knew that already ;)
By Xeni Jardin at 4:49 pm Saturday, Jul 22
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Washington Post "
Security Fix" blogger Brian Krebs reports that Steven Rambam, whose company
Pallorium Inc. touts itself as the "largest privately held online investigative service" in America, was arrested today by FBI agents just as he was about to lead a panel discussion at
HOPE in NYC. Snip:
Rambam's fellow panelists said four men clad in dark blue FBI jackets quietly entered the auditorium, asked Rambam if he had any weapons on him, and then escorted him out the door along with his laptop and other equipment that contained the PowerPoint slides that were to make up the bulk of his scheduled two-hour presentation.
"If you know Steve then you know he's very flamoyant, and at first I thought it was just PR, you know?" said Kelly Riddle, a private investigator from San Antonio who was to speak alongside Rambam. "So, they asked him to step out in the hallway, placed the handcuffs on him and started to lead him off."
Rambam was going to discuss how he dug up -- in just 4.5 hours of searching private and public databases -- more than 500 pages worth of data on HOPE attendee Rick Dakan, who agreed to be the guinea pig for the project.
Link. No one, including HOPE organizers, has published further details on the arrest at this time.
Reader comment: BoingBoing reader ylbissop, emailing us from the conference where Mr. Rambam was arrested, says:
As I sit here waiting for the engineers of the Grafitti panel at HOPE I decided to look around and saw the post about Steven Rambam. Seems whisper down the lane has changed the story since Emmanuel told it before the mentioned panel today. According to Emmanuel, Steve was arrested as soon as the Palltech seminar was over, not immediately before. Emmanuel spoke to us before the panel entitled "Privacy is dead: Get over it." The Palltech seminar was in the same hotel but on a different floor and as far as I know the FBI has left us hackers alone, only going after the aforementioned private investigator. "Privacy is dead: Get over it" went on as scheduled without Rambam and was great. cheers from hope!
Update, 11PM ET: Krebs at the WP got in touch with an FBI spokesperson in the agency's New York field office, who confirmed they had:
...executed one arrest warrant without incident at around 4 p.m. ET today at the Hotel Pennsylvania where HOPE Six is behind held. The FBI agent said the agency would not release any more information about the arrest, and that the information was sealed until Monday when Rambam is expected to make an initial appearance in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. I've got a call in to his attorney and will update this post if I hear anything new. The scuttlebutt here at the conference is that Rambam may have located someone who was in the FBI's witness protection program, but I have not been able to verify that rumor at all.
Nathan Rudy says,
A little side note on Rambam: He is the friend of Richard "Kinky" Friedman, the funny country singer who wrote "They Ain't Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore," and is running as an independent for Governor of Texas this year. Rambam is also a repeat character in Friedman's mystery novel series, where all of Kinky's friends are fictionalized.
By Cory Doctorow at 9:14 am Saturday, Jul 22
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ScatterChat is a new hactivist program from the Cult of the Dead Cow. It's an anonymous chat program that combines gaim, an open source encrypted chat protocol, with TOR, an open source "onion router" that disguises the origin and destination of packets, so that no one can know what you're chatting, nor whom you're chatting with.
ScatterChat is a HACKTIVIST WEAPON designed to allow non-technical human rights activists and political dissidents to communicate securely and anonymously while operating in hostile territory. It is also useful in corporate settings, or in other situations where privacy is desired.
It is a secure instant messaging client (based upon the Gaim software) that provides end-to-end encryption, integrated onion-routing with Tor, secure file transfers, and easy-to-read documentation.
Link
By Xeni Jardin at 8:45 am Saturday, Jul 22
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Covered previously on BoingBoing
here. Snip from
Washington Post story about Christie "Econo-Girl" Axsmith: a software contractor for the CIA who says she was fired over an anti-torture post on her internal, intel-community blog:
Only people with top-secret security clearances could read her musings, which were posted on Intelink, the intelligence community's classified intranet. Writing as Covert Communications, CC for short, she opined in her online journal on such national security conundrums as stagflation, the war of ideas in the Middle East and -- in her most popular post -- bad food in the CIA cafeteria.
But the hundreds of blog readers who responded to her irreverent entries with titles such as "Morale Equals Food" won't be joining her ever again.
On July 13, after she posted her views on torture and the Geneva Conventions, her blog was taken down and her security badge was revoked. On Monday, Axsmith was terminated by her employer, BAE Systems, which was helping the CIA test software.
As a traveler in the classified blogosphere, Axsmith was not alone. Hundreds of blog posts appear on Intelink. The CIA says blogs and other electronic tools are used by people working on the same issue to exchange information and ideas.
Link Image: Kevin Clark for the
Washington Post.
By Cory Doctorow at 7:08 am Saturday, Jul 22
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My friend Bill Shunn's story "Observations From the City of Angels" (originally published on Salon as
Love in the Time of Spyware) has been adapted for spoken word by the excellent science fiction podcast Escape Pod. The story is about a guineapig in a program to track criminals with reality-TV-style spyware that transmits their sensoria to a home audience. He's kept company by robots and an omnipresent voice of the panopticon computer, each guiding him through a life where his every word and deed and sensation are transmitted to the world.
It's not just that, Brian. Think about this technology. The experiment's been successful beyond anyone's expectations. Spyware fittings for registered offenders will no doubt go into effect next year. But why stop there? Can you imagine having a therapist, a financial counselor, a social secretary, a nutritionist and personal trainer at your beck and call twenty- four hours a day? You'd like to get rid of that spare tire, right? We could help you. Really."
Hayes shivers, though the climate inside the car is perfectly controlled. "Sure," he says. "And I could have the whole world watching everything I do, for the rest of my life."
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 6:44 am Saturday, Jul 22
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I found this one-hour presentation on using clean ethanol instead of bloody petroleum to power the world's automotive fleet through Bruce Sterling, who sez,
I saw Vinod Khosla give a very similar speech this month. It's technical, but technical solutions are supposed to be technical. Now that I've heard the speech twice, this is actually starting to sound like a rational plan to me. It might, conceivably, actually work. It can't stop us from getting slammed with a series of city-wrecking Katrinas, but it might avert a scenario that's all Katrina, all the time.
Link
(
via Beyond the Beyond)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:40 am Saturday, Jul 22
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A plane made almost entirely out of "printed" parts flew last weekend at an airshow in Britain. It was made by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works in Palmdale, CA, and is a 28m unmanned vehicle made of radar-absorbing composites.
About 90 per cent of Polecat is made of composite materials with much of that material made by rapid prototyping.
"The entire Polecat airframe was constructed using low-cost rapid prototyping materials and methods," says Frank Mauro, director of UAV systems at the Skunk Works.
Link
(
via Futurismic)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:36 am Saturday, Jul 22
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Here's a cool, brief interview with Scott "
Understanding Comics" McCloud that touches on the present and future of comics (which is looking pretty rosy, thanks to novel titles, formats and business-models):
WN: How does the lack of editors affect webcomics?
McCloud: I always think of Spiderman's "With great power comes great responsibility."
When you're free of editorial control, you owe it to yourself to obtain feedback from friends and readers. Some take those criticisms to heart and incorporate it into their work, and some ignore them.
WN: Is it difficult to separate the quality webcomics from those of lesser worth when there are literally thousands of them?
McCloud: The good work floats to the top really quickly. If a comic comes out on the scene and it's really knock-out brilliant, the community is pretty good about getting the word about good newcomers. (The challenge is) finding the one that evolves and becomes better: You'll check it out and it wasn't very good. Then you'll check it out three years later and realize it's become pretty good.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 6:31 am Saturday, Jul 22
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In honor of the San Diego Comics Con, Wired News has published a handsome little gallery of classic funnybook covers from the heyday of sexy comic illustration.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 6:08 am Saturday, Jul 22
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There's a new version of Democracy Player, the free and open source Internet TV program that can play any video format and that's as easy to use as a TV.
Democracy is produced by the Participatory Culture Foundation, the same activists behind Downhill Battle (remember the Christmas when they sent a lump of coal to the RIAA for every $100 donated to EFF?). They're now registered as a charity, taking donations to pay programmers to improve the user-interface behind Democracy.
Democracy is made by combining the popular open source program VLC with a free RSS reader and a free BitTorrent client -- so you can subscribe to any channel of video and it will be pulled down cooperatively with all the other subscribers, and played right there regardless of the video format.
The new version plays on Windows, MacOS and Linux, and, while still in beta, is far more stable and robust. If you want to live on the edge, you can also sign up to test the next version.
Link
(Disclosure: I am a proud member of the Participatory Culture Foundation's Board of Directors)
