After a year of missing a Debconf, I have made it to Debconf 6 where I had planned to give my talk on hacker codes of value on Monday and then basically chill out against and depsite the the hot and spicy Mexican environment. Not a bad plan and not one too hard to keep unless your file system turns to mush, and worse it happened before I really completed the prep for the talk. Ai Bendito, Caramba, Conchale, Mama Mia… That sucked.

There are worse places where this sort of fiasco could have happen like during the luddite society annual conference or something. I mean geeks during Debconf are having fun but they are also spending a lot of time doing what they do best: hacking! So as soon as grub reported an error, there were a pack of geeks, drunk on and with and for technology (and as the day wore on drunk on tequila too) who took the challenge (as they so love to do and as I will talk about during my talk) to fix the problem.

Now my slides are recovered, my system is back (without the rest of my files but I have backups for most of them) and now it is back to the grind so I can finish my talk. This time, I will make sure to make backups every 5 minutes or so.
Hay Benditio!

Mr. Bit Shifter (as I like to call him), is going on a world tour and well, if you are into 8 bit music, the man who shifts bits is the one to catch. Not only is his music playfully electric he knows how to move to his own bit beats to provide the audience with a full-bodied performance.

I try to go to at least once hacker/developer conference per year and when they are in Latin America, it is just impossible to resist. So this year I am going to Debconf6 being held just outside of Mexico City in mid-May. Along with presenting a paper, I may do a little filming too of the event.

Today someone pointed me to this uber-geeky set of graphs that offers all the essential stats:

* Participant’s accomodation requirements.
* Confirmed Participants
* Participant’s countries.
* Participant’s food requirements.
* Participant’s laptops details.
* Participants by gender and type
* Proposals by track, status and type
* Participant’s shirt requirements.
* Participants who request sponsorship.
* Sponsorship for participants travels.

Now most of these stats are essential for the organizers and they are attacking a conference’s unwieldy ways with the help of technology. They are also great for a researcher like me as they have done a good chunk of really interesting and important statistical data. And while technology is usually never an easy panacea to social ills or hurdles, if used tactically and well, like these organizers use it (and know how to use it), it can help quite a bit, at least judging from the last Debconf I went to, which was simply wonderful.

Life online sometimes is productive of very funny and strange things because it is so easy to fake and feign things like identity. And this story about a prank, code named victoria, is perhaps one of the finest examples of the great gulf that exists between one person and the other online, a gulf that is productive of deception. Of course, deception is not unique to packets and bytes. But packets and bytes are a channel that can augment the chances for such deception. The post is written my the eminent security expert and writer, Bruce Schneier who ends with this amusing assessment:

Security morals? First, this is the cleverest social engineering attack I’ve read about in a long time. Second, authentication is hard in little text windows — but it’s no less important. (Although even if this were a real co-ed recruited for the ruse, authentication wouldn’t have helped.) And third, you can hoodwink college basketball players if you get them thinking with their hormones.

Finally, make sure to check out the picture that captures the fleeting but very real moment when the player under the prank attack understood
that he was the target of a prankish joke , meant to disarm him and this game!

For those who know of this world of faceless chat, you may want to check out The Parlor. I use it for teaching and now it is there for viewing on google video.

So I get a daily ‘google’ email with the day’s psychiatry news. Rarely is there any news that touches on my hacker/Internet material but this article stuck out like a sore thumb as relevant: The Development of the Self in the Era of the Internet and Role-Playing Fantasy Games in the American Journal of Psychiatry. But I have to say there is one heck of a lot of slippery argumentation that goes on in there, an article whose progtagonist is “Mr. Aâ??s” whose “internal world had been colonized by what are termed “massively multiplayer online role-playing games,” or MMORPGs for short (11). Sometimes termed “heroinware”…”

I will just let interested parties read the rest (if you have access to the journal, which requires some sort of subscription or University access)

Anne Galloway, as usual, has a nice discussion on her blog, this time around, using Bruce Sterling’s recent keynote at the Emerging Tech Con, to get at the question of power, empowerement, and dispowerment of words

Bruce Sterling has posted his Emerging Tech talk and I’m still fixated on his fixation on words. This whole rationale behind coining neologisms interests me, and particularly how he understands terms like ‘internet of things’, ‘spimes’, ‘theory objects’, ‘everyware’, ‘thinglinks’ etc. are being mobilised to replace (with varying successes) what he considers to be no-longer-adequate terms like ‘ubiquitous computation’. I think he understands perfectly well how much this is all language games and image wars, and he’s playing for all it’s worth.

The stack is shorter. I started the week with a long series of articles on new media technologies and as I have turned each page, I have learned a great deal. I wish I could blog about them all but because there are still some left, not to mention other things to attend to, my time is limited. But I would do a great disservice if I did not mention one that blew me away, both for its content and its eloquence. Kris Cohen, a Ph.D student at U of C, published a short but rich piece entitled What does the photoblog want?

There is a lot more there than a mere 19 pages may first seem to suggest. I have the feeling I will go back to it again to mull over the different strains he ties together in a coherent and enticing knot. Today what spoke to me most strongly was his demonstration of how technologies can work in concert not only in ways unexpected, but in way that produce a dense (and surprising) matrix of personal desire and motivation. Among other things, he shows how a piece of technology, the camera, can acquire a whole new life and trajectory when it is animated within the context of another technology, the photoblog:

One function of the photoblog, its practitioners say, is to provide motivation for taking photos. The photoblog provides structure for photographs, gives them something to do, compels their production via the motivating external abstractions of a project. This makes the photoblogger answerable not to her own (some- times unreliable) self, but to her blog and its audiences, however hypothetical these are, however unknown.

What I mean is: the photoblog is both what photoblogger want (a record of their everyday lives and idiosyncratic vision) and the means for achieving it (that is, the desire to achieve it).

In union with photography, the photoblog functions as a verb: motivating, justifying. In union with photographs, the photoblog functions as a noun: collection, site.

Moroever, if the photoblog refigures the act of taking pictures, of the very stuff of desire and motivation, this piece also show us how this new practice of photoblogging alters the very nature of the Real, of what it may mean to record our daily lives, everyday:

Notice not just how Ed’s desires begin to articulate an interestingly recon?gured photography, but how his technological fantasy is also a fantasy about his life. He wants to proliferate photography so that it becomes less distinct from his life in general. An in?nite expansion of
photography in this way would effect an in?nite regression as well: being everywhere, photography would also be nowhere.

Whether it is the Incompatible Timesharing System from the early days at the MIT lab, Unix, or the Internet, it is clear that hackers encode and realize values through the making of various technologies. But this encoding is not always straightforward and it tends to embody a multiplicity of potentialities that get realized in sometimes conflicting modes.

As interesting is that geeks theorize this, and do so in a dialogically, enganged manner. The following 2 blog entries are by Debian developers and they are about Debian, Unix permissions, and the ways in which openness/opaquness foster different forms of access and possiblities. I don’t have time now to give any analysis but here they are:

From From Joey Hess’ Blog:

I could give many more examples of subsystems in Debian that exist at different point in the spectrum between locked down unix permissions and a wiki. There seems to be a definite pull toward moving away from unix permissions, once ways can be found to do so that are secure or that allow bad changes to be reverted (and blame properly assigned). Cases of moving in the other direction are rare (one case of this is the further locking down of the Debian archive server and BTS server after the server compromise last year).

Anyway, the point of this is that, if you survey the parts of dealing with the project where Debian developers feel most helpless and unempowered, the parts that are over and over again the subject of heated discussions and complaints, you will find that those are the parts of the project where unix permissions still hold sway. This can range from simple cases such as a cron job that only one person can look at and modify[1], to various data files that could perhaps be kept in svn, but aren’t, all the way through to stuff like the Debian keyring. I would love to see a full list developed, although many of the things that remain are obscure little corners like certian blacklists in the BTS, bits of the buildd infrastructure that only a half dozen people know about, etc.

And then a reply from former Debian release manager, Anthony Towns:

One interesting approach, to my mind, is worrying less about permissions and more about space – so that different people with different ideas on how to do things can do them independently. That’s part of the idea behind usertags and usercategories: rather than having people try to find an imperfect compromise, let them work on the same stuff in the way they actually prefer. That reduces the risk of carelessness, in that you stop having any reason to bother other people, and also reduces the problem of restrictions, in that if you don’t have permission to work in someone else’s area, you can just setup your own area and work there.

Perhaps the worst problem is if the drawbacks feed on each other: a restrictive system turns away contributions, which causes prospective contributors to get frustrated and hence careless, which then reinforces the reasons that the restrictions were put their in the first place and diminishes the chance they’ll be reconsidered. That’s a hard cycle to break, but it’s not one where anyone really wins.

Yesterday Peter Jaszi who was at the forefront of the critique of authorship project in the early 1990s, came to visit at the Center for Cultural Analysis. During his seminar presentation as well as public talk on his project he brought up some very interesting points about the limits of the Creative Commons project when discussing copyright activism aimed at building a strong fair use foundation for documentary film makers.

His critique of the Creative Commons was the following: In affirming the creation of a commons through individual choice and voluntary gifting, it trivializing the importance of public rights and access that are built in to the copyright system. The danger is that we will end up with two different systems in which the commons material will only arise from those creators willing to relinquish some of the exlusive rights of copyrights. This is quite valid and perceptive. But in many ways, given the seemingly unstoppable movement of copyright law toward greater protections, I think the only way to put a stop to it was through the creation of an alternative model. In this case, legislation and policy was not going to do the trick.

That said, now that there is a robust alternative, now that the hegemony of IP assumptions have been punctured, it does seem more imperative than ever to foment a copyright culture that respects, much more than it does now, the idea of public access and goods.

This is where in fact Jaszi is channeling his energy. He is one of the folks behind the Best Practices in Fair Use at the Center for Social Media. It is a project aimed at cultivating an ethic for greater access and set of best practices among documentary filmmakers who are being strangled financially because of licensing fees for music and other materials.

According to his talk last night, in the last decade there has been a “fair use renaissance” honoring the principle. This project fosters this awakening in the realm of documentary film by creating a set of best practices that are presented to courts who apparently are quite interested in what communities of practices do in regard to their craft. On top of it, they are using this material in film schools which seems so essential. So much of our professional ethics derive from educational socialization so this is vital component to this project.

Thanks to the efforts of Bryan Pfaffenberger (thanks Bryan!), there is now an STS wiki. Here is a note from Bryan:

I’m writing to announce (somewhat earlier than I had planned) the STS
Wiki, located at http://www.stswiki.org . I had hoped to build lots of
content before getting the word out — but the word’s out anyway
(thanks, Google). In the last 24 hours the content has been expanded by
something like 200%. The rocket, it seems, has left the pad. So take a
look – and:

(1) add yourself to the worldwide directory of sts scholars;
(2) add your program to the worldwide directory of sts programs;
(3) upload a bibliography
(4) help build the link directory
(5) think of more ways to use the site!
(6) keep an eye out for vandalism
(7) forward this message to other STS scholars

If you know how to use Wikipedia, you know how to use STS Wiki. It uses
the same software. Do please visit and contribute regularly.