FW: media and social change networks?
You might want to do some searches around "community informatics" which is very much concerned with ICTs and economic and social development (and associated social change). My current blogpost (and the associated comments) might also be of interest: The-dead-hand-of-western-academe-community-informatics-in-a-less-developed-c ountry-context <http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/the-dead-hand-of-western-academe-c ommunity-informatics-in-a-less-developed-country-context/> (tiny url http://wp.me/pJQl5-6Z ) M Michael Gurstein, Ph.D. Editor in Chief: The Journal of Community Informatics http://ci-journal.net ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 11:40:08 +0200 From: Annette Markham <amarkham@gmail.com> To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] media and social change networks? Message-ID: <BANLkTinME0UfMXknMUbHqO0M6HawvWQpvg@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Hi All, I'm trying to get a sense of what research collectives/networks focus specifically on media and social change. If you know of any, could you post to this list? I realize this is a huge category, but I'm trying to get a sense of how this general topic is being approached, either within-discipline, across disciplines, or outside academia. My query is deliberately vague to try to generate the breadth of this topic area. (I also ask because I just returned from a workshop focused on creating a research network on media and social change within media anthropology and I'd like to ascertain how closely this network would align with other efforts) Thanks for anything you provide. I'd be happy to share a collection of anything that emerges from this inquiry. annette ***************************************************** Annette N. Markham, Ph.D. Guest Professor Institute for Communication & Media Studies Centre for Internet Research Aarhus University, Denmark Senior Research Fellow, Internet Research Ethics Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee amarkham@gmail.com http://markham.internetinquiry.org/ Co-Editor, International Journal of Internet Research Ethics http://www.ijire.net ************************************* _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
(apologies for cross-posts) Expanding the frontiers of hacking Bio-punks, open hardware, and hackerspaces A special issue of Critical Studies in Peer Production Edited by: Johan Soderberg and Alessandro Delfanti Call: 500-word abstract Both theoretical and empirical contributions accepted During the past two decades, hacking has chiefly been associated with software development. This is now changing as new walks of life are being explored with a hacker mindset, thus bringing back to memory the origin of hacking in hardware development. Now as then, the hacker is characterised by an active approach to technology, undaunted by hierarchies and established knowledge, and finally a commitment to sharing information freely. In this special issue of Critical Studies in Peer Production, we will investigate how these ideas and practices are spreading. Two cases which have caught much attention in recent years are open hardware development and garage biology. The creation of hacker/maker-spaces in many cities around the world has provided an infrastructure facilitating this development. We are looking for both empirical and theoretical contributions which critically engage with this new phenomenon. Every kind of activity which relates to hacking is potentially of interest. Some theoretical questions which might be discussed in the light of this development include, but are not restricted to, the politics of hacking, the role of lay expertise, how the line between the community and markets is negotiated, how development projects are managed, and the legal implications of these practices. We welcome contributions from all the social sciences, including science & technology studies, design and art-practices, anthropology, legal studies, etc. Interested authors should submit an abstract of no more than 500 words by July 10, 2011. Authors of accepted papers will be notified by July 31. All papers will be subject to peer review before being published. Abstracts should be sent to delfanti@sissa.it. Critical Studies in Peer Production (CSPP) is a new open access, online journal that focuses on the implications of peer production for social change. http://cspp.oekonux.org/
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Mathieu ONeil <mathieu.oneil@anu.edu.au>wrote:
During the past two decades, hacking has chiefly been associated with software development. This is now changing as new walks of life are being explored with a hacker mindset, thus bringing back to memory the origin of hacking in hardware development. Now as then, the hacker is characterised by an active approach to technology, undaunted by hierarchies and established knowledge, and finally a commitment to sharing information freely.
i wish I had any understanding of why this view can continue to be promulgated. i see so little of it from groups like anonymous and so on. to the contrary, contemporary hacking is characterised by: - attempting to steal every bit of information and financial property i and you and every other person on this list has earned or owns by whatever means; - doing so without any clear political program or input from political thinkers, but typically because there is something they don't like about the target, and/or the target has something of value they want to steal; - being absolutely antidemocratic and authoritarian with regard to their decisions and actions; - keeping whatever profits they make solely for themselves; - in many cases, working on behalf of large multi-national corporations and governments. the most famous recent example is Stuxnet. where is the special issue on that topic? why do we keep having them, and endless list and conference discussions, on this one, which does not map onto the reality i know at all? it's not like this was in the news as recently as yesterday or today or anything... Hardly a month has gone by this year without a multinational company such as Google Inc., EMC Corp. or Sony Corp. disclosing it’s been hacked by cyber intruders who infiltrated networks or stole customer information. Yet no hacker has been publicly identified, charged or arrested. If past enforcement efforts are an indication, most of the perpetrators will never be prosecuted or punished. “I don’t have a high level of confidence that they will be brought to justice,” said Peter George, chief executive of Fidelis Security Systems Inc., a Bethesda, Md.-based data protection consulting firm whose clients include International Business Machines Corp., the U.S. Army and the Department of Commerce. “The government is doing what they can, but they need to do a lot more.” In the U.S., the FBI, the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies are confronting what amounts to a massive crime wave that’s highly organized and hard to combat with traditional methods. The hacker organizations are well-funded and global, eluding arrest except in the rarest of cases. Attacks are coming from organized crime groups based in Eastern Europe and Russia, from industrial spies in China and from groups such as LulzSec, whose members appear to reside mostly in the U.S. and Europe and seem more interested in publicity than in making a profit from their crimes. (By Michael Riley, Greg Farrell and Ann Woolner, Bloomberg News, "Cyber intruders confound: Few hackers are brought to justice<http://www.telegram.com/article/20110612/NEWS/106129977/-1/NEWS05>," Jun 12 2011) -- David Golumbia dgolumbia@gmail.com
David that view can continue to be promulgated because it's correct. You see no real hacking from anonymous because they are not a hacker group, although from time to time some of them are involved in hacking. When you say "anonymous and other groups", what other groups do you have in mind? (If you want to learn more about anonymous, Biella Coleman does work on them, she's at NYU. She even has a class on hacker culture and politics. http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman ) The items you list in the bullet points are not hacking, they are either organized crime or government espionage. The problem you are running into is one that hackers themselves have run into, that is, of different definitions of the word hack/hacker. Mostly in the mainstream media (news, movies, television), it has a negative connotation (good for news, and good for dramatic tension in movies). There have been suggestions I've seen to call the criminal side of hacking either "cracking" or "black hat hacking", while the legal side that most people do but yet that few hear about "white hat hacking" (since if it's legal it certain isn't of much interest to the news media and is rather ho-hum for movies). Hacking has a very old history (that the CFP does not touch on enough to my liking). Early wireless telegraphy, young men with their crystal radio sets transmitting over the ether, they were hackers (since they had to build their sets and keep them tuned). Early hot rodding was car hacking, and to this day car modding has its own cultures, meetups, and magazines (and these days web sites). No hackers have been identified in the cases you mention since it can be very hard, if not impossible, to identify perpetrators. Not every non-computer crime is solved either. And when it's done with the backing of the Chinese or American governments, that simply won't happen. The examples at the end of your email aren't hackers in the sense of the CFP, they are organized crime syndicates who use computers. Organized crime goes where the money is. There's money to be had over the internet, in a variety of ways (bank accounts, personal info, botnet creation), so of course that's where they are now. It would be quite surprising if they weren't. If you'd like to learn more about real hackers and hackerspaces, there is, for instance, one a few blocks from where I live: http://www.nycresistor.com/ I've been there, and met the people there for an event they had around the Debian conference. As you can see they have a variety of classes for the public, so that people can learn more about the computers they own and what they can do with them. Part of the ethic, in my understanding, is that, "this computer that I bought is mine, I'd like to play with it and see what it can do, beyond what it does currently, beyond what the manufacturer says I can do with it." There are lots of examples of hacking all around you on the internet. Most of the software that runs the internet is open source, and, given the methods of open source programming, it's all a hack, not in the sense of a kludge (somewhat badly hacked together) but in the ethos of its manufacture. (Again we see how the word "hack" has multiple and conflicting meanings.) Linux is a total hack, which has been well-detailed elsewhere so I won't go over it here (but I'd suggest Torvalds's book, "Just For Fun"). Basically, Torvalds wanted to do something else with his computer, so, he did it. He hacked his computer. Now Linux is so mainstream that even IBM ran a advertising campaign that consisted of spray-painting the Linux penguin on the sidewalks of several cities (this was a few years ago, the cities were generally not amused). Because Linux is so mainstream (relatively speaking), those not overly familiar with it probably don't consider it a hack, but it is. Ten years ago when I took apart two Intel boxes, bought some new parts, and built a new computer (I went AMD if anyone is curious) and then installed Linux on it (Red Hat or Slackware, I don't recall), that was hacking (installing back then was terrible!). When someone took a version of Linux and stripped it down to boot off of a floppy (which I used to make a router), that was hacking. Even the titanium screw I have in my jaw is essentially a hack, a biological one. (It's part of a crown, but that's a long story that involves the summer of 1972 and a springer spaniel.) Hacking is all around us. Always has been, always will be, even if the mainstream news uses the term for the more negative side of its meaning. Hacking (not the organized crime side of it) is a form of play, which is why it is a part of who we are -- see Brown's "Play", an excellent book -- he's an MD who is a play researcher -- I liked it so much I'd advise everyone read it: http://www.amazon.com/Play-Shapes-Brain-Imagination-Invigorates/dp/B002KAORU... Brown differentiates nicely between rough play (in children) and violence, which I think is a decent parallel here between what I call hacking (play) and organized crime (violence). Hopefully now you have an idea that there is this whole other component to the word "hack" that the CFP is, quite correctly, talking about, but one that is almost never covered in the news (it does get touched on from time to time in movies and on TV, though). -Nat. On Jun 14, 2011, at 9:54 AM, David Golumbia wrote:
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Mathieu ONeil <mathieu.oneil@anu.edu.au>wrote:
During the past two decades, hacking has chiefly been associated with software development. This is now changing as new walks of life are being explored with a hacker mindset, thus bringing back to memory the origin of hacking in hardware development. Now as then, the hacker is characterised by an active approach to technology, undaunted by hierarchies and established knowledge, and finally a commitment to sharing information freely.
i wish I had any understanding of why this view can continue to be promulgated.
i see so little of it from groups like anonymous and so on. to the contrary, contemporary hacking is characterised by:
- attempting to steal every bit of information and financial property i and you and every other person on this list has earned or owns by whatever means; - doing so without any clear political program or input from political thinkers, but typically because there is something they don't like about the target, and/or the target has something of value they want to steal; - being absolutely antidemocratic and authoritarian with regard to their decisions and actions; - keeping whatever profits they make solely for themselves; - in many cases, working on behalf of large multi-national corporations and governments. the most famous recent example is Stuxnet.
where is the special issue on that topic? why do we keep having them, and endless list and conference discussions, on this one, which does not map onto the reality i know at all?
it's not like this was in the news as recently as yesterday or today or anything...
Hardly a month has gone by this year without a multinational company such as Google Inc., EMC Corp. or Sony Corp. disclosing it’s been hacked by cyber intruders who infiltrated networks or stole customer information. Yet no hacker has been publicly identified, charged or arrested.
If past enforcement efforts are an indication, most of the perpetrators will never be prosecuted or punished.
“I don’t have a high level of confidence that they will be brought to justice,” said Peter George, chief executive of Fidelis Security Systems Inc., a Bethesda, Md.-based data protection consulting firm whose clients include International Business Machines Corp., the U.S. Army and the Department of Commerce. “The government is doing what they can, but they need to do a lot more.”
In the U.S., the FBI, the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies are confronting what amounts to a massive crime wave that’s highly organized and hard to combat with traditional methods. The hacker organizations are well-funded and global, eluding arrest except in the rarest of cases.
Attacks are coming from organized crime groups based in Eastern Europe and Russia, from industrial spies in China and from groups such as LulzSec, whose members appear to reside mostly in the U.S. and Europe and seem more interested in publicity than in making a profit from their crimes. (By Michael Riley, Greg Farrell and Ann Woolner, Bloomberg News, "Cyber intruders confound: Few hackers are brought to justice<http://www.telegram.com/article/20110612/NEWS/106129977/-1/NEWS05>," Jun 12 2011)
-- David Golumbia dgolumbia@gmail.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
------------------------------- Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D. http://natpoor.blogspot.com/
I tend to agree with Nat, but I'll note that arguments over what hacking "is" seem to me to be as useful as whether or not Apple makes great computers. There has been a battle over the term itself for decades. Looking at how that term has been deployed as an identity marker is more interesting, but it's surprising to see it played out here. We all know better than to accept that "hacker" is a stable term. There can be little doubt that--for a number of reasons--the word "cracker" has never caught on. So "hacker" means different things to different communities. I suspect that most of the people on this list, having been involved in social computing for some time, are more likely to associate the term with the definition in the call and perhaps the longer history that Nat relates. Get a group of journalists in a room, and they will likely draw the connotations David has made, to groups that trespass (though this is a loaded term) on computing systems. Not only is Anonymous a difficult case to classify as a "hacker" group of either stripe (the borders between hit web site, virtual sit-in, and DDoS is hardly clear), that's truer of hacking than many would like to admit. Yes, most of the cases like those David lists are acts perpetrated by organized crime, national governments, organized crime in the service of governments, governments in the service of corporations, etc. But they are often perpetrated by individuals who might otherwise consider themselves "hackers" and might in some contexts be considered as such by others. It seems the main question is not the types of skills one has--anyone skilled at computing should be able to discover and exploit vulnerabilities in a security system, for example--but how they are employed. So, if you look at the introduction to the MIT lock-picking manual, or go to a Makers Faire session on picking locks, the ethics surrounding such breaches are at the fore. Asking journalists to draw a distinction between "white hat," "black hat," and "gray hat" hacking seems even more doomed then getting them to use the term "cracking." I don't think we can fault the call for using "hacking" as a term of art frequently used within academic communities studying social and technological systems. Nor do I think there is anything wrong with exploring "hacking" as the term is used in other discourse communities. But I think arguments over how the word *should* be used are both silly and ultimately irrelevant. Best, Alex On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Nathaniel Poor <natpoor@gmail.com> wrote:
David that view can continue to be promulgated because it's correct.
You see no real hacking from anonymous because they are not a hacker group, although from time to time some of them are involved in hacking. When you say "anonymous and other groups", what other groups do you have in mind? (If you want to learn more about anonymous, Biella Coleman does work on them, she's at NYU. She even has a class on hacker culture and politics. http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman )
The items you list in the bullet points are not hacking, they are either organized crime or government espionage.
The problem you are running into is one that hackers themselves have run into, that is, of different definitions of the word hack/hacker. Mostly in the mainstream media (news, movies, television), it has a negative connotation (good for news, and good for dramatic tension in movies). There have been suggestions I've seen to call the criminal side of hacking either "cracking" or "black hat hacking", while the legal side that most people do but yet that few hear about "white hat hacking" (since if it's legal it certain isn't of much interest to the news media and is rather ho-hum for movies).
Hacking has a very old history (that the CFP does not touch on enough to my liking). Early wireless telegraphy, young men with their crystal radio sets transmitting over the ether, they were hackers (since they had to build their sets and keep them tuned). Early hot rodding was car hacking, and to this day car modding has its own cultures, meetups, and magazines (and these days web sites).
No hackers have been identified in the cases you mention since it can be very hard, if not impossible, to identify perpetrators. Not every non-computer crime is solved either. And when it's done with the backing of the Chinese or American governments, that simply won't happen.
The examples at the end of your email aren't hackers in the sense of the CFP, they are organized crime syndicates who use computers. Organized crime goes where the money is. There's money to be had over the internet, in a variety of ways (bank accounts, personal info, botnet creation), so of course that's where they are now. It would be quite surprising if they weren't.
If you'd like to learn more about real hackers and hackerspaces, there is, for instance, one a few blocks from where I live: http://www.nycresistor.com/ I've been there, and met the people there for an event they had around the Debian conference. As you can see they have a variety of classes for the public, so that people can learn more about the computers they own and what they can do with them. Part of the ethic, in my understanding, is that, "this computer that I bought is mine, I'd like to play with it and see what it can do, beyond what it does currently, beyond what the manufacturer says I can do with it."
There are lots of examples of hacking all around you on the internet. Most of the software that runs the internet is open source, and, given the methods of open source programming, it's all a hack, not in the sense of a kludge (somewhat badly hacked together) but in the ethos of its manufacture. (Again we see how the word "hack" has multiple and conflicting meanings.) Linux is a total hack, which has been well-detailed elsewhere so I won't go over it here (but I'd suggest Torvalds's book, "Just For Fun"). Basically, Torvalds wanted to do something else with his computer, so, he did it. He hacked his computer. Now Linux is so mainstream that even IBM ran a advertising campaign that consisted of spray-painting the Linux penguin on the sidewalks of several cities (this was a few years ago, the cities were generally not amused). Because Linux is so mainstream (relatively speaking), those not overly familiar with it probably don't consider it a hack, but it is.
Ten years ago when I took apart two Intel boxes, bought some new parts, and built a new computer (I went AMD if anyone is curious) and then installed Linux on it (Red Hat or Slackware, I don't recall), that was hacking (installing back then was terrible!). When someone took a version of Linux and stripped it down to boot off of a floppy (which I used to make a router), that was hacking.
Even the titanium screw I have in my jaw is essentially a hack, a biological one. (It's part of a crown, but that's a long story that involves the summer of 1972 and a springer spaniel.)
Hacking is all around us. Always has been, always will be, even if the mainstream news uses the term for the more negative side of its meaning. Hacking (not the organized crime side of it) is a form of play, which is why it is a part of who we are -- see Brown's "Play", an excellent book -- he's an MD who is a play researcher -- I liked it so much I'd advise everyone read it: http://www.amazon.com/Play-Shapes-Brain-Imagination-Invigorates/dp/B002KAORU... Brown differentiates nicely between rough play (in children) and violence, which I think is a decent parallel here between what I call hacking (play) and organized crime (violence).
Hopefully now you have an idea that there is this whole other component to the word "hack" that the CFP is, quite correctly, talking about, but one that is almost never covered in the news (it does get touched on from time to time in movies and on TV, though).
-Nat.
On Jun 14, 2011, at 9:54 AM, David Golumbia wrote:
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Mathieu ONeil <mathieu.oneil@anu.edu.au>wrote:
During the past two decades, hacking has chiefly been associated with software development. This is now changing as new walks of life are being explored with a hacker mindset, thus bringing back to memory the origin of hacking in hardware development. Now as then, the hacker is characterised by an active approach to technology, undaunted by hierarchies and established knowledge, and finally a commitment to sharing information freely.
i wish I had any understanding of why this view can continue to be promulgated.
i see so little of it from groups like anonymous and so on. to the contrary, contemporary hacking is characterised by:
- attempting to steal every bit of information and financial property i and you and every other person on this list has earned or owns by whatever means; - doing so without any clear political program or input from political thinkers, but typically because there is something they don't like about the target, and/or the target has something of value they want to steal; - being absolutely antidemocratic and authoritarian with regard to their decisions and actions; - keeping whatever profits they make solely for themselves; - in many cases, working on behalf of large multi-national corporations and governments. the most famous recent example is Stuxnet.
where is the special issue on that topic? why do we keep having them, and endless list and conference discussions, on this one, which does not map onto the reality i know at all?
it's not like this was in the news as recently as yesterday or today or anything...
Hardly a month has gone by this year without a multinational company such as Google Inc., EMC Corp. or Sony Corp. disclosing it’s been hacked by cyber intruders who infiltrated networks or stole customer information. Yet no hacker has been publicly identified, charged or arrested.
If past enforcement efforts are an indication, most of the perpetrators will never be prosecuted or punished.
“I don’t have a high level of confidence that they will be brought to justice,” said Peter George, chief executive of Fidelis Security Systems Inc., a Bethesda, Md.-based data protection consulting firm whose clients include International Business Machines Corp., the U.S. Army and the Department of Commerce. “The government is doing what they can, but they need to do a lot more.”
In the U.S., the FBI, the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies are confronting what amounts to a massive crime wave that’s highly organized and hard to combat with traditional methods. The hacker organizations are well-funded and global, eluding arrest except in the rarest of cases.
Attacks are coming from organized crime groups based in Eastern Europe and Russia, from industrial spies in China and from groups such as LulzSec, whose members appear to reside mostly in the U.S. and Europe and seem more interested in publicity than in making a profit from their crimes. (By Michael Riley, Greg Farrell and Ann Woolner, Bloomberg News, "Cyber intruders confound: Few hackers are brought to justice<http://www.telegram.com/article/20110612/NEWS/106129977/-1/NEWS05>," Jun 12 2011)
-- David Golumbia dgolumbia@gmail.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
------------------------------- Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D. http://natpoor.blogspot.com/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- // // This email is // [x] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [ ] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net //
I think the question that needs to be asked is one of harm. Is the hacker or computer break-in harmful. UK law and some US case law shows this distinction. Breaking in under UK law I believe is a summary offence meaning non felony in US terms. Whereas break-in with a further criminal offence such as theft is an indictable offence meaning felony. The infamous hackers as anti-hero cases tend to show no real harm in my brief review of case law in Canada and the US. Then the question becomes what of harming capitalist incomes v harming our ideas of privacy. Also a bigger question who is responsible to stop hacking, the individual or the state? Peter Timusk at571@ncf.ca ptimusk@sympatico.ca web: www.crystalcomputing.net blogs www.cyborgcitizen.org -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Nathaniel Poor Sent: June-14-11 11:44 AM To: David Golumbia Cc: air-l@aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] CFP: Expanding the frontiers of hacking David that view can continue to be promulgated because it's correct. You see no real hacking from anonymous because they are not a hacker group, although from time to time some of them are involved in hacking. When you say "anonymous and other groups", what other groups do you have in mind? (If you want to learn more about anonymous, Biella Coleman does work on them, she's at NYU. She even has a class on hacker culture and politics. http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman ) The items you list in the bullet points are not hacking, they are either organized crime or government espionage. The problem you are running into is one that hackers themselves have run into, that is, of different definitions of the word hack/hacker. Mostly in the mainstream media (news, movies, television), it has a negative connotation (good for news, and good for dramatic tension in movies). There have been suggestions I've seen to call the criminal side of hacking either "cracking" or "black hat hacking", while the legal side that most people do but yet that few hear about "white hat hacking" (since if it's legal it certain isn't of much interest to the news media and is rather ho-hum for movies). Hacking has a very old history (that the CFP does not touch on enough to my liking). Early wireless telegraphy, young men with their crystal radio sets transmitting over the ether, they were hackers (since they had to build their sets and keep them tuned). Early hot rodding was car hacking, and to this day car modding has its own cultures, meetups, and magazines (and these days web sites). No hackers have been identified in the cases you mention since it can be very hard, if not impossible, to identify perpetrators. Not every non-computer crime is solved either. And when it's done with the backing of the Chinese or American governments, that simply won't happen. The examples at the end of your email aren't hackers in the sense of the CFP, they are organized crime syndicates who use computers. Organized crime goes where the money is. There's money to be had over the internet, in a variety of ways (bank accounts, personal info, botnet creation), so of course that's where they are now. It would be quite surprising if they weren't. If you'd like to learn more about real hackers and hackerspaces, there is, for instance, one a few blocks from where I live: http://www.nycresistor.com/ I've been there, and met the people there for an event they had around the Debian conference. As you can see they have a variety of classes for the public, so that people can learn more about the computers they own and what they can do with them. Part of the ethic, in my understanding, is that, "this computer that I bought is mine, I'd like to play with it and see what it can do, beyond what it does currently, beyond what the manufacturer says I can do with it." There are lots of examples of hacking all around you on the internet. Most of the software that runs the internet is open source, and, given the methods of open source programming, it's all a hack, not in the sense of a kludge (somewhat badly hacked together) but in the ethos of its manufacture. (Again we see how the word "hack" has multiple and conflicting meanings.) Linux is a total hack, which has been well-detailed elsewhere so I won't go over it here (but I'd suggest Torvalds's book, "Just For Fun"). Basically, Torvalds wanted to do something else with his computer, so, he did it. He hacked his computer. Now Linux is so mainstream that even IBM ran a advertising campaign that consisted of spray-painting the Linux penguin on the sidewalks of several cities (this was a few years ago, the cities were generally not amused). Because Linux is so mainstream (relatively speaking), those not overly familiar with it probably don't consider it a hack, but it is. Ten years ago when I took apart two Intel boxes, bought some new parts, and built a new computer (I went AMD if anyone is curious) and then installed Linux on it (Red Hat or Slackware, I don't recall), that was hacking (installing back then was terrible!). When someone took a version of Linux and stripped it down to boot off of a floppy (which I used to make a router), that was hacking. Even the titanium screw I have in my jaw is essentially a hack, a biological one. (It's part of a crown, but that's a long story that involves the summer of 1972 and a springer spaniel.) Hacking is all around us. Always has been, always will be, even if the mainstream news uses the term for the more negative side of its meaning. Hacking (not the organized crime side of it) is a form of play, which is why it is a part of who we are -- see Brown's "Play", an excellent book -- he's an MD who is a play researcher -- I liked it so much I'd advise everyone read it: http://www.amazon.com/Play-Shapes-Brain-Imagination-Invigorates/dp/B002KAORU M/ Brown differentiates nicely between rough play (in children) and violence, which I think is a decent parallel here between what I call hacking (play) and organized crime (violence). Hopefully now you have an idea that there is this whole other component to the word "hack" that the CFP is, quite correctly, talking about, but one that is almost never covered in the news (it does get touched on from time to time in movies and on TV, though). -Nat. On Jun 14, 2011, at 9:54 AM, David Golumbia wrote:
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Mathieu ONeil <mathieu.oneil@anu.edu.au>wrote:
During the past two decades, hacking has chiefly been associated with software development. This is now changing as new walks of life are being explored with a hacker mindset, thus bringing back to memory the origin of hacking in hardware development. Now as then, the hacker is characterised by an active approach to technology, undaunted by hierarchies and established knowledge, and finally a
commitment to sharing information freely.
i wish I had any understanding of why this view can continue to be promulgated.
i see so little of it from groups like anonymous and so on. to the contrary, contemporary hacking is characterised by:
- attempting to steal every bit of information and financial property i and you and every other person on this list has earned or owns by whatever means; - doing so without any clear political program or input from political thinkers, but typically because there is something they don't like about the target, and/or the target has something of value they want to steal; - being absolutely antidemocratic and authoritarian with regard to their decisions and actions; - keeping whatever profits they make solely for themselves; - in many cases, working on behalf of large multi-national corporations and governments. the most famous recent example is Stuxnet.
where is the special issue on that topic? why do we keep having them, and endless list and conference discussions, on this one, which does not map onto the reality i know at all?
it's not like this was in the news as recently as yesterday or today or anything...
Hardly a month has gone by this year without a multinational company such as Google Inc., EMC Corp. or Sony Corp. disclosing it's been hacked by cyber intruders who infiltrated networks or stole customer information. Yet no hacker has been publicly identified, charged or arrested.
If past enforcement efforts are an indication, most of the perpetrators will never be prosecuted or punished.
"I don't have a high level of confidence that they will be brought to justice," said Peter George, chief executive of Fidelis Security Systems Inc., a Bethesda, Md.-based data protection consulting firm whose clients include International Business Machines Corp., the U.S. Army and the Department of Commerce. "The government is doing what they can, but they need to do a lot more."
In the U.S., the FBI, the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies are confronting what amounts to a massive crime wave that's highly organized and hard to combat with traditional methods. The hacker organizations are well-funded and global, eluding arrest except in the rarest of cases.
Attacks are coming from organized crime groups based in Eastern Europe and Russia, from industrial spies in China and from groups such as LulzSec, whose members appear to reside mostly in the U.S. and Europe and seem more interested in publicity than in making a profit from their crimes. (By Michael Riley, Greg Farrell and Ann Woolner, Bloomberg News, "Cyber intruders confound: Few hackers are brought to
justice<http://www.telegram.com/article/20110612/NEWS/106129977/-1/NEWS05>,"
Jun 12 2011)
-- David Golumbia dgolumbia@gmail.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
------------------------------- Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D. http://natpoor.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
There are also some appropriate parallels to, and discussions about, control over one's computer (so, oh that copy-flag tech in the US...), the Sony rootkit incident (on some of their music CDs a few years ago that affected/infected Windows machines), and other things like jailbreaking your iPhone (Android is a nice counter-example in terms of some of the power dynamics around code and economic models) or hacking your Xbox 360 or PS3 with Linux or modding/chipping your game console to play foreign games (usually Japanese ones, if I understand it correctly). This can also spill over into the copyright realm (at least in the US, but it seems like the US view is being forced on the rest of the world). "This" I mean the issue of control over something (contested!) and how that control is framed (hegemony!) and the technological aspects relevant here. (Actually if anyone has anything on how the "alternate OS" boot loader got onto the PS3 and then why it was later removed, that's a story I'd love to hear -- I assume there was an individual who championed it but then left....) On Jun 14, 2011, at 12:35 PM, Peter Timusk wrote:
I think the question that needs to be asked is one of harm. Is the hacker or computer break-in harmful. UK law and some US case law shows this distinction. Breaking in under UK law I believe is a summary offence meaning non felony in US terms. Whereas break-in with a further criminal offence such as theft is an indictable offence meaning felony.
The infamous hackers as anti-hero cases tend to show no real harm in my brief review of case law in Canada and the US.
Then the question becomes what of harming capitalist incomes v harming our ideas of privacy.
Also a bigger question who is responsible to stop hacking, the individual or the state?
Peter Timusk at571@ncf.ca ptimusk@sympatico.ca web: www.crystalcomputing.net blogs www.cyborgcitizen.org
-----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Nathaniel Poor Sent: June-14-11 11:44 AM To: David Golumbia Cc: air-l@aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] CFP: Expanding the frontiers of hacking
David that view can continue to be promulgated because it's correct.
You see no real hacking from anonymous because they are not a hacker group, although from time to time some of them are involved in hacking. When you say "anonymous and other groups", what other groups do you have in mind? (If you want to learn more about anonymous, Biella Coleman does work on them, she's at NYU. She even has a class on hacker culture and politics. http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman )
The items you list in the bullet points are not hacking, they are either organized crime or government espionage.
The problem you are running into is one that hackers themselves have run into, that is, of different definitions of the word hack/hacker. Mostly in the mainstream media (news, movies, television), it has a negative connotation (good for news, and good for dramatic tension in movies). There have been suggestions I've seen to call the criminal side of hacking either "cracking" or "black hat hacking", while the legal side that most people do but yet that few hear about "white hat hacking" (since if it's legal it certain isn't of much interest to the news media and is rather ho-hum for movies).
Hacking has a very old history (that the CFP does not touch on enough to my liking). Early wireless telegraphy, young men with their crystal radio sets transmitting over the ether, they were hackers (since they had to build their sets and keep them tuned). Early hot rodding was car hacking, and to this day car modding has its own cultures, meetups, and magazines (and these days web sites).
No hackers have been identified in the cases you mention since it can be very hard, if not impossible, to identify perpetrators. Not every non-computer crime is solved either. And when it's done with the backing of the Chinese or American governments, that simply won't happen.
The examples at the end of your email aren't hackers in the sense of the CFP, they are organized crime syndicates who use computers. Organized crime goes where the money is. There's money to be had over the internet, in a variety of ways (bank accounts, personal info, botnet creation), so of course that's where they are now. It would be quite surprising if they weren't.
If you'd like to learn more about real hackers and hackerspaces, there is, for instance, one a few blocks from where I live: http://www.nycresistor.com/ I've been there, and met the people there for an event they had around the Debian conference. As you can see they have a variety of classes for the public, so that people can learn more about the computers they own and what they can do with them. Part of the ethic, in my understanding, is that, "this computer that I bought is mine, I'd like to play with it and see what it can do, beyond what it does currently, beyond what the manufacturer says I can do with it."
There are lots of examples of hacking all around you on the internet. Most of the software that runs the internet is open source, and, given the methods of open source programming, it's all a hack, not in the sense of a kludge (somewhat badly hacked together) but in the ethos of its manufacture. (Again we see how the word "hack" has multiple and conflicting meanings.) Linux is a total hack, which has been well-detailed elsewhere so I won't go over it here (but I'd suggest Torvalds's book, "Just For Fun"). Basically, Torvalds wanted to do something else with his computer, so, he did it. He hacked his computer. Now Linux is so mainstream that even IBM ran a advertising campaign that consisted of spray-painting the Linux penguin on the sidewalks of several cities (this was a few years ago, the cities were generally not amused). Because Linux is so mainstream (relatively speaking), those not overly familiar with it probably don't consider it a hack, but it is.
Ten years ago when I took apart two Intel boxes, bought some new parts, and built a new computer (I went AMD if anyone is curious) and then installed Linux on it (Red Hat or Slackware, I don't recall), that was hacking (installing back then was terrible!). When someone took a version of Linux and stripped it down to boot off of a floppy (which I used to make a router), that was hacking.
Even the titanium screw I have in my jaw is essentially a hack, a biological one. (It's part of a crown, but that's a long story that involves the summer of 1972 and a springer spaniel.)
Hacking is all around us. Always has been, always will be, even if the mainstream news uses the term for the more negative side of its meaning. Hacking (not the organized crime side of it) is a form of play, which is why it is a part of who we are -- see Brown's "Play", an excellent book -- he's an MD who is a play researcher -- I liked it so much I'd advise everyone read it: http://www.amazon.com/Play-Shapes-Brain-Imagination-Invigorates/dp/B002KAORU M/ Brown differentiates nicely between rough play (in children) and violence, which I think is a decent parallel here between what I call hacking (play) and organized crime (violence).
Hopefully now you have an idea that there is this whole other component to the word "hack" that the CFP is, quite correctly, talking about, but one that is almost never covered in the news (it does get touched on from time to time in movies and on TV, though).
-Nat.
On Jun 14, 2011, at 9:54 AM, David Golumbia wrote:
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Mathieu ONeil <mathieu.oneil@anu.edu.au>wrote:
During the past two decades, hacking has chiefly been associated with software development. This is now changing as new walks of life are being explored with a hacker mindset, thus bringing back to memory the origin of hacking in hardware development. Now as then, the hacker is characterised by an active approach to technology, undaunted by hierarchies and established knowledge, and finally a
commitment to sharing information freely.
i wish I had any understanding of why this view can continue to be promulgated.
i see so little of it from groups like anonymous and so on. to the contrary, contemporary hacking is characterised by:
- attempting to steal every bit of information and financial property i and you and every other person on this list has earned or owns by whatever means; - doing so without any clear political program or input from political thinkers, but typically because there is something they don't like about the target, and/or the target has something of value they want to steal; - being absolutely antidemocratic and authoritarian with regard to their decisions and actions; - keeping whatever profits they make solely for themselves; - in many cases, working on behalf of large multi-national corporations and governments. the most famous recent example is Stuxnet.
where is the special issue on that topic? why do we keep having them, and endless list and conference discussions, on this one, which does not map onto the reality i know at all?
it's not like this was in the news as recently as yesterday or today or anything...
Hardly a month has gone by this year without a multinational company such as Google Inc., EMC Corp. or Sony Corp. disclosing it's been hacked by cyber intruders who infiltrated networks or stole customer information. Yet no hacker has been publicly identified, charged or arrested.
If past enforcement efforts are an indication, most of the perpetrators will never be prosecuted or punished.
"I don't have a high level of confidence that they will be brought to justice," said Peter George, chief executive of Fidelis Security Systems Inc., a Bethesda, Md.-based data protection consulting firm whose clients include International Business Machines Corp., the U.S. Army and the Department of Commerce. "The government is doing what they can, but they need to do a lot more."
In the U.S., the FBI, the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies are confronting what amounts to a massive crime wave that's highly organized and hard to combat with traditional methods. The hacker organizations are well-funded and global, eluding arrest except in the rarest of cases.
Attacks are coming from organized crime groups based in Eastern Europe and Russia, from industrial spies in China and from groups such as LulzSec, whose members appear to reside mostly in the U.S. and Europe and seem more interested in publicity than in making a profit from their crimes. (By Michael Riley, Greg Farrell and Ann Woolner, Bloomberg News, "Cyber intruders confound: Few hackers are brought to
justice<http://www.telegram.com/article/20110612/NEWS/106129977/-1/NEWS05>,"
Jun 12 2011)
-- David Golumbia dgolumbia@gmail.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
------------------------------- Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D. http://natpoor.blogspot.com/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
------------------------------- Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D. http://natpoor.blogspot.com/
the incredibly condescending tone of this email is remarkable. what makes you think i don't know the claim you are making and reject it, rather than need to "learn" about it? you can call them 'not hackers" if you want. i have been at this a long time, and in my observation the number of 'white hat" hackers who actually do anything is remarkably small. the number of hackers who steal is overwhelmingly large. but there are no "special issues" or classes about them. even if i grant for you that there is some small coterie of people who are actually "doing good" (and who need to be constantly redefined to serve your own purposes), they are dwarfed by the number who use hacking techniques to do very bad things. you are welcome to willfully define one as one thing and another as another, but I don't see an interesting or principled way to make the distintction. and i do think anonymous promotes itsself as a hcaking enterprise, and i find almost everything they to to be authoritarian, anti-democratic, and typically very destructive. and as a career path, "good" hacking often leads to industry employment. the entire world of internet studies is beset by an awful wishfulness: to find only what looks "good" and to absolutely ignore the bad. the fact is, numerically speaking, the number of people who use hacking techniques to violate the law far outstrips the number who "do good." and the kind of "good" that the do-gooders do it not really legible to me. i don't recognize it as informed, thoughtful, directed, meaningful political action. and i ask again: where are the special issues on Stuxnet? where are the waves of threads on AOIR-L and nettime etc. about that? and the tip of the iceberg it represents? i have been here for over a decade, watching. i find what was once a sad off-the-cuff observation seems more and more the absolute truth: these lists exist to promote computerization. when stuff starts to rub against that, it won't be talked about. it does not surprise me that your response has to become ad-hominem and start telling me i need to "learn" things that I have been reading about for decades. surely i must be the know-nothing, not the scrappy kids who come out of high school armed with a copy of 2600 and having never read Bakunin Kropotkin, let alone Marx or Emma Goldman, but will proclaim themselves our anarchist political saviors. what do they even mean by anarchy? i've yet to read a coherent account. and yes I've read about "agorism," another amazingly uninformed movement. our world is going to hell in a handbasket. hackers (and COMPUTERS THEMSELVES) are not the solution. informed politics is the solution. there is more information available today than ever before, but if it doesn't fit, it doesn't get discussed. there is more information, but peole are so much less informed and so much more manipulable than they were 20 years ago that it isn't funny. I have been watching informed politics drain away from the world of intellectual discussion since 1995--coincidentally, just the moment when the internet was commercialized, and so took over. if i need to "learn" more stuff, please feel free to let me know. i really appreciate the informed engagement with my own research that spurred your message. i worked in investment banking for over a decade. the damage done by hackers (who "are not hackers" in your funny definition, because they do evil? but they use the same techniques) is absolutely amazing, and kept quiet because the bankers don't want the general public to know how vulnerable their assets are. when anonymous took down several credit cards for a period of hours (which was good WHY?) that started to reveal it. show me anything like that pervasive kind of effect of the "good" hackers. anything. better: show me a place where anyone is actually talking about politics, because we are getting pretty close to the end of ability to do anything about it. On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Nathaniel Poor <natpoor@gmail.com> wrote:
David that view can continue to be promulgated because it's correct.
You see no real hacking from anonymous because they are not a hacker group, although from time to time some of them are involved in hacking. When you say "anonymous and other groups", what other groups do you have in mind? (If you want to learn more about anonymous, Biella Coleman does work on them, she's at NYU. She even has a class on hacker culture and politics. http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman )
The items you list in the bullet points are not hacking, they are either organized crime or government espionage.
The problem you are running into is one that hackers themselves have run into, that is, of different definitions of the word hack/hacker. Mostly in the mainstream media (news, movies, television), it has a negative connotation (good for news, and good for dramatic tension in movies). There have been suggestions I've seen to call the criminal side of hacking either "cracking" or "black hat hacking", while the legal side that most people do but yet that few hear about "white hat hacking" (since if it's legal it certain isn't of much interest to the news media and is rather ho-hum for movies).
Hacking has a very old history (that the CFP does not touch on enough to my liking). Early wireless telegraphy, young men with their crystal radio sets transmitting over the ether, they were hackers (since they had to build their sets and keep them tuned). Early hot rodding was car hacking, and to this day car modding has its own cultures, meetups, and magazines (and these days web sites).
No hackers have been identified in the cases you mention since it can be very hard, if not impossible, to identify perpetrators. Not every non-computer crime is solved either. And when it's done with the backing of the Chinese or American governments, that simply won't happen.
The examples at the end of your email aren't hackers in the sense of the CFP, they are organized crime syndicates who use computers. Organized crime goes where the money is. There's money to be had over the internet, in a variety of ways (bank accounts, personal info, botnet creation), so of course that's where they are now. It would be quite surprising if they weren't.
If you'd like to learn more about real hackers and hackerspaces, there is, for instance, one a few blocks from where I live: http://www.nycresistor.com/ I've been there, and met the people there for an event they had around the Debian conference. As you can see they have a variety of classes for the public, so that people can learn more about the computers they own and what they can do with them. Part of the ethic, in my understanding, is that, "this computer that I bought is mine, I'd like to play with it and see what it can do, beyond what it does currently, beyond what the manufacturer says I can do with it."
There are lots of examples of hacking all around you on the internet. Most of the software that runs the internet is open source, and, given the methods of open source programming, it's all a hack, not in the sense of a kludge (somewhat badly hacked together) but in the ethos of its manufacture. (Again we see how the word "hack" has multiple and conflicting meanings.) Linux is a total hack, which has been well-detailed elsewhere so I won't go over it here (but I'd suggest Torvalds's book, "Just For Fun"). Basically, Torvalds wanted to do something else with his computer, so, he did it. He hacked his computer. Now Linux is so mainstream that even IBM ran a advertising campaign that consisted of spray-painting the Linux penguin on the sidewalks of several cities (this was a few years ago, the cities were generally not amused). Because Linux is so mainstream (relatively speaking), those not overly familiar with it probably don't consider it a hack, but it is.
Ten years ago when I took apart two Intel boxes, bought some new parts, and built a new computer (I went AMD if anyone is curious) and then installed Linux on it (Red Hat or Slackware, I don't recall), that was hacking (installing back then was terrible!). When someone took a version of Linux and stripped it down to boot off of a floppy (which I used to make a router), that was hacking.
Even the titanium screw I have in my jaw is essentially a hack, a biological one. (It's part of a crown, but that's a long story that involves the summer of 1972 and a springer spaniel.)
Hacking is all around us. Always has been, always will be, even if the mainstream news uses the term for the more negative side of its meaning. Hacking (not the organized crime side of it) is a form of play, which is why it is a part of who we are -- see Brown's "Play", an excellent book -- he's an MD who is a play researcher -- I liked it so much I'd advise everyone read it: http://www.amazon.com/Play-Shapes-Brain-Imagination-Invigorates/dp/B002KAORU... Brown differentiates nicely between rough play (in children) and violence, which I think is a decent parallel here between what I call hacking (play) and organized crime (violence).
Hopefully now you have an idea that there is this whole other component to the word "hack" that the CFP is, quite correctly, talking about, but one that is almost never covered in the news (it does get touched on from time to time in movies and on TV, though).
-Nat.
On Jun 14, 2011, at 9:54 AM, David Golumbia wrote:
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Mathieu ONeil <mathieu.oneil@anu.edu.au wrote:
During the past two decades, hacking has chiefly been associated with software development. This is now changing as new walks of life are
being
explored with a hacker mindset, thus bringing back to memory the origin of hacking in hardware development. Now as then, the hacker is characterised by an active approach to technology, undaunted by hierarchies and established knowledge, and finally a commitment to sharing information freely.
i wish I had any understanding of why this view can continue to be promulgated.
i see so little of it from groups like anonymous and so on. to the contrary, contemporary hacking is characterised by:
- attempting to steal every bit of information and financial property i and you and every other person on this list has earned or owns by whatever means; - doing so without any clear political program or input from political thinkers, but typically because there is something they don't like about the target, and/or the target has something of value they want to steal; - being absolutely antidemocratic and authoritarian with regard to their decisions and actions; - keeping whatever profits they make solely for themselves; - in many cases, working on behalf of large multi-national corporations and governments. the most famous recent example is Stuxnet.
where is the special issue on that topic? why do we keep having them, and endless list and conference discussions, on this one, which does not map onto the reality i know at all?
it's not like this was in the news as recently as yesterday or today or anything...
Hardly a month has gone by this year without a multinational company such as Google Inc., EMC Corp. or Sony Corp. disclosing it’s been hacked by cyber intruders who infiltrated networks or stole customer information. Yet no hacker has been publicly identified, charged or arrested.
If past enforcement efforts are an indication, most of the perpetrators will never be prosecuted or punished.
“I don’t have a high level of confidence that they will be brought to justice,” said Peter George, chief executive of Fidelis Security Systems Inc., a Bethesda, Md.-based data protection consulting firm whose clients include International Business Machines Corp., the U.S. Army and the Department of Commerce. “The government is doing what they can, but they need to do a lot more.”
In the U.S., the FBI, the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies are confronting what amounts to a massive crime wave that’s highly organized and hard to combat with traditional methods. The hacker organizations are well-funded and global, eluding arrest except in the rarest of cases.
Attacks are coming from organized crime groups based in Eastern Europe and Russia, from industrial spies in China and from groups such as LulzSec, whose members appear to reside mostly in the U.S. and Europe and seem more interested in publicity than in making a profit from their crimes. (By Michael Riley, Greg Farrell and Ann Woolner, Bloomberg News, "Cyber intruders confound: Few hackers are brought to justice< http://www.telegram.com/article/20110612/NEWS/106129977/-1/NEWS05>," Jun 12 2011)
-- David Golumbia dgolumbia@gmail.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
------------------------------- Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D. http://natpoor.blogspot.com/
-- David Golumbia dgolumbia@gmail.com
and no, i'm sorry: redefining "open source" as "hacking" just says "black is white." that's not hacking. doing what people like nathan Mitnick do/did is hacking. breaking into secure systems, "freakign" them, getting around firewalls--SPAM and VIRUSES are probably numerically speaking the overwhelming largest amount of true, formal hacking. but they are "bad news," so let's not talk about them. open source will save the world! just ask IBM--that's why they went so hog-wild over Linux a decade ago. because it's going to tear apart capitalist authority! i have had a few, deliberate, angry conversations with advocates where i have tried to get them to forge any connective tissue between "open source" and "non-computer related political change." do your best--i've yet to even find a coherent argument put forward. but if i say that: "open source is about computers, not about real-world politics," people talk about me like i have a lot to "learn." people who, it turns out, have read almost nothing, except about computers. who's zooming who? On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Nathaniel Poor <natpoor@gmail.com> wrote:
David that view can continue to be promulgated because it's correct.
You see no real hacking from anonymous because they are not a hacker group, although from time to time some of them are involved in hacking. When you say "anonymous and other groups", what other groups do you have in mind? (If you want to learn more about anonymous, Biella Coleman does work on them, she's at NYU. She even has a class on hacker culture and politics. http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman )
The items you list in the bullet points are not hacking, they are either organized crime or government espionage.
The problem you are running into is one that hackers themselves have run into, that is, of different definitions of the word hack/hacker. Mostly in the mainstream media (news, movies, television), it has a negative connotation (good for news, and good for dramatic tension in movies). There have been suggestions I've seen to call the criminal side of hacking either "cracking" or "black hat hacking", while the legal side that most people do but yet that few hear about "white hat hacking" (since if it's legal it certain isn't of much interest to the news media and is rather ho-hum for movies).
Hacking has a very old history (that the CFP does not touch on enough to my liking). Early wireless telegraphy, young men with their crystal radio sets transmitting over the ether, they were hackers (since they had to build their sets and keep them tuned). Early hot rodding was car hacking, and to this day car modding has its own cultures, meetups, and magazines (and these days web sites).
No hackers have been identified in the cases you mention since it can be very hard, if not impossible, to identify perpetrators. Not every non-computer crime is solved either. And when it's done with the backing of the Chinese or American governments, that simply won't happen.
The examples at the end of your email aren't hackers in the sense of the CFP, they are organized crime syndicates who use computers. Organized crime goes where the money is. There's money to be had over the internet, in a variety of ways (bank accounts, personal info, botnet creation), so of course that's where they are now. It would be quite surprising if they weren't.
If you'd like to learn more about real hackers and hackerspaces, there is, for instance, one a few blocks from where I live: http://www.nycresistor.com/ I've been there, and met the people there for an event they had around the Debian conference. As you can see they have a variety of classes for the public, so that people can learn more about the computers they own and what they can do with them. Part of the ethic, in my understanding, is that, "this computer that I bought is mine, I'd like to play with it and see what it can do, beyond what it does currently, beyond what the manufacturer says I can do with it."
There are lots of examples of hacking all around you on the internet. Most of the software that runs the internet is open source, and, given the methods of open source programming, it's all a hack, not in the sense of a kludge (somewhat badly hacked together) but in the ethos of its manufacture. (Again we see how the word "hack" has multiple and conflicting meanings.) Linux is a total hack, which has been well-detailed elsewhere so I won't go over it here (but I'd suggest Torvalds's book, "Just For Fun"). Basically, Torvalds wanted to do something else with his computer, so, he did it. He hacked his computer. Now Linux is so mainstream that even IBM ran a advertising campaign that consisted of spray-painting the Linux penguin on the sidewalks of several cities (this was a few years ago, the cities were generally not amused). Because Linux is so mainstream (relatively speaking), those not overly familiar with it probably don't consider it a hack, but it is.
Ten years ago when I took apart two Intel boxes, bought some new parts, and built a new computer (I went AMD if anyone is curious) and then installed Linux on it (Red Hat or Slackware, I don't recall), that was hacking (installing back then was terrible!). When someone took a version of Linux and stripped it down to boot off of a floppy (which I used to make a router), that was hacking.
Even the titanium screw I have in my jaw is essentially a hack, a biological one. (It's part of a crown, but that's a long story that involves the summer of 1972 and a springer spaniel.)
Hacking is all around us. Always has been, always will be, even if the mainstream news uses the term for the more negative side of its meaning. Hacking (not the organized crime side of it) is a form of play, which is why it is a part of who we are -- see Brown's "Play", an excellent book -- he's an MD who is a play researcher -- I liked it so much I'd advise everyone read it: http://www.amazon.com/Play-Shapes-Brain-Imagination-Invigorates/dp/B002KAORU... Brown differentiates nicely between rough play (in children) and violence, which I think is a decent parallel here between what I call hacking (play) and organized crime (violence).
Hopefully now you have an idea that there is this whole other component to the word "hack" that the CFP is, quite correctly, talking about, but one that is almost never covered in the news (it does get touched on from time to time in movies and on TV, though).
-Nat.
On Jun 14, 2011, at 9:54 AM, David Golumbia wrote:
On Tue, Jun 14, 2011 at 4:24 AM, Mathieu ONeil <mathieu.oneil@anu.edu.au wrote:
During the past two decades, hacking has chiefly been associated with software development. This is now changing as new walks of life are
being
explored with a hacker mindset, thus bringing back to memory the origin of hacking in hardware development. Now as then, the hacker is characterised by an active approach to technology, undaunted by hierarchies and established knowledge, and finally a commitment to sharing information freely.
i wish I had any understanding of why this view can continue to be promulgated.
i see so little of it from groups like anonymous and so on. to the contrary, contemporary hacking is characterised by:
- attempting to steal every bit of information and financial property i and you and every other person on this list has earned or owns by whatever means; - doing so without any clear political program or input from political thinkers, but typically because there is something they don't like about the target, and/or the target has something of value they want to steal; - being absolutely antidemocratic and authoritarian with regard to their decisions and actions; - keeping whatever profits they make solely for themselves; - in many cases, working on behalf of large multi-national corporations and governments. the most famous recent example is Stuxnet.
where is the special issue on that topic? why do we keep having them, and endless list and conference discussions, on this one, which does not map onto the reality i know at all?
it's not like this was in the news as recently as yesterday or today or anything...
Hardly a month has gone by this year without a multinational company such as Google Inc., EMC Corp. or Sony Corp. disclosing it’s been hacked by cyber intruders who infiltrated networks or stole customer information. Yet no hacker has been publicly identified, charged or arrested.
If past enforcement efforts are an indication, most of the perpetrators will never be prosecuted or punished.
“I don’t have a high level of confidence that they will be brought to justice,” said Peter George, chief executive of Fidelis Security Systems Inc., a Bethesda, Md.-based data protection consulting firm whose clients include International Business Machines Corp., the U.S. Army and the Department of Commerce. “The government is doing what they can, but they need to do a lot more.”
In the U.S., the FBI, the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies are confronting what amounts to a massive crime wave that’s highly organized and hard to combat with traditional methods. The hacker organizations are well-funded and global, eluding arrest except in the rarest of cases.
Attacks are coming from organized crime groups based in Eastern Europe and Russia, from industrial spies in China and from groups such as LulzSec, whose members appear to reside mostly in the U.S. and Europe and seem more interested in publicity than in making a profit from their crimes. (By Michael Riley, Greg Farrell and Ann Woolner, Bloomberg News, "Cyber intruders confound: Few hackers are brought to justice< http://www.telegram.com/article/20110612/NEWS/106129977/-1/NEWS05>," Jun 12 2011)
-- David Golumbia dgolumbia@gmail.com _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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------------------------------- Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D. http://natpoor.blogspot.com/
-- David Golumbia dgolumbia@gmail.com
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participants (7)
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Alex Halavais -
David Golumbia -
Mathieu ONeil -
Michael Gurstein -
Nathaniel Poor -
Peter Timusk -
Phoenix Mo