activism

understanding computers?

“…our inability to describe and understand technological infrastructure reduces our critical reach, leaving us both disempowered and, quite often, vulnerable.”

James Bridle

“Again it comes back to infrastructure and how our inability to describe and understand reduces our critical reach, leaving us both disempowered and, quite often, vulnerable.

Opacity is an important word here too, as is the term ‘black box’. Most of our engineered communications infrastructure is not just extraordinarily abstract for people to come to grips with but is actively kept hidden. There are some valid reasons, of course, for keeping infrastructure hidden but the fact is it out of sight is being increasingly exploited in and out of supposedly democratic contexts, largely by surveillance initiatives we were never told about.

Engendering a healthy paranoia here, along with making work that ruptures the featureless skin of these black boxes – providing points of entry – is important to me currently. Infrastructure must not be a ghost. Nor should we have only mythic imagination at our disposal in attempts to describe it. ‘The Cloud’ is a good example of a dangerous simplification at work, akin to a children’s book. Such convenient reductions will be expensive in time as some corporations and governments continue to both engineer – and take advantage of – ignorance.”

Julian Oliver

Bruce Schneier braindump: "Internet and Power"

The always excellent Bruce Schneier (who coined the term “security theater”) in a talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center (video and transcript). About the Internet and Power,  and technological advances that set into motion events no could can possibly predict. In his own words:

What I’ve Been Thinking About

I have been thinking about the Internet and power: how the Internet affects power, and how power affects the Internet. Increasingly, those in power are using information technology to increase their power. This has many facets, including the following:

1. Ubiquitous surveillance for both government and corporate purposes — aided by cloud computing, social networking, and Internet-enabled everything — resulting in a world without any real privacy.

2. The rise of nationalism on the Internet and a cyberwar arms race, both of which play on our fears and which are resulting in increased military involvement in our information infrastructure.

3. Ill-conceived laws and regulations on behalf of either government or corporate power, either to prop up their business models (copyright protections), enable more surveillance (increased police access to data), or control our actions in cyberspace.

4. A feudal model of security that leaves users with little control over their data or computing platforms, forcing them to trust the companies that sell the hardware, software, and systems.

On the one hand, we need new regimes of trust in the information age. (I wrote about the extensively in my most recent book,Liars and Outliers.) On the other hand, the risks associated with increasing technology might mean that the fear of catastrophic attack will make us unable to create those new regimes.

It is clear to me that we as a society are headed down a dangerous path, and that we need to make some hard choices about what sort of world we want to live in. It’s not clear if we have the social or political will to address those choices, or even have the conversations necessary to make them. But I believe we need to try.

’Avoid Clicking’

News about your own personal trojan horse in your pocket. Whether on iOS or Android, Windows Mobile or Symbian, big data knows what you do (and where you are and why). But this is new, although it has been suspected for a while: Government spyware on mobile phones.

’Avoid Clicking’

The fun part is that they pretend not to have sold their suppression-ware to Bahrain. No, it has been stolen by hackers! That’s a security company you can trust.

Two proposals concerning robots

1.

Kluger Artikel von Frank Rieger, einem der Sprecher des Chaos Computer Clubs.

Er versucht, eine Lösung zu finden zum Problem der immer weiterführenden Automatisierung und damit einher gehenden Selbst-Abschaffung der menschlichen Arbeitskräfte.

2.

Eben Moglen: Time To Apply The First Law Of Robotics To Our Smartphones

auf deutsch: Eben Moglen findet, wir sollten mal Asimovs Robotergesetze umsetzen.

Hacking, On- and Offline Surveillance, Robots, the Future. Chaos Computer Club.

Two good articles, more to follow:

1. An interview with Chaos Computer Club spokespeople Constanze Kurz and Frank Rieger:
http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/digital/kontrolle_auf_vorrat_1.12980121.html

Translated into English: http://www.signandsight.com/features/2187.html

 

2. A manifesto: “Soon everything will be different. Machines will be better than humans, anywhere. A revolution is coming…” (in German)
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/automatisierungsdividende-fuer-alle-roboter-muessen-unsere-rente-sichern-11754772.html

Alternatively, from within the KHM network, see as PDF facsimile  (the KHM has a deal with them that allows us complete access to their archives.)