activism

Stop ACTA in EU, write to your elected representative

Posted by Christian

Please  take a moment and send an email to your elected representative in the EU parliament:

http://www.stop-acta-in.eu/

Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren,

ich möchte Sie dringend bitten, alles in Ihrer Macht stehende zu tun, um die Einführung des Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreements (ACTA) zu stoppen. Es sieht mir so aus, als wäre es nicht das Ziel unserer Parlamente und Regierungen, z.B. China auf dem Weg zur Demokratie zu begleiten. Im Gegenteil, unser eigenes Land, beziehungsweise unser Zugang zum Internet, scheint sich immer mehr China zum Vorbild zu nehmen. Lassen Sie uns diesen Trend stoppen bevor es zu spät ist. Es ist sehr leicht, Freiheiten aufzugeben, aber unendlich schwieriger, sie (zurück-)zu erkämpfen.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

…

As a citizen who will be severely affected by ACTA, I am shocked that this legislation has been drafted and signed in almost complete secrecy by unelected officials and corporate lobbyists, without public access to the text or any respect for the democratic process.

I remind you that as one of my personal representatives in the EU parliament, it is your job and your duty to understand precisely the effects that legislation will have on the people, and to act in the people’s interest. ACTA is finally coming to the people’s attention, and we are collectively outraged.

The internet has grown to be the most important platform for information sharing and granting power to the people in the history of mankind. ACTA will fundamentally destroy the openness and ingenuity of the Internet, lacks democratic credibility, and poses a serious threat to free speech that wrongly requires ISPs to surveil and police their users.

I urge you to withhold consent on this agreement, seek to draft better legislation with more respect for the rights of the person, and to stand up for democracy and the fundamental rights of every human across the world.

about Black Boxes, hiding and the growing demand for transparency

Posted by Christian

Sascha Lobo talking about how politics, the media and the economy used to be ‘black boxes’, simply because of the high costs of communicating details about their inner workings. Now with the Internet and cheap communication, the trade secret becomes the exception, rather than the rule. People want to know why and how things get decided.

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/0,1518,811007,00.html

(In German)

I feel that trend, too. Funny how hard it is to resist the urge to disclose the references and  sources of your art works. Now with art I’d argue that often it’s better to hide the strings of your puppets. Or what do you think?

Wikileaks targeting surveillance companies

Posted by Christian

There’s a new round of Wikileaks disclosures. Hurray! This time they are revealing internal documents from surveillance companies from around the world. If you want to know what’s possible, and where to get it from (if you have some spare change), check out http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html

As a starting point, you might want to have a look at what a local company, DigiTask, the makers of the much maligned and ridiculed Staatstrojaner (see our post from October 11) have on offer. I like the look of the WiFi interceptor! http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/list/company-name/digitask.html

P.S. wow, this is a lot of information. Haven’t heard that term before: “Offensive Security”. Used as a euphemism for actively intruding into a system in order to insert a trojan/spyware.

 

 

 

 

 

0zapftis!

Posted by Christian

German government malware reverse-engineered by the CCC  shown to be incompatible with the constitution. And very badly coded.

Here’s the CCC’s press release, with some juicy details:
http://www.ccc.de/system/uploads/76/original/staatstrojaner-report23.pdf

And some more insight:
http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=b06e60e0

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung’s original article
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/chaos-computer-club-der-deutsche-staatstrojaner-wurde-geknackt-11486538.html

Update: a PDF of the Feuilleton pages with the funky source code.
“Der gefährlichste Abschnitt der Spionagesoftware auf fünf Seiten: ein Text, den wir nicht verstehen – und der doch unser Leben bestimmt.”

 

Mindshare L.A.

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mindshare_oct_2010_041.jpgMindshare LA is a unique monthly eventwhich draws a brilliant crowd seekingconnections, experiences and exposureto new ideas. Over the past three yearsa zealous following has developedaround what can only be describedas ‘Enlightened Debauchery’… Home Page ButtonMay 18th register

SAG 2011: about Cornelia Sollfrank

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German digital media artist Cornelia Sollfrank explores the changing role of the artist in the Information Age, new forms of dissemination of art, the gender-specific handling of technology, and communication and networking as art. She was a member of the collectives Frauen-und-Technik and -Innen, and she initiated the Cyberfemininist alliance known as “Old Boys Network” (http://www.obn.org). Her project Female Extension (1997) was a hack of the first net.art competition initiated by a museum, in which she flooded the museum’s network with submissions by 300 virtual female net artists. Her net.art generator (http://www.obn.org/generator) automatically produces art on demand. She edited the First Cyberfeminist International (1988) and Next Cyberfeminist International (1999). Sollfrank is currently producing work on the subject of female hackers.

have script, will destroy; video 00:15:00 (2000)

“For quite some time the Hamburg artist Cornelia Sollfrank has been researching female hackers and found that hacking is a field completely under male domination. Nonetheless she was able to produce a series of several videos in which she interviewed female hackers. In December 1999 she came to know a U.S. hacker who attended the annual hackers’ convention held by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). She did the video interview have script, will destroy with her on condition that the woman, code-named Clara G. Sopht, remained anonymous and did not provide specific information about her work. The result is a highly theoretical interview about current forms of political resistance, undermined by seductively beautiful and enigmatically diffuse pictures of a woman wearing sunglasses and a cap, moving around in a low-tech scenario.”
—Yvonne Volkart, “Tamed Girls Running Wild, Figurations of Unruliness in Contemporary Video Art“, : Video as a Female Terrain, ed. Stella Rollig (Graz: Catalogue Styrian Automn, 2000)
source: http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?HAVESCRIPT

revisiting feminist art
source: http://artwarez.org/projects/refeministart/

Cornelia Sollfrank’s CV
source: http://artwarez.org/cv.0.html?&L=1