STDIN

Dear Readers,

I just wanted to let you know about a couple of events which pertain to our hackers class which Free Culture @ NYU is helping to put on:

First,

Free Culture NYU is a co-sponsor of Evan Korth’s Computers & Society speaker series at NYU this fall. The next talk is this Sunday at 6pm. It will feature Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University. His topic is “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.”

The content industry has convinced industry in general that extremism in copyright regulation is good for business and economic growth. In this talk, Professor Lessig describes the creative and profitable future that culture and industry could realize, if only we gave up IP extremism.

Date: Sun November 9 2008
Time: 6pm - 7pm
Location:
Warren Weaver Hall NYU
251 Mercer Street
Rm 109 New York, NY 10012

Members and public welcome. Enter via W. 4th St. Photo ID required.

Second,

the next Sunday, FCNYU will be screening "Steal This Film!" and have a Q+A with Alan Toner afterwords (he is coming to our class as well, but maybe you will want to talk to him in greater depth!)

Date: Sun November 16 2008
Time: 7:30pm - 9pm
Location:
Warren Weaver Hall NYU
251 Mercer Street
Rm 109 New York, NY 10012

The Public is welcome. Enter via W. 4th St. Photo ID required.

Hope to see you there, and as always, keep www.freeculturenyu.org in mind for more details.

- Max

VS

We opened class on Monday November 3, 2008 with a discussion on Thomas Malaby’s Anthropology and Play: The Contours of Playful Experience and the second half of Julian Dibbell’s Play Money. We started by looking at Malaby’s beliefs about play. He saw a distinct separation between ritual and play. According to Dictionary.com a ritual is “any practice or pattern of behavior regularly performed in a set manner” and by the very nature of the word this means that “ despite the fact that [rituals] can go wrong, they are subject to contingency, and they aim to bring about determinate outcomes” (Malaby). These determinant and repetitive qualities of rituals makes it the inverse of play because play “is marked by a readiness to improvise” (Malaby). The very nature of play allows for games to be indeterminate. Therefore play is less pliable for the industry because of this improvisation. This doesn’t allow for the exploitation of play for institutional and nationalistic purposes like you could do with rituals because of their determinate outcomes.

After we discussed these distinctions we looked at the example that Malaby used to show how the Olympic games

"so clearly demonstrates the power and limitations of games when put to use by institutions."

To emphasize this point Malaby brought up the Olympic games in Berlin in 1936. The Nazi’s felt that through the games they would be able to “display the power and legitimacy of Nazi ideals” because they believed that they could determine that the winners would all be Aryan. However those beliefs went against the very nature of games because of the improvisation that occurs which is supposed to allow their winners to be contingent. After all anything can happen in a game, especially at the Olympics.

We then looked at how competition influences “work” and “play”. Both Dibbell and Malaby brought up the practices of the website TopCoder.com. This website holds various contests which allows programmers to compete by creating the best code solutions in order to win cash prizes. Once the codes are submitted to Topcoder.com they now own the codes and are allowed to make a profit off of them. Malaby discusses how,

"the success of the enterprise depends on TopCoder’s ability to tap into the playful competitive mode or disposition, while the entire game activity is extrinsically governed by an ulterior profit motive, geared to practical applications of the winning solutions after the fact."

This “playful competitive mode” used in order to be productive is not specific only to TopCoder.com. It is becoming more and more popular for various companies to create competitions in order to get all types of people outside of the company involved in their creative process in order to create new and innovative ideas while generating both profit and buzz for the company.

Jennifer responded to TopCoder’s method of productivity in her paper by bringing up how,

"in this situation, the distinction between play and work is blurred. For coders, they are doing some sort of play- meaning that they enjoy coding and it’s fun for them, but in reality they are doing work- they are making something that will be efficient for others in the long run and can actually help computers to run."

Here is the link for the TopCoder.com website. http://www.topcoder.com/

Exploitation?

This then launched the class into a discussion about if this method could be considered exploitation. Anique felt that it is hard to put a label on it, and say if it is in fact exploitation. Charlotte then brought up how when people submit their work they agree to the terms and conditions laid out by the company. I explained my feelings about how competitions like this could definitely be beneficial for both parties and allow for exposure of the creators, which they would have never received without the competition.

Both Malaby and Dibbell wondered about the possibilities of making work more play-like, and whether it would be a good or bad thing. The class believed that if people were having fun at work they would be more productive. Many companies even hold competitions for prizes within their company as an incentive to make their employees more efficient. However, it was brought up during our discussion that once you have a nicer and more fun job they expect more from you.

Another distinction between work and play was brought up in Richard’s response paper he discussed how online players free a sense of pleasure in their work, and this may be because “games like World of Warcraft are encouraging in their nature. When you successful mine, you may get a message saying your mining skill increased, which is rewarding and self-encouraging. The game is constantly telling you how you are improving, while most desk jobs do not.” I personally completely agree with this statement as I have noticed that I hate going to jobs where I never receive acknowledgment for the hard work that I do, as opposed to how I love going to jobs where the environment is more encouraging and supportive.

Another interesting concept is that when Dibbell visited China to view these “virtual sweatshops” he found that after work hours some of the workers still played World of Warcraft, but on their own accounts. This led Jennifer to wonder if their work made them addicted to the game.

Our discussion then turned to Dibbell’s Play Money as we talked about the ethics surrounding gold farming and making money off virtual items. One of the more interesting topics concerned the stolen bone crusher that Dibbell purchased. In Play Money Dibbell recalled an instance where he was debating if he should make the virtual purchase of a bone crusher that he knew was stolen. While he pondered what to do he asked his friend Bob for advice. Bob responded with,

"Stealing in the game is not unethical to me. Rogue/ thief is a player skill- so I would have no problem with that. Now, if it involved real life theft- real money or out of game scamming- that is a totally different story. But using stealth/ stealing in game is totally acceptable in my mind" (169)

"virtual world at the end of the day is a game- and craftiness is rewarded over ethical practices. This seems reminiscent of many hacking acts, such as accessing government databases, which in the real world seems unethical or illegal somehow, but in the hacking world are seen as feats of ingenuity."

John believes that changing the way the software works in order to fix these problems makes it more like the law in these games.
Anique wondered if these companies were just trying to prevent people from making money off of their game every time they changed their code or policies to prevent these actions.

Pride!

Next, we discussed the pride that these games instill in their players. Professor Coleman mentioned that in a gaming system there is plenty to be proud of. Players are encouraged to represent their skill as a craftsman as they have control over everything. Why do people opt out of this in order to purchase items that they did not create or earn themselves? This may be why the workers Dibbell saw in China wanted to continue playing the game on their breaks. They may have wanted to show of their skills as they create their own items for personal use. We then gained insight from Richard who is an avid gamer. He believes that, “games are craft-like. The purpose is to gain skills in order to progress, and in the game you are expected to build these items yourself. That is the point of the game.” During class Richard admitted that last year he was a gold farmer. He said that he had gotten to the point where there was nothing else to accomplish in the game, so gold farming allowed him to add another layer to his gaming experience. Since he had already invested so much time in the game, he was able to use his superior skills as a craftsman while he was able to make some money on the side.

In the end, the lines are still blurred in terms of the ethics that surround this underground economy. It doesn’t help that the IRS technically does not have a concrete way of claiming these earnings. Perhaps once the newness of this industry wears off things will be seen differently.

Have a great weekend!

Readings due for today:

Adams, Clint – Blog entry http://xana.scru.org/xana2/ranticore/debknights/
This is rant about the Debian project that is from the inside.

Coleman, Biella – “The (copylefted) Source Code for the Ethical Production of Information Freedom”
Gabriella talks about a commonality among hackers – the love of information freedom. She writes that by nature, hackers have a lust to know – a “pursuit of knowledge…[that] is a basic undeniable element of computer hacking”. She says that hacking is political just by what it is.

Fogel, Karl – “Producing Open Source Software” Chapter 4 – Social and Political Infrastructure http://producingoss.com/en/producingoss.html#social-infrastructure
As classmate Max writes in his paper,

Author Karl Fogel analyzes the power structures for how open source software projects are handled, maintained, and litigated.

Shirky, Clay – “Failure for Free”
Classmate Miranda writes about Shirky's chapter saying,

...various computer-related programs/advancement are discussed in conversation with this idea of failure as a free (and essentially positive) outcome of programming.

For today’s class, Monday November 10, we were fortunate enough to have Karl Fogel as a guest speaker.

We began class by a discussion about governance and conflict in different software projects, especially Debian.


Then we went right into Questions & Answers:

Miranda’s question was How does one become a Benevolent Dictator?
As Fogel writes in his chapter,

As a general rule, if it's simply obvious to everyone who should be the BD, then that's the way to go.

When there is a disagreement about decisions being made – such as what bug tracker to use, you can use a different one and see how many people rather use yours. Overtime, you can see who gets more volume.
We then took this example and related it to our class. If one student did not like the blog server we were using, they could copy it and then put it onto a completely new blog server. Our professor could then see who prefers which blog but could not give an “F” to people who choose to use the new one. There is a general societal agreement, as there is with choosing a B.D.

What lessons from free software models can be seen in terms of governance?
Free software projects operate like oxygen in our society – you can take as much as you want but there is still plenty left. Free software projects have a commitment to transparency and accountability. There is a value in making things available in a technologically convenient way. Convenient transparency is not taking hold in our government. For example, newspapers like the New York Times now show visual graphics that make it easier. Police have crime maps online.

Then the comment was made that police have authority over what is the best crime map but in free software you can fork. Fogel responded by saying that you are forking the thing that is governed but not the government. Governments are not meant to be forked – “Government is the decider”.

We discussed two examples of free software programs that have similar government procedures:
Subversion – this is a free software program that is key to combining and working on things. It shows the history of the edits and syncs changes rather than make it more complicated and jumbled (like a history on Wikipedia).
Subversion has a self-selected group of editors responsible for the reputation of program. People work on what they want to work on because what motivates them interests them.

Apache – Apache is web server and big foundation. They have special committees in every project and each committee has a chair that represents the project. In practice, they rarely use their committees.

One issue Fogel writes about is the idea of forks.

One student asked: how much of the community leaves? Where do attitudes change? Many hackers work on both versions, the fork and the original. They do not necessarily need to choose one. The attitudes of those left depend on who has left – if the three best hackers left, that would be an issue.

Fogel also spends a lot of time in his chapter discussing voting.

If there is arguing, the threat of a vote is always there. In the history of Subversion, there have only been two votes. Usually they run on consensus. Voting is seen as a threat, which is why it is so important. It is so frowned upon but it works as a force.

There are many different voting systems but one that Fogel writes about is approval voting, which he says is much better than how we vote for president.

A good choice in most cases is approval voting, whereby each voter can vote for as many of the choices on the ballot as he likes. Approval voting is simple to explain and to count, and unlike some other methods, it only involves one round of voting.

…a programmer who has only one good idea, ever, is a distinctly bad hire

The development of Linux can take a good idea from anyone, and frequently does.

Fogel responded that yes, Debian wants people that will work a lot but you can also get your work included in other ways. You can give your work to a full Debian member who has gone through the test and they can put it on. This creates classes of people.

What happens when you meet outside of the computer?
Programmers do meet a fair amount. People who have met are more accommodating to each other – there is a social impact in the way one might expect. In metropolitan areas like New York, Boston and San Francisco, they hang out together a lot and not just people who work on the same project but other projects as well because they are part of similar endeavors. Having met the person makes you want to fix a bug faster if they tell you there is one, for example.

What’s in store for the future?
Free software is beyond software. It will change the way people think about shareable things. Right now there are more geeks and hackers working than ever in these realms but there are still skeptics that believe the newcomers do not have the skills of the older guys.
Fogel introduced the class to the phrase “Eternal September”, which refers to the wave of new users that arrives every September when kids get on the internet at school for the first time, unaware of ‘Netquette’ (Core rules of Netiquette).

On Wednesday we had the privilege of having Alan Toner, producer of "Steal This Film" as a guest speaker. In Toner's film, the fight over Pirate Bay brought about some very important questions. Was the Pirate Bay raid not actually about convicting people for their downloads and piracy, but rather, about sabotaging them? And is this a piracy of culture or a culture of piracy??

The complaints of Pirate Bay were analagous to the complaint of the VCR when it came out, and yet we have learned to incorporate the VCR as another outlet for revenue, and have even surpassed that with the onslaught of DVD players and burners. Therefore, Toner projects in his film that Pirate Bay should be seen as an opportunity.

In class, Toner reiterated that the debate over piracy is not about protecting a business model. With the domination of broadband/high speed internet, access is what is promised. And ALL WE ARE DOING IS WHAT COMES NATURALLY: tapping into that access. As we are moving towards a situation with more access, there isn't one set business model anymore. Here is where Toner claimed that "piracy" is a negative label.

The editorial "So You Want to Be a Pirate" also claims this. It says that a pirate is NOT a bootlegger, and a true pirate is merely one who is plugged into a larger group of people who share the similar interest of file sharing and free information. A pirate should be thought of more as a library service and as a tutor who ultimately helps to increase computer literacy.

In this same vein, Toner's discussion in class brought us to what advertisers today call the "Prosumer." In advertising speak, the prosumer today is actively seeking information, expects information to be freely given, and is not just a user, but a producer--they'll turn around and provide information just as freely as they have taken it. Toner claimed that this is the new consumption that we and markets have to deal with today; that there is no learning curve in the internet, and the roles of producers and users are very vague and almost non-distinct anymore.

And of course, not only does technological advancement lead to a world of panic, Toner claimed that the grief of corporations is based on the fact that corporations need to find a way to rein in this market potential...and suddenly it's about communication, time and money that is at stake.

Toner said, "Technology allows for new possibilities, but are in conversation with other factors such as marketing and consumption."

Rachel had a question: "does free access to culture foster global community? If all movies are free to be distributed and sharing p2p-will movies continue being made? Will the blockbusters we all love so much still exist in a new economy free of copyright?"

And to this end, Toner answered, that the tools to consumer are easier and more accessible than the tools to produce. The simplicity of interface is more susceptible to mass adoption, and as long as viewers remain in a consumption view point, there will always be a need for corporate/conglomerate support to entertain...because THIS IS CONVENIENT, and we are a culture based on convenience.

An article written just a couple weeks ago in Wired highlights a piracy crackdown on Texas teen. A federal judge is ordering Whitney Harper, 20 years old, to pay the Recording Industry Association of America $7,400 to "settle copyright infringement allegations involving her use of the peer-to-peer file sharing network Kazaa when she was a juvenile." See article at http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/judge-rejects-m.html

Is she an innocent infringer because she did not know the consequences of such copyright infringement as such a young age, or should the courts just simply take a no-tolerance approach and punish all such cases? Is this law by the books or law by case? What do we need?

Readings due for Monday November 17, 2008:

Phil Zimmerman: “How PGP Works/Why Do You Need PGP?”
Classmate Miranda summarizes Zimmerman’s reading, a piece directed at giving the instructional of PGP, how it functions, and why it is beneficial: “Zimmerman discusses PGP encryption software, which allows individuals to engage in electronic communication without the government or anyone else interfering or eavesdropping. There are two “keys” that facilitate the private exchanges online, a public key and a private key. He also mentions a public-key-enciphered conventional “session” key. Along with these keys are key rings, which hold key IDs and passwords.”

Stephen Levy: “CryptoRebels”
In “CryptoRebels,” Levy gives us a history of cryptography and notes its inherent politics, “the vital importance of getting this stuff out to the world for the public weal,” again confirming the hacker ethic of proliferation of information (Levy, 186). Levy continues discussing the capabilities of the NSA and then details Whitfield Diffie’s public key cryptography system that Phil Zimmerman describes in his article as well. Levy then comments on Zimmerman’s PGP and its relative success as a FOSS project, despite the legal trouble it faced for violation of intellectual property rights. He describes Cypherpunks and their rebellion against privacy invasion. Levy ends on a note of the importance of cryptography and the stakes of privacy versus national security.

Cory Doctorow: Little Brother (1/3 of book)
Maria gives a great summarization of the beginning of Doctorow’s book, expressing her own feelings that the book is farfetched: “As for Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, a world overly exaggerated is presented, full of surveillance and paranoia about a possible terrorist attack. Set in San Francisco, the story narrates the lives of Marcus Yallow and his three high school friends, and how they are completely altered after a sudden bombing. Doctorow’s work ties correlates with the issue of privacy because the characters are deprived, to some extent, of their right to privacy and to some degree of secrecy… As the story unfolds, there is a growing force of opposition and resistance, mostly triggered by Marcus’s efforts and hacker activities. However, the greater the opposition, the more severe, and rather ridiculous, things turn out to be.”

We began class by identifying just who cryptographers are and where they reside in the world of hackerdom. There are two levels: there are the geeks and hackers that are really into crypto and math, then there are the other hackers who are of course involved in this world to some degree. All hackers have PGP.

Then we discussed how exactly the public key cryptography system works. Biella described this using two rings, one represented a public key and the other represented the private key. You physically give the public key to someone who enters it into his or her computer. (She gave it to James). Then, if they want to send you a message, they encrypt it with your public key. Then, upon receiving the message only your private key will open it. You are literally giving the other half of this “code” to someone.

Because of the degree of secrecy involved in keys, there is a high-level of trust that is established between geeks when exchanging keys. There is a web-of-trust established. You know whom you trust with your life and in turn those people have the people that they trust. Subsequently, you trust those people, and so on. This is how the web of trust forms and keys are exchanged to create key rings.

We watched a video Biella recorded in Mexico at a key-signing party. There is a lot of pride amongst hackers in who has signed your key. At key signing parties, huge groups of these cryptographers physically gather and have printed papers with the public key of others and their other information. When they meet one another they confirm that the information is correct by physically signing the papers. They also exchange IDs to ensure that everyone is who they say they are. (At this particular conference there was an uproar because one developer presented his membership card of a private organisation called "transnational republic" and used that as his ID to prove a point.)

In the video Biella questions attendees about the importance of key-signing parties, here are a few responses:
“You have an obligation to the community. You can sign people you wouldn’t normally meet.”
“It is important to confirm that people are legit”
“You can put faces to a name and you know who you are dealing with.”

Then we held some discussion. Jon stated that he found it strange that FOSS projects have such policies of privacy when they are “open.” Biella replied that it is about authentication and it’s more practical than anything else. It prevents anyone from messing with the infrastructure of these projects. Although it can’t be 100% effective, it is a deterrent of “digital arson.” Security is not absolute. It is about just making it more difficult to mess with.

The majority of the class was Biella giving a legal and cultural history of privacy:

1700s: Free Speech had philosophical tracks. Privacy exists, but much more implicit like in ideas of architecture. People like Jefferson assert that anonymity is really important to free speech. “The Spectator” was a newspaper at the time committed to anonymity.

1890: Commitment to Privacy, Law Journal article, “Right to Privacy,” makes it clear that new technology has been provoked. (Quoted on our handout)

Biella interjects with a thought that privacy is not explicitly stated in the Bill of Rights and that is why it is even more important. It is more important because it is implied and not spelled out.

WWII: Alan Turing, who created the idea of the computer with the Turing Machine, was a cryptographer for the British. He helped end WWII by cracking German cryptography. He was later jailed for being a homosexual and only released when he agreed to hormone treatments. Ironic because this was the exact persecution he was fighting against.

1966: Freedom of Information Act: Full or partial disclosure of documents of the US government, exemptions being trade secret, national security, etc.

1967: Publication of “Code Breakers”: Up until this point the history of cryptography had been opaque and never completely compiled. It created the conditions for people to think about the implications of cryptography and helped the development of public-key cryptography.

1974: Privacy Act: After Watergate and it amended the Freedom of Information Act. It stated that records about you could only be released voluntarily.

1991: Zimmerman releases PGP. It was one of the greatest acts of civil disobedience. He broke patent laws because he included the algorithms from RSA and broke national security laws because strong forms of cryptography were not allowed to be exported outside of the US.

1994: CALEA. Made all phone companies changed to a digital format and change networks so it was easier to wiretap.

1995: Case brought to court by Daniel Bernstein. Ruled that you have the First Amendment right to created cryptography and release it for export.

1999: Court said that Bernstein had the right to publish academic material and could export cryptography. Before this strong cryptography had to be housed outside of the US.

2001: Patriot Act: It made it easier to get a warrant for a wiretap. There was a shift in awareness of not just the government spying on us, but corporations too.

2004: FBI, CIA, Department of Justice, etc. requested that CALEA expand to the Internet. It was passed and it is very easy for them to track anyone via the Internet.

We finished with Max describing TOR, an Internet routing system. It routes all traffic through TOR nodes, so that whoever is trying to track can’t identify where the information is actually coming from. It isn’t centralized so it would be too difficult to shut down. It is crackable, but expensive and time-consuming. It is also really slow because of all the re-routing, thus it is best to be used only for really important documents.

Cory Doctorow posts on boinboing that he’ll be hosting a book signing of Little Brother in London next week. There are user comments underneath about his novel which are interesting.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/11/18/little-brother-uk-la.html

After our discussions about privacy, there were some interesting articles today about privacy in the news.

The first is from NYT's technology section entitled "Does AT&T's Newfound Interest in Privacy Hurt Google?" by Saul Hansell.

The touches on the topic of consumer privacy, discussing a new privacy think tank, the Future of Privacy Forum, funded by AT&T. He dicusses the group's agenda and questions AT&T's motives in funding the project- as a competitive strategy against Google.

The next article is not as interesting, but touches on privacy issues in NYC: "New York Police Fight With U.S. on Surveillance"

This article discusses how the NYPD gets approval for counter terrorism surveillance, and the debate about the ease of doing so and safety vs. privacy issues.

The readings for Wednesday's class informed our jumping off point for conversation. George Radwanski's letter to RCMP Commissioner Loukidelis provides an excellent summary of the issues inherent to discussions of mechanical surveillance of public activity, noting many points on the conception of privacy with demand a nuanced approach to account for the subject's stickiness--as we discussed in class, defining 'privacy' is not an easy project, so what people need to do is come up with working definitions that are effective given certain conditions and goals. Radwanski's goals are a safe, well-organized and respectful society-- he speaks of privacy in one's home as a human right, expressing both a conception of the government's role in individual lives, as well as a more implicit conception of the home or 'private' life which citizens are entitled to. For instance, he mentions that the Canadian government cannot "compile detailed dossiers on citizens 'just in case', an assumption about government's role in private life which is not as popular among American legislators. Privacy means something different in American, as it means something different nearly everywhere, to nearly everyone.

Also central to our discussion was Siva Vaidhyanathan's "Naked in the Nonopticon" which discussed issues of data privacy and data trafficking, as well as the shields of opacity used by both individuals and institutions to protect themselves while hiding select information. He outlines a number of different models to understand these complex re-routed flows of carefully selected information-- first, there's the classic panopticon model, in which subjects are aware that they could be observed at any time, but never positive whether they are being watched currently. In theory, the panopticon achieves the effect of total surveillance without having to actually surveil constantly, as people alter their behavior as though they were being observed all the time, just in case. He also introduces the 'nonopticon', a model useful for understanding the surveillance of digital data-- subjects are never aware whether they're being monitored because the surveillance apparatus is completely obscured. Third, he introduces the concept of 'sousveillance', or surveillance of surveillers by subjects.

So Wednesday's class began with students' attempts to define privacy-- the concept of privacy is far from absolute. It means different things in different contexts, and is thus difficult to define. One would do well to note that it is constructed by social conditioning. Different cultures have different notions of the level of privacy that one could reasonably demand or claim entitlement to. This complicates discussion of an individual's "right to privacy" because the concept of a RIGHT is usually understood to be fairly universal. In reality neither privacy nor rights are universally understood to mean any one thing.

Vagueness = Customizability

In effect, privacy means what people want it to mean. People use privacy to protect themselves, from whatever they find to be threatening. Privacy is difficult to peg as a 'right' because most rights are defined positively-- you CAN assemble freely, you CAN own a gun, etc. Privacy, in contrast, is defined negatively. To enact privacy is to say that you can NOT be surveilled or recorded in a given situation. However, it's difficult to imagine a cultural arrangement where one would ever be completely free from the gaze of his or her neighbors. Privacy does not exist unless placed in opposition to publicness or display.

Opacity vs. Transperancy

Protection of information is protection of the self. In a completely free egalitarian society there would, in theory, be no need for privacy. The division between selves, between workself and playself, of streetself and homeself, is a form of alienation. Marx theorized that in his unalienated state, man would not play multiple socially determined roles but act as one, holistic, self-- thus one might say that alienation necesitates privacy. If we were truly free and at peace, privacy would be a non-issue. But we aren't that free.

Privacy can cause alienation as well. It is not only the subject, the consumer, that enacts privacy in an attempt to protect his or her self. Corporations enact privacy in the form of opacity with regards to trade secrets, financial information or other data that if proliferated could dent profits or marketshare. Coca Cola protects the secret recipe and Apple locks its computers. As a result the consumer is left to purchase commodities about which he he or she knows next to nothing.

Apparent Surveillance, Hidden Surveillance

In discussions of privacy the Panopticon is frequently invoked-- all subjects know that they may be watched at any time, because the apparatus for surveillance is apparent, though one never knows if they are currently being observed. Some scholars have coined the term nonopticon to refer to technniques of surveillance which do not reveal themselves-- I personally would argue that in our current cultural framework, the nonopticon is nearly a moot point-- though its framework isn't always readily apparent, we can be certain at all times that if someone wanted to observe us, they would be able to. I would argue that the panopticon is so ubiquitous that it no longer requires a symbolic presence in order to make itself apparent. It goes without saying.

One thing that one can not be sure of, however, is the exact extent of possible consequences for the information that interested parties may obtain. Because the surveillers enact a certain amount of their own privacy, one is never completely sure just what observers know. Ironically, it is the same privacy presumed to protect individuals which also prevents them from knowing the extent of their subjectification.

Privacy = Control

Privacy is a form of control. However, their are historical examples of tight control restricting intellectual activity and cultural production. The digital age has thus far been characterized by a number of experiments in transperancy and relinquish of control-- of code in open source projects, or personal information on facebook. Though the negative effects are difficult to pin down, the positive effects have been apparent-- systems of efficient community support have emerged surrounding everything from child rearing advice to the production of computer operating systems. In addition, there are examples of surveillance technologies being used to protect rights aside from privacy-- by protestors to document police response, for instance. This is called sousveillance, surveillance used to protect individuals from the gaze of other surveillance methods.

--James Hodges

Firstly Necrocam is a movie that might have you consider cremation after thinking about how a body decomposes faster when you up the heat in coffin. However after moving past this, the film brings up many different facets of the hacker world. We see hardware hackers, software hackers, gamers, as well as web designers. Beyond just showing that there is an array of hacking that one can partake in, the film also brings up important issues in the hacker world. I found the idea of privacy to b paramount, and perhaps it is because it is a topic that we have recently discussed in class.
We have focused on surveillance and disclosure. Discussing this in terms of what you put on your Facebook, to the right people have to be taped on the streets. But do we, the living, have the right to tape and watch the dead? One of the slogans if you will, of hackerdom is that knowledge wants to be free. In the film we see Xeno asking his father about coffins and the rate of a bodies discomposure once buried, if looked at from a scientific perspective a live feed of a decomposing body can be seen as a means to acquire such knowledge, knowledge that Xeno claimed was not something he was able to find on the internet when questioned by his father. For a hacker it might not be a matter of rights in terms of the personal right, but it can be seen as something that should be public.
Although it’s a plausible argument, it does not make the idea of chronicling the stages of death any more palatable. This might be my personal opinion, but I feel it is almost a mater of culture. Death is a very culture sensitive issue to begin with, people morn differently, just feel differently about the dead. Obviously it would be too far of a jump to believe that necrocam’s are exclusive to hacker culture, but one has to wonder why this comes up along side hackers (aside from the fact that it makes it more plausible as they are technically savvy).
I wonder if the body just seems unimportant to hackers, that it is the mind, and what has been created that holds the significance of a person. Perhaps to watch the body decompose is nothing, its just the hardware, and if the mind and the software can continue on then it really does not seem so obscene. If one takes the story line in the film, it was Xeno’s idea of have people vote on changing the temperature, and while his body decomposed faster when people upped it, never the less his idea lived on in the form of the website that was created.

Noll 1

Chelsea Noll

Dr. Gabriella Coleman

Hacker Culture and Politics
26 November 2008
Extra Credit Response

Ine Poppe wrote Necrocam, a film shot in the Netherlands in 2001, after she overheard her son and his friends discussing the idea of placing a webcam inside of a person’s coffin. The film follows the friendship of two friends, Christine, Xeno, Go, and Bivak. Christine has cancer and decides that since she is dying, when she is buried she wants a webcam, named a necrocam, placed inside her coffin. Christine is then told that her treatments have worked and that she is currently cancer-free. On their way to celebrate with their friends, Xeno and Christine are racing down the street when Xeno is hit by a car and killed. The friends then attempt to convince his parents to honor Xeno’s wishes to also have a necrocam. They vehemently oppose the idea, but the friends proceed to install one anyway, along with a temperature gauge, allowing visitors to their website to either increase or decrease the temperature within the coffin to either slow or hasten the decaying process.
This idea explored by Poppe is not only gross, but also a huge invasion of privacy. Whether or not it was Xeno’s wishes, in a case such as this, when something would be put on such mass display, it is an invasion of his family’s privacy. In our discussion of privacy and its relation to technology, we have openly dialogued about the capabilities technology allows us to avoid previously regarded social norms of privacy. Now, not only can we look up the phone number and address of any person we choose with detailed directions of how to get to their house and satellite picture of it, we can even watch their body decay inside of its sealed coffin.
Privacy is obviously a controversial issue, especially with regards to technology. But just because we have the technology, does it mean we should do it? I don’t think so. I think that steadfast cultural norms, such as the rituals surrounding death (typically private, at least in the way that you don’t broadcast the decay of the body) and the privacy often associated with mourning, should be respected and left out of the equation. Just because it is possible, does not mean it has to be enacted. I think it's another form of netiquette. Whether or not it was that person’s wish, it should ultimately lay in the hands of his/her loved ones that are left behind, whether or not they want to go through with it. They are the ones that must deal with the aftermath of that person’s invasive technological decision.
The idea addressed in Necrocam is not just one of privacy, but of the possibility of uniting two of society’s greatest fears, technophobia and thanatophobia, the fears of technology and death respectively. The combination of the two is an interesting dichotomy that is capable of being explored by interested hackers with the advanced technology of today. But just because they can, doesn’t make it right.

Tiffany Chang
November 26, 2008
Computer Hacking
Prof. Coleman

Necrocam

The current “Face Time” campaign that Dentyne Gum is running claims that our proposed tech-savvy environment is leaving human interaction derelict and human life compromised. The United States Postal Service also rolled out marketing efforts to reposition snail mail in the consumers’ mind; people pour out their hearts and confess shocking secrets to online anonymous forums such as Post Secret; and in more recent and sad news, a Florida teenager used a webcam to live-stream his suicide. What all of these events point to is the undeniable fact that today’s world is dominated by technology, and that relationships are being redefined for our interactions with such digital outlets. Necrocam, a disturbing 50-minute film about live-streaming a corpse’s decaying process, brings to light a horrific reckoning with the realization that this cyberspace and technology is not just a new space of interaction and activity, but that the virtual world is being reinforced daily as an extension of life.

Necrocam opens with a tableaux of this digital world, in which a group of friends embody the wide range of hacker interests: they play video games with vigorous passion, are into robotics and web design, engage in hacking systems, and stalk the internet for interesting finds. Christine is a girl with cancer, who attempts to cope with death in an unconventional way, by proposing that she have a webcam installed in her coffin to track her decay. Christine and her friends pledge to install a camera in the coffin of the first to die. When one of them dies unexpectedly, the others, under pact, fulfill their promise to each other despite the protests of the grieving parents.

What this film illuminates is not merely a gruesome idea, but a notion that cyberspace can be so predominant in a life, as to be able to transcend its abstract state and become something embodied. Cyberspace is certainly separate from physical space, and as such, it has appeared that a digital body has arisen that is very different from the digital body. While Christine and her friends hoped for a way to cope with physical death by producing virtual immortality, such a macabre concept epitomizes just how alive and central the Internet has become to society. By claiming that there is a virtual life to be had, that a virtual life can potentially render more of a legacy than a physical life, Necrocam speaks wonders to our current context. While such a memorial to death is unquestionably disturbing, it is interesting to wonder: if technology is seen as an extension to life, then should it not be logical to see cyberspace as an extension to death?

Adriana Mozzo
On Monday, November 24, our class watched the Dutch film, Necrocam. It was about 4 teenage hacker friends who use technology to confront the mysteries of death.
For the characters in the film, technology is an extension of life. The teens use technology in almost every part of their daily lives. They play computer games, communicate through internet messaging, and record much of their activities with a video camera. So they believed technology should also play a role in death.
It all started with the character Christine who has cancer and believes she is dying. She tells her friends that she wants them to do everything they possibly can to install a webcam that she calls “necrocam”, in her coffin when she dies. On video-camera, the friends pledge an oath (they swear on Bill Gates’ grave) to install the necrocam in the coffin of the first one who dies. Christine later finds out she is entering remission and in a plot twist tragedy strikes when another of the friends, Xeno, is hit by a car and killed. Attempting to honor Xeno’s final wishes, the teens show the videotape of the pact to the victim’s parents. The parents are disgusted with the idea, but the teens go ahead with the plan anyway and dig up the coffin and install the webcam. I think it was interesting to see the parent’s disapproval of the plan as they represented a generation who is still uncomfortable with technology. While the teenagers represent the people who are very intimate with the world of computers and use technology in creative and unconventional ways.
Throughout the semester we have been learning about the hacker culture and their motivations. One common element present in all of the different hackers we have discussed has been a desire to know and understand something completely and spread that knowledge to others. I think the film capture this ambition. The necrocam was an attempt to understand death. The movie ends with internet users viewing Xeno’s dead corpse being eaten away by maggots. The visitors can also vote to adjust the coffin’s temperature. This was Xeno’s idea, before his death, to help understand the decaying process of a dead body. In a sense, this was a way to “hack” death. Changing the temperature allowed users to manipulate the rate at which Xeno’s body would decay. While it was a bit gross, the teens confronted what is often ignored and misunderstood in Western society, death.

The Dutch film, “Necrocam”, watched in class last Monday is a rather thought-provoking piece of work. Written by Ine Poppe, this film narrates the lives of four teenagers—Christine, Xeno, Bivak, and Go—who technology savvy and have a penchant for various aspects of hacking. In an act of comradery, they make a pact to install a permanent webcam device or necrocam into their coffin, streaming the live video of the corpse as it decomposes, onto a web site. Certain that she’d be the first to die, Christine, who struggled with cancer was utterly shaken when her best friend Xeno is killed by a car. As promised, the group of friends places the necrocam inside Xeno’s coffin and stream images of his decaying body, onto a web site for users to see; his parents were strongly against this idea.

At first glance, the idea of the necrocam seems atrocious and disgusting. It is a grave invasion of privacy and a transgression of cultural rituals—death is a serious matter for a majority of cultures and deserves respect. However, throughout the film, the director communicates other notions that should be explored. Most importantly, “Necrocam” further emphasizes how technology is penetrating every surface of life, encroaching onto the most sacred aspects of us. Technology has become such a pervasive medium that the younger generations are highly dependent of it, it seems – the Internet included in the category.

Although the main element of the film, the necrocam, is an affirmation of the extent to which technology has reached, it is also preserves a memory. As was mentioned in class, it is as if the teenagers are hacking death by way of the camera, defying the obscurity placed in front of them once Xeno was gone. Placing the obvious intrusion of Xeno’s coffin and the fact that his parents are strongly opposed to it aside, the act itself can be considered as a way to remember the dead by way of new media. Mourning the dead has transformed and relocated from physical space onto cyberspace. The film’s last scene is a graphic image of Xeno’s face as it is eaten away by maggots, and demonstrates just how successful their act was – their web site reached high numbers of user participation.

The director’s use of color throughout the various scenes was an addition to the overall message of the plot. For the majority of scenes, the characters were set in a kind of dull blue tone, looking very pale and somber. It is interesting to observe that very few scenes are filled with bright colors and light—for instance, the opening scene of online video gaming or the taping of Xeno and Christine as they make a pact. Such particular use of color in the film is manifest of just how prominent technology is in the lives of the young teenagers, almost to the point that it transforms into a source of existence.