Jaromil's Research 2008

The NetFlix is a solid-state video player marketed by Roku, which since today released the full source code of this interesting device that can play out several different formats including HDMI from network video streams.

On the other end, it's been a few months I'm hacking on the TViX 4100SH model to get synced video out of multiple connected boxes, but despite the lively community around it and the fact the system is based on Busybox/ucLinux, it's SigmaTel playback chipset is closed.

This user-to-user could make a nice acronym as U2U :)

Anyway, i got the scoop today from Jeff, something called CSpace is out and it sounds like a good plan for a cross-platform framework mainly based on python...

...to provide a connect(user,service) primitive, similar to the sockets API connect(ip,port). Applications built on top of CSpace can simply invoke connect(user,service) to establish a connection.

on my list of software to be tried, just besides i2p and syndie.

The homebrew scene on the nintendoDS console unfolds rapidly: here createdigitalmusic.com gives an overview of NDS music apps, among them a very interesting implementation of WiFi MIDI to remotely control instruments.

People at Remain calm maintain an updated list of NDS music homebrew.

More than being a bright idea, it is well implemented by Johnny Lee using tools available on the consumer market. I place my bet this is envisioning the future of video on theatre stage.

Back in Amsterdam I'm getting worried about the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a big threat for free software and a tremendous step backwards in media policies. Let's stop it!

Tmp/lab hackers in Paris have been releasing this amazing hack consisting of an MP3 file that can lock/unlock the wheels of new generation shopping carts.

As a small break from the HSF today I've visited the Kosmopolite graffiti convention in a park of Bagnolet. Very good mood.

Today I've reached the HSF2008 on site in Paris, just in time for the presentation of NUI group on how to build your own multi-touch screen. And there is even an open source library, to be integrated soon in FreeJ.

Today Jamie pointed me out this case of a jailed animal rights activist whose only crime was to setup an anti-corporate website.

A similar case is found on Indymedia Antwerpen where an activist documented the responsibility of a hunt party firm in elephant slaughter, the firm followed with a dangerous lawsuit.

Even before racist laws, nazi regimes as the NDH declared as a crime the act of criticising the state. And guess what, now that corporations count more than the state itself...

Since today FreeJ is one of the first FOSS applications streaming and recording Ogg/Theora video on OSX.

Thanks to some good time spent together with Xant and V@ne, there is now a ready to install binary of FreeJ4leopard that runs on Apple computers with Darwin/OSX 10.4.

Only limitations so far: no live video input from webcams, no live audio input from mic/line.

Now also for British law, since an appeal court ruled that mod chips do not violate copyright laws, declaring innocent an Xbox mod chip re-seller importing from Hong Kong to the UK.

My BBS fetishism today lead to spreadpoint (or at least what's left of it), with a nostalgic ghost list of all disappeared cyberpunk holes. If you're 0ld sch00l you should have phoned (ehrm, boxed?) at least one of them, eh!

Hack-a-day launches today some good ideas about recycling photoviewers into video screens, there is also an hacked PSone monitor and most important an open source library called phack.

I think my next suitcase computer is going to have a screen ;)

I've just found out about Leo4All, a modified Darwin/OSX system with wider hardware support for homebrew apples.

The minimum requirement of SSE3 enabled CPUs (core duo and such expensive new stuff) is a show stopper, still it opens interesting horizons, while some former Apple employees think they are a clone now.

I didn't reached to make it work on my recycled hardware, I hope someone does.

Frontiers scouts and border crossers is the topic for the Sarai Reader 07, among the others two good articles by Solomon Benjamin and the No One is Illegal collective.

Tickling interests for migrant issues, another recent publication is Tekno guerrilla by Fran Ilich.

All worth reading: migration is definitely an hot issue for our century, eh.

After our successful coding sessions we tagged the new FreeJ 0.10 release, publicly announced and demonstrated at the LPM VJ festival in Roma today.

I'm just out from 2 intense weeks in Milano, where I've spent a total of 24 hours together with students of MA course Digital Environment Design in the new Academy of Fine Arts.

Here is an abstract and bibliography of the course elaborated on Art, theories and techniques of Free Software.

Freeframe developers have updated the video plugin API to use OpenGL and hardware accelerated shaders. Sounds cool, the FFGL SDK is online including sources for example implementations.

It appeared online a blog with photos, audio, materials and interventions about the HACK.Fem.EAST exhibition in Berlin.

I've met Super Bertram in Linz last year: a robotic snowpuppet living an interesting life roaming around on the back of its inventor. It also has a phone on it, so you can receive calls from people people that see you in the video stream; it's all open source, made with cheap and recycled materials, very funny and useful to connect happenings.

It might sound gross, but still i consider it a very interesting development on which NASA is focusing and even before them the Russian space agency: obtaining drinkable water from urine. Here some info on Visionpost (italian), USA Today and Wired.

I've just finished updating the website on nimk.dyne.org about my research and development activities in the Netherlands Media Art Institute, complete with yearly reports - 3 years now, still counting.

I won't hide it is my ambition to establish a R&D department focusing on Media Art in the institute: that's just an humble start, up to the readers to judge how useful such a department can be.

8 years is a lot for us: that's how old is dyne.org. Struggling for survival since the beginning and until now, one thing at least we made sure in all these years, that nothing got lost. So today I reached to fix the mailinglist web archives, now fully browsable online, searchable back to the origins in 2000.

Hack-a-day reports about the upcoming second appeal for a court-case in Germany against Skype, for its violation of GNU GPL license in redistributing free software in a closed source product as the SMC phones.

Definitely the biggest coding session on FreeJ ever, going on now since two weeks, will take some effort to round up the change-log. Cherry on top: Caedes (apricot project) got interested in using FreeJ as a 2d renderer inside Crystal Space and Blender, so now we have python bindings and full opengl support.

It is finally obvious to many that Negroponte's leadership on the OLPC project is deleterious, so he is left alone while several hackers are discussing about continuing the real development on Sugar.

It's growing fast, among the new features: freeframe plugin support, wiimote controller, sound parametrisation, openGL rendering and a huge javascript api cleanup are in the making.

As Mr.Goil arrived in Amsterdam we started our FreeJ hacking week, but first of all he blessed me with his knowledge of GIT.

I'm so excited about this new versioning system, finally delivering what Subversion promised: now we can really challenge widely distributed development.

Of course git.dyne.org is now up & running.

Annet Dekker has published a recent interview on Time Based Text: another chance for revenge of literature in new media art :)

I'm receiving lots of positive feedback about it, thanks!

Going to the Taxi-to-Praxi workshop in London, plenty of documentation on the next layer website.

Armin Medosh published the Babylon by Bus interview we've made in 2006.

It's hard to make me blush, but he got almost there.

August has just written a practical how-to for subtitles rendering, with particular attention at the quality when included in DVD, see aug.ment.org/dvd.

Very interesting to meet Robin Gareus here at NIMK, while he is collaborating with Lilia Pérez Romero to realize her new interactive installation - he pointed me out his project xjadeo: a jack video monitor for synchronisation over the jack transport.

Europe Rejects Plan To Criminalize File-Sharing

Seems that campaigns as I Wouldn't Steal went through.

I'm happy to have contributed somehow with the Piracy and Privacy campaign last year.

Taking off tomorrow for Cairo, will be active on workshop and screenings hosted by the Contemporary Image Collective.

While still in Amsterdam I won't miss the Perfect Present Continuous screening tonight.

At the Territorial Phantom opening in NIMK I've met Akos. We know about each other by the affinity of the GNU GPL audio streaming software we have written, it has been striking to meet him in person.

I took the time to read through this publication by Vecna (in Italian) about security, privacy and psychological effects of terrorism: written one year ago, still a very interesting analysis from the point of view of a young security expert.

Now I'm looking forward to the acts of the upcoming PRISE conference: policies on privacy and security are core issues for Europe (which might be later spelled as Your-Rope around my neck).

Kuros announces the release of politube.org website code under the GPLv3 (Free) license under the software name Tubix and it's written in Ruby.

In two interesting recent threads here and here slashdot geeks discuss the "Church of Apple" and its zealot users.

Today's good finding is one of the most arcane-like generational language engines¹ ever seen online.

1. meaning "Alienate ungenial go gangrene." or "In an eager, negligent analogue."

The /tmp/lab launches a call for papers for the first HSF:

The goal of this festival is to bring together people from many cultural and technological backgrounds and from different Hacker Spaces and Autonomous zones in France and Europe (and from beyond, if they can attend) to share and show what's going on.

Easy going, no big sponsors or people lecturing the masses, I bet it will bring together an interesting round of people, as the spirit of the /tmp/lab echoes the independent and autonomous way hackers like to do things, looking at perspectives in art and creativity.

It was 2003 when at the first Piksel conference Fukuchi Kentaro show us how to paint on a wall using a laser pen, a projector and a webcam.

Shortly after, the Graffiti Research Lab made it funky and hit the streets with the Laser Tag.

Now another Tag Tool is stepping on the scene, open in software and hardware, soon presented at Breakpoint 2008 - and I bet we'll see more after that...

The Schrödinger project has announced that it has made available the world's first high performance implementation of Dirac.

The british Oyster card cracked, as reports Bruce Schneier and various other sources. Meanwhile the Guardian reports MI5 plans to datamine the whole public transportation database (not just ask single routes).

As proximity to suspects can be verified in relation to anyone, this will result in proliferating more suspects, which also multiplies the possibilities for false positives.

PAD.MA is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download.

The PAD.MA project is initiated by a group consisting of three organisations from Bombay: Majlis, Point of View and Chitrakarkhana/CAMP, plus oil21.org from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore.

More than a good initiative: there is even some interesting new code. Jan reports:

Pad.ma is build with TurboGears, the site is using a lot of javascript, some jquery, data is stored in mysql and search is done via solr. GStreamer, mod_annodex and several other Ogg related tools are used for the video backend.

the code is gpl and can be found at https://wiki.pad.ma/browser or https://wiki.pad.ma/wiki/Source

Erik de Castro Lopo updates us about improvements of his Secret Rabbit Code for audio resampling. I guess this new release will refine audio quality of the majority of GNU/Linux audio applications around.

An interesting article came out yesterday on the New York Times, providing a comprehensive survey on "consumer profiling" and privacy.

Graphs are interesting, I just wonder what makes Yahoo so evil.

The Blender community strikes back with a new project, an open game that looks very promising: Apricot.

Caedes has been hacking for a while on the integration of Blender and Crystal Space so Apricot will mark its achievement.

Nestography is truly enjoyable digital poetry, especially for nostalgic gamers. Some game stereotypes are deeply rooted in '80s culture, I'm sure those who have grown up playing in those years will feel the tickling. The artist writes:

The problem with video games is that most of them are trying very hard to engage you without making you feel anything [...] . The problem with me and video games is that I want them to love me as much as I love them and they can't, so I have to fill in the blanks myself. - Adam Mathes

The social networking platform Facebook does apply censorship of contents referring to its competitors.

I posted a link to Yuwie:

Yuwie is a new social networking website that plans to pay its users (sharing with them the income of advertisement) and does not claim any ownership rights on the materials uploaded.

As more social networking tools are coming up, I'm wondering if we'll stay lazy and owned by facebook, or move...

which was automatically removed from the post as soon as i pressed submit.

A new issue of the Italian hacker's e-zine is out, with the title "Weaponize your SELF", you can download it from here.

While Sony openly complains about the EEEPC market breaker, here we go with a new sub-200$ model: the Elonex.

As people switches to LCD flat screens, we have loads of them lying around: here are some ideas on what to do with old monitors.

Here we go with Philippe Langlois re-launching my post with hacks on-going at tmplab in Paris:

• OLPC Sugar on EEEPC
• Backtrack3 on EEEPC
• Sugar Xubuntu on EEEPC

After extensive testing in my own daily usage, the "dyneee" kernel release is ready for public. I'm just trying to upload binaries and sources (58MB in total) from hotspots in Yogyakarta... not so easy indeed. Once completed it will all be online on ftp://ftp.dyne.org/eeepc

This is just a start (the kernel actually) for dyne:ee GNU/Linux (or dyne:eee?). Main improvements on EEEPC factory default kernel include:

• Wifi monitor mode (for wireless wardriving, kismet etc.)
• Highmem RAM (to make full use of >1GB RAM extension)
• SquashFS (allows use of read-only compressed filesystems)
• CFQ scheduling and 300Hz operation (improves usage speed)
• DM-Crypt (supporting encrypted filesystems with cryptsetup)

Alberto Escudero-Pascual announces the release of second edition of book on VoIP and wireless in developing regions, two free online resources are on voip4d.org and wndw.net.

Meanwhile Jacob Appelbaum disclosed his collective research project with alumni of ITP Princeton University: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys.

After all, it was worth to bike through all Jogja to get online today.

Jeff Moe (BLAG developer) writes:

The official "vanilla" Linux kernel from Linus that gets distributed on kernel.org has non-free¹ software in it. [...] After talking to Jaromil from dynebolic, looking at the gnewsense approach (which has to remove additional non-free blobs that ubuntu adds), and debian's approach I felt a single clean source tarball would be of benefit to everyone who wants a truly Free Linux kernel. This new cleaned kernel source has been dubbed "linux-libre" and I am its janitor. It is available here: ftp://ftp.blagblagblag.org/pub/BLAG/linux/kernel/v2.6

Yep, someone gotta do it. Future d:b releases will be based on the Linux-Libre kernel.

1. http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/free-sw.html

...when there is Gambas? A FOSS visual programming environment that is simple, well documented, translated in many languages, working on all platforms and most important: free.

Today was out a new version.

More slashdot threads coming up on the topic Facebook, Google, and Intellectual Property.

Some time ago i wrote on the bricolabs mailing-list, after wondering about a possible new search engine architecture:

[...] the possibility is open for a campaign against "illegitimate indexing" claiming the rights to index your own data instead of letting a third-party monopoly like google doing it (which right now we all let, because we need to exist) [...]

something like: i will not be data-mined! or go data-mine your own garden! :)

The issue of DRM in libraries should be related by the question: who has the right to index public libraries? And here we go with the local DRM Elimination Crew having a successful demonstration out of the Boston Public Library.

Quoting a comment by Migraineman:

Luke is sitting alone at his computer. He nervously inserts a linux Live CD into the disk drive and reboots. His roommate, Chad, enters from the kitchen.

Chad: Whatcha doin', Luke?
Luke: [nervous] Nothing!
Chad: Looks like you're installing linux.
Luke: It's just a Live CD.
Chad: You know, I've been into linux for years now.
Luke: Really? I'm just ...
Chad: Yes?
Luke: God, I can't believe I'm saying this ... I'm ... I'm a little dual-boot curious.
Chad: Oh. Let me show you how to properly set the boot parameters on that Live CD you've got
(cue the "bow-chicka" music ...)

http://incident.net/theupgrade/economie0/conferences.htm

Should have been interesting... even not being there I've manage to virtually introduce two friends:

• 21:00 Philippe Langlois
• 22:00 Hans Bernhard (UBERMORGEN.COM)

Hive Networks street radio setup is out!

Cool, should be posted on hack a day.

Seems that urban planning discussions are coming up in the public this year in Europe - finally! - I wonder if any squatter will be talking to masses.. Momo? :)

First was Amsterdam at De Balie where this interesting conference by Nader Vossoughian about Otto Neurath Information and the Global Polis

(psst. psst. I have a secret passion for Austrian architects, sshh..)

Then soon the Art of Rent is happening in London.

Meanwhile a spectacular gentrification tragedy is going on in Istanbul, for the gypsy neighbourhood of Sulukule.

HasciiCam is featured as a funny webcam software tool in this article on Linux.com. Mmh. Should really find the time to update that software eh.

Over and over again, still should fix things in freej's build system (rusty autoconf/automake), which takes even longer than writing actual code for it.

I recall a mail where Graham Todd suggested me waf, should really have a look at it soon or later.

A Chinese professor is suing Google and Yahoo for removing all mention of him in China.

"Google and Yahoo, of course, have agreed to play by local rules in China, upsetting many. Legally, it would seem like this suit has little chance of success - but I doubt that he cares about the legal result. What this actually does is to call attention to his plight - and on that front, it's clearly a successful strategy."

Some people says in 2008 we'll witness the rise of semantic web services and the commitment of Reuters to tag the world seems to confirm this prediction.

This top down semantic web approach suggests the Quillian model is relegated to bottom-up and therefore easily neglected (oioioi!)

So far I kind of like Morla as a client-side application to let anyone edit RDF files easily.

I've Found some juicy documentation, mirrored here http://korova.dyne.org/i0.ieee.pdf

Porbably It would be productive to get in touch about http://netsukuku.org

com! - Das Computer-Magazin would like to put the free-/ test-version of Dynebolic 2.5.2 on covermount-CD. It will be distributed with the special issue "Security" of com!

Suppatoll! There is a Rijndael-256 hashed SHA256 mechanism to automatically encrypt user's home in there, not bad eh ;)

Slashdot reports the suicides quoting an article on Wired, but what is most interesting is the discussion thread: I don't find it difficult to believe that creative people living in capitalist societies are keen to suicide as they "lack business sense".

To complete the picture about IT developers "badly coping with business sense" and then suiciding, here is someone I always like to remember, Gene Kan:

• http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,53704,00.html
• http://www.news.com/2100-1023-942180.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kan

Anyone else i forgot here? oh yes, Phil Katz

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Katz

An interesting study has been published about google monopoly on heuristics of information.

A research team led by Prof. Hermann Maurer, chairman of Graz University's Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media, argues that Google is turning into a new version of George Orwell's "Big Brother" - creating unacceptable monopolies in many areas of the worldwide web.

Not only online, but also in real life: most of my hacker friends received offers to be assimilated. And me too, in December 2007 I said no to Google asking me an interview for a software engineer position at Google Search in Europe. I thought that even accepting the interview would have meant data-mining my brain.

A recent article about the "futurist" philosopher and venture capital Peter Thiel http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook

I've been writing a long mail on the Spectre discussion list about freedom and licensing of tools and art, together with my contribution to the Content in Context publication it might be worth to reformulate all this into a new expiration..