It consists of a report about many of the discussions developed the past year in the bricolabs network, including various contributions in the form of a "collaborative narrative" examining what impact RFID and other systems will have on our cities and our wider society.

It was a successful evening, hosting inspiring speeches among the others by Saskia Wieringa, Heri Latief, Max Lane and Yanti, well partecipated on-site as well on-line where many Indonesians watched the stream.

My intervention focused on the intense role that Internet played in the popular uprisings in 1995 that lead to the destitution of dictator Soeharto in 1998. Here you can download the slides titled Warnet Indonesia.

The declarations of Spike Lee are offending us. What he said is demonstrating that he willingly realized a film without taking into consideration the truth of what really happened in Sant'Anna di Stazzema.

Spike Lee has so far refused any dialogue with witnesses of the facts he is representing in his fiction; the old partisans are offended by elements of fantasy in the story, for example when in the movie one of them betrays his Companeros, a crucial moment in the fiction which never really happened in history.

Another offensive point is that the movie suggests the partisans used the civilian population to shield themselves, supporting a rhetoric of war that tries to shed negative light on grassroot civilian resistance against aggression.

In solidarity with all the people who fought and gave their lives for my own freedom, I feel deluded too. I guess this story can go well along with the essay of Rana Dasgupta about Hollywood's revisionism and how it is harming society and its memory.

For the 25th anniversary of the GNU project, which during the years spawned a word-wide movement of hackers engaged to liberate users from mental slavery and corporate monopolies, RMS wrote an important statement about compromises we shouldn't do, explaining why it is more and more important to keep focus on the originating principles and how difficult that is becoming nowadays.

It is getting harder as it goes on, as a big share of visibility generated by our efforts is nowadays in the hegemony of commercial and billion-funded "philanthropic" ventures that are often neglecting to properly represent and respect the social and political aspects of this movement, as well its grassroot nature.

This statement was very much needed, what I understand is that we must keep in balance and well focused on a long term strategy to preserve the fundamental principles of the GNU project alive, protecting them from a growing amount of manipulations, of which a few can still be acceptable and useful to spread our social concerns in multiple contexts.

Federal regulators seized Washington Mutual and struck a deal to sell the bulk of its operations to J.P. Morgan in what is by far the largest bank failure in U.S. history.

This is generating a domino effect of $307 billions in assets, as more banks are following.

Recently i got more insterested in financial systems, looking forward to the day when our generation will finally have a word on new ways to shape economy - and seems that day is getting closer.

We all know about the financial crisis, but what is most interesting is the way the mainstream media are presenting it: hiding failures (as in the WAMU case) and advertising all kind of optimistic initiatives to "save the market", all surprisingly backed by state intervention. The collusion between media and finance leads into a dirty game of misinformation.

Let me remind that it is plank 5 of the communist manifesto reciting:

Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

Are we really up for such regressions?

The dilemma is that, on the wave of their success, they should choose between scaling their production to industrial level or remain artisans and miss to satisfy the growing demand, giving up the opportunity for profit.

I like their statement:

The main reason for refusing (to produce more) is that the monks attach enormous importance to a limited production on a human scale.

Enjoying all the inspiring meanings attached to the definition of human scale in this and other contexts. I just hope one doesn't needs to be a monk to nurture such good principles in life.

That the great artists of modern Western culture managed to produce what they did, despite the danger and intensity of their effort, was due in large part to improvised social forms built around close-knit networks where thought and affect circulated with high velocity, and where it was possible to try out forms of non-conventional human relationships that would not destroy, nor be destroyed by, a life of art.

[...]

In the second half of the twentieth century, many of the functions of these networks were taken over in Europe by institutions (government funding bodies, universities, museums, etc) and much of their excessive feeling was neutralised. This was only a small part of a general process of the time: the absorption of human emotion into bureaucratic channels, and the emergence of a social coolness, an efficiency of feeling. [...] In order to arrive at such a standardised, manageable conception of creativity, much previous knowledge about this field of human activity must be sacrificed.

I went to speak about Cyberpunk culture and how it influenced and will influence younger generations worldwide. Here you can download the slides titled Cyberpunk is not dead which are also linking to the video excerpts shown.

The whole festival was amazing, well realized and with high profile content as the Singing Tesla Coil installation in the middle of the town's square. Cheers to PlanetArt for organizing it so well and choosing such an interesting and visionary topic.

The news given by CNet is really frightening if you think about the dangers faced by citizens in totalitarian, dictatorial and repressive governments. Those that are re-designing the Internet in such directions are responsible for much more (and worst) than a "safe internet". That's really a human rights concern and UN seems to be working against those rights now.

It states that IT's emerging challenge is to help businesses reduce energy usage as prices rise, a familiar vision for all those knowing how the free software movement has traced several "green" patterns with its development.

This achievement is a result of my R&D activity this year.

To better understand the evolution of such languages, might be useful to confront this panoramic with an older account on the same topic, as in 2005 was published another article on the state of the scripting universe.

There are many places in the south where this technology could dramatically improve the quality of people's life.

From February to June 2008, FACIL has noticed sales of proprietary software for more than 25 million dollars. These purchases were made for products offered by large multinational enterprises, with no regard to suppliers in Quebec. These purchases hurt the Free Software suppliers throughout Quebec and are an obstacle to the development of Quebec IT enterprises. FACIL contests these methods as the association believes they are illegal and unacceptable.

Nowadays it is widely known that a strategic Free Software utilization in public administration could create thousands of jobs as well as a significant decrease in software licensing costs. However, Quebec's public administration (and still many others around the World) refuses to even consider and evaluate these options.

You can download the presentation PDF by Kapela and Pilosov from the latest DEFCON hackers conference, although it was a little-known problem since a dozen years, I remember also some security experts at the first hackmeeting demonstrating it on Cisco routers.

I was already planning to update and expand the "culture" section on dyne.org website to feature more "free software art" and Javier's initiative comes right to the spot. Cheers.

Wow, it almost sounds like cold war.

Sounds good :) cheers to Nicole - but please now tell the world how!

Unfortunately there is no manual: just a loud announcement with prizes and national propaganda, while the article talks about a patenting process that is going to take five years before the "secret" is revealed. I hope not.

Today there was a buzz on slashdot, about "New Multi-GPU Technology With No Strings Attached, meaning that another company is trying to break in business with a open-hardware "no strings attached" product.

I think there can be a good market for Lucid Logix and hopefully some future for the GLSL initiative, considering that the current monopoly on access to GPUs is in the hands of Micros... guess who :) appropriating the creations of young asian geniuses as in BSGP by Kun Zhou - with what they call "intellectual property".

I guess dr.Zhou believes they are going to make him rich, what he might not grasp is that his money comes from limiting the legitimate liberties of users and developers who bought graphic devices and never had the opportunity to use them as they want.

With a truly open platform for multiple GPUs (cheaply produced in large numbers as components of consumer products), the computing speed of hardware can dramatically increase. Unfortunately what is already available by ATI and NVIDIA cannot be (yet?) recycled for the purpose.

Some inspiring reflections are emerged, where it seems that most people pirating games are concerned about their quality and tend to pay them when they are really good and innovative.

More in general Cliff shows a very good attitude here: having such open dialogues instead of the same old impersonal corporate attitude help in understanding what we can all do better for ourselves and the people around us.

While pointing you to the link above for the arguments that Pirate Bay puts forward and the relative long discussion thread below, I'll just add something completely different that still seconds Pirate Bay's statement: today lots of people is arrested in Firenze just for sitting around in the street or putting out clothes from their window.

Surely fascism is not just virtual: it definitely becomes real when you see people arrested on the streets for not complying with an imposed conservative idea of decor that denies basic civic liberties in the use of public space.

I wonder how long will take before having dreadlocks will be illegal.

Some of us symbolically climbed vulcanoes around the world, connecting our campfires between the Etna and the Merapi, in a magical networked ritual.

Many thanks go to anyone contributing to this document, we like to think of it as an new open magna carta for all the tribes struggling to go in our same directions, while it will be corrected and expanded in the future with all the contributions we keep on receiving.

Then we'd better settle some plans before that happens: set your nuclear bunker online :) ... well even without a bomb-like event, it might happen that ISP's go for complete commercialisation as it seems some are already planning in Canada.

So please i2p2 and netsukuku and more alternatives: no fooling around, set a roadmap, emergency simulation tests and procedures. It's becoming urgent.

I'll note down my experience, as a "7th generation new media artist"... my feelings are so far best resumed by Bronac and by this excellent report by Brogan Bunt, while I still hope there will be some more discussion around, so I'll just mention two more facts.

My written contribution is not even present in the ISEA catalogue, even if it was selected for publication: Mircosoft DOC was the only format accepted (not pdf, rtf, nor anything else) and this excludes me because of my objection of consciousness to its use. Actually this issue is an extremely important one in several countries especially in the south of the World, but is neglected by the ISEA organisation that uses proprietary formats for all documents in the conference.

Another astonishing thing was to hear Lev Manovich giving a keynote that was basically advocating data-mining in a fancy format. I am horrified to see that the media art scene goes that way (and that's it, if you pay 20k SGD to hear such theories) when it should actually be one of the few critical contexts in respect to this worldwide tendency to keep everyone under control.

Among the few interesting things printed out I've found a list of "Viridian Principles 2.0" at the Luminous Green workshop mentioning as one important Moral Principle prof.Manovich might want to acknowledge:

Every design process is incomplete unless it takes into careful consideration what could be done with the product by a dictatorial megalomaniac in command of a national economy, secret police and large army.

Schade! I never enjoy to be polemical, but the need for criticism is urgent here.

If you are interested in rap, education, youth culture, trance, society and ethnographic researches then you can't miss his work. Unfortunately most English speakers know little because of language limitations.

Anyway here is what can be quickly found online: an interview in Italian (1995), a French article on psychologie sociale and a collection of some of his texts.

His books are really worth to read. His mind will be missed.

Now we should really push FreeJ forward full speed, it will be javascript programmable producer for multimedia content on the web.

We are almost there ;)

I'll definitely have one around to hack, they make it up for some handy little screens (usually 320x240 pixels) that are now also able to do generative video.

project called Nano Data Centers (NADA) as part of the its future Internet initiative.

Now this is a very good plan! i just hope this will actually lead to a working implementation (unfortunately not always true for EU projects), but well the people involved seems capable and several companies are involved too. There is an article on ComputerWorld reporting this scoop more in detail, unfortunately it doesn't acknowledges existing efforts in the same direction, as hive networks or netsukuku for instance:

NADA will seek to build an Internet architecture that delivers data from the edge of the Internet using set top boxes and Peer-to-Peer technology, instead of the network-centric architecture that stores and delivers content from data centers via Internet backbones. NADA is proposing a network of hundreds of thousands of set top boxes, hugely popular in Europe, to be essentially split into two: one side is the user interface side, the other a virtualised Peer-to-Peer storage client that stores and sends media in the same way a data center would.

Libunicap is used for the task, working like a charm. Some more issues to be solved with all possible fourcc color-spaces around, but that's just a matter of time and testing more cams.

If you ever meet me in a coding mood and you have a webcam laying around please offer it for an half-hour testing, it will help :)

I find it a good perspective, especially considering that the most popular GTA4 game has specular similarities: you are an immigrant from Albania starting his criminal career with the mafia contacts of his cousin in the new city he moves in. What is that for a stereotype?

I actually started with the offer RealNetworks manager Rob Lanphier made me in 2002 to buy the MuSE audio streaming software and all dyne.org software house, which I promptly refused as it would have meant to close all the sources as "Real Networks doesn't supports independent efforts".

What this has to do with W3C? well at that time Mr.Lanphier was on the W3C board for the "open" protocol SMIL - a board that, despite being proposing a standard protocol, counted all members coming from closed source companies.

That made it clear to me that W3C collaborators not only were ignoring open source technologies, but were active in investing for closing the development of open source software competitors.

Now a good insight in W3C's faults is given by this article, mentioning we should blame W3C for proprietary web developments.

It would feel much better, being an European, to not know about public funds as the WAI-AGE paying off W3C closed source agenda with our tax money.

A discussion including people from Europe, South America and Middle-East is hosted on the bricolabs mailinglist: while FFII has warned about the Soviet Internet plans in EU, in Brasil people protests against a new internet law proposal whose dangers are explained (in portuguese) by the FSF in Latin America.

It is interesting to see how certain people have prejudices accepting a project that is made out of the well-known north-western "innovation labs", still they might consider that as of now NTK is still a well documented algorithm for its own kind.

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 (H.264 and MPEG4 hardware decoder) is closed source.

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.

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

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

Today was out a new version.

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.

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 ...)

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)

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.

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

"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."

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.

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

Suppatoll! There is a Rijndael-256 hashed SHA256 mechanism to automatically encrypt user's home in there.

Many creative people living in capitalist societies are keen leave or in the worst case suicide as they "lack business sense": someone that shouldn't be forgotten is peer to peer software developer Gene Kan and the troubled life story of Phil Katz.

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.