Virtual Seminar on Chat Control November 22, 2021

Chat Control Flyer

November 22nd, at 11 am SLT (8 pm CET, 7 pm GMT, 11 am PST, 2 pm EST) there will be a Seminar hosted by Caledon Oxbridge University on the topic of ChatControl legislation in the European Union. Participants will gather in the Req Quixote Memorial Hall in the full Sim Caledon Oxbridge Village.

A SLurl to Quixote Hall can be found here:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Caledon%20Oxbridge%20Village/14/171/2003

New to Second Life?

  • Go to SecondLife.com and click “Sign Up” and follow the steps to create your account and avatar.
  • Download a viewer. Either the Default “Linden” viewer or a third party viewer such as Firestorm Viewer
  • Run the viewer and enter your Avatar Name and Password you created when you si..gned up for Second Life and login.

Second Life can have a bit of a learning curve, so avail yourself of several orientation areas to learn how to best use Second Life. We recommend visiting the hosts for this seminar, Caledon Oxbridge Univeristy.

Review: Julian Assange From Hacker Ethic to Wikileaks

Julian Assange: From Hacker Ethic to Wikileaks is an Italian Graphic Novel by Dario Morgante and Gianluca Constantini. I read the English translation.

The Cover to Julain Assange From Hacker Ethic To Wikileaks

The first panels are fields of white, cinematically revealing a city – could be any city in the world. Then we see a CRT with the YouTube homepage transitioning to thick-bordered square panels we see the events of the video later known as “Collateral Murder” play out in comic-book form.

A powerful opening for a powerful story. The story follows Julian Assange’s life using flashbacks and flash-forward to present its engaging story beats as events in Assange’s past give a context for the events portraying his work at Wikileaks. The creators use a motif of hallucination of shadow puppets to portray Assange’s internal dialog artistically but make clear in the forward that this is artistic license used in the storytelling and not based on anything reported about Assange, as when it was originally written in 2011, and there was little knowledge and rumor about Julian Assange For this 2021 English edition by Countershock Press, a new final chapter has been added which brings the story up to 2021 with Julian Assange detained by the United Kingdom Government while the United States Government seeks his extradition.

This story is a breath of fresh air in the tradition of the Italian political novel for me who has been subjected to character assassination of Assange by politicians and amplified by the complicit press who seem to value access to the powerful over the duty of reporting their crimes.

The story articulates Julian Assange’s version of the Hacker Ethic, namely:

First: Don’t damage computer systems you break into.
Second: Don’t change the information in the systems.
Third: Share Information

Julian Assange From Hacker Ethic to Wikileaks p. 17
Julian Assange From Hacker Ethic to Wikileaks p. 17

From these three principles, the story unfolds first as the young computer Hacker, Mendax, exploring systems through his home computer and a modem, to the publisher of crimes of the powerful on Wikileaks. The art is charming, and the story’s pace makes this an easy and engaging read.

The medium of the graphic novel combining illustration and literature has long been a favorite way for me to consume stories, and this tome was quite enjoyable while working as a precis to the events that have led to Assange giving up his freedom to tell the world the truth, and the machinations since of the United States and its allies to silence those that expose their crimes. With the United States refusing to be a member of the World Court, the only way to hold them accountable for war crimes is for journalists to bring forth that which the Military Industrial Complex would rather remain hidden so as to protect their profits through conflict throughout the world at the cost of human lives, warfighters and civilians alike like the 2 Reuters journalists among the 18 dead and 2 children wounded in the video known as Collateral Murder all of who were unarmed.

The people must have the facts surrounding the actions of their government so that they can form public opinion without manipulation. This is the mission of Wikileaks. This graphic novel teaches the underlying philosophy that drives Julian Assange in an approachable manner, and I urge everyone to read this, as he is awaiting his extradition hearing in the United Kingdom.

Free Julian Assange now! Journalism is not a Crime!

Julian Assange From Hacker Ethic is available from Channel Draw either in Print or Free Download

Virtual Million Mask March 2021

Flyer for the Virtual Million Mask March

Every November 5th members of Anonymous take to the streets for the Million Mask March. There are no leaders, everyone brings their own agenda and issues they are protesting for. Anons seek a better world and this kind of direct action is one of the many tools used for change.

In 2021, because many Anons are quarantined due to the global pandemic, and others cannot safely attend a street event. With this in mind, a Virtual Million Mask March is being organized in the virtual world of Second Life.

The information for the Virtual Million Mask March is as follows:

Location: Ahern Welcome Area, Second Life

Use the following SLURLS to attend the March if a sim is full, try the next one.

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Ahern/9/10/41

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Morris/9/248/41

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Bonifacio/247/246/41

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Dore/245/11/41

Time: 12:00 PM & 6:00 PM Pacific Time

For announcements and organizing Join the group, “Anonymous Million Mask March”

(WordPress doesn’t know how to parse this link but your Second Life Viewer will)

secondlife:///app/group/efca679c-55f7-743c-bc02-0447d2621f54/about

New to Second Life?

  • Go to SecondLife.com and click “Sign Up” and follow the steps to create your account and avatar.
  • Download a viewer. Either the Default “Linden” viewer or a third party viewer such as Firestorm Viewer
  • Run the viewer and enter your Avatar Name and Password you created when you signed up for Second Life and login.

Second Life can have a bit of a learning curve, so avail yourself of several orientation areas to learn how to best use Second Life. Once you are in world, you can search for and join the group “Anonymous Million Mask March” and connect to other anons for organizing planning, help, and free items for the march.

You can also purchase a mask to wear from the Second Life Marketplace

UPDATE: We have collected in a Notecard everything you need to plan for & Attend the Virtual Million Mask March in Second Life on November 5th. Everything is completely FREE and FULL PERMS meaning you can modify and distribute it all as much as you want. Join the group, “Anonymous Million Mask March” or contact ZenMondo Wormser to get your own copy of this notecard.

Good luck anons and see you at the Ahern Welcome Area on November 5th!

Gender is a Bogus Criterion too

Set the wayback machine for 1986. I had just checked out a book from the school library by Steven Levy entitled, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.  This book, along with the 1983 Movie Wargames were major influences on the Hacker Johnny Fusion aspired to be, being presented as they were to a young, adolescent demiboy socialized as male along with all the privilege, taught ignorance, and toxic attitudes being male in the 1980s brought.

My well-worn copy of this book

So when I read this tome I was enamored by these heroes of the computer revolution, and the misogyny and sexism went unnoticed as it aligned with what I had been taught my entire life up to that point.

I have not given my well-worn copy a re-read in a while but a tweet I saw came across my feed, and the misogyny and sexism in this work, expressed by the personalities portrayed and editorialized by the author. Consider these two passages from the book:

You would hack, and you would live by the Hacker Ethic, and you knew that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory space. “Women, even today, are considered grossly unpredictable,” one PDP-6 hacker noted, almost two decades later. “How can a hacker tolerate such an imperfect being?”

Steven Levy, 1984, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Dell Publishing

And they formed an exclusively male culture. The sad fact was that there never was a star-quality female hacker. No one knows why. There were women programmers and some of them were good, but none seemed to take hacking as a holy calling the way Greenblatt, Gosper, and the others did. Even the substantial cultural bias against women getting into serious computing does not explain the utter lack of female hackers. “Cultural things are strong, but not that strong,” Gosper would later conclude, attributing the phenomenon to genetic, or “hardware,” differences.

Steven Levy, 1984, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Dell Publishing

What a load of steamy piled-on bullshit!  I am sorry to say that in many hackerspaces and in the tech world, this toxic misogyny is the rule, and its absence is the exception. Women must be twice as good to be given half the credit and train themselves to speak in a lower more “masculine” register as well as other changes to typical feminine characteristics to even be taken seriously in the tech world. Not because feminine traits are not serious, but because sexism is so rampant.

In this same book, Levy often talks about the Hacker Ethic as the core value of hackers, and my young, impressionable brain soaked that up and it has guided my entire hacking career and inspired the name of this blog.  I always liked Levy’s 6-bullet point encapsulation of the Ethic, even if only the first two points (The Free Flow of Information & Access to Computers) seem to be universally accepted by most hackers.  Which the Jargon File defines as “The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing open-source code and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible.”

In Levy’s six-point version, the fourth point reads, “Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.”  The absence of gender as a bogus criterion is a glaring omission.  But given the attitudes of the subjects in Levy’s biographical work, it is easy to see why it was omitted. Also omitted is sexual orientation.  But for a book written in the 80s when queer individuals were still highly discriminated against and oppressed, It is also understandable why it was omitted. So, in good hacker fashion, I have modified and distributed the Hacker Ethic with this patch and bug fix to include them whenever I write it out.  

I am a hacktivist, and it is my view that we are not free until we all are free.  And this means fighting for the liberation of the most oppressed and marginalized members of our society in all the intersections of their oppression. By helping those at the bottom, we help everyone and not just ourselves. “A rising tide lifts all ships”  We must patch our internal source code to eliminate the bugs of discrimination, toxicity, and oppressive attitudes, and replace them with equity and justice so that in transforming ourselves, we can then transform the world into something more just and equitable for all.