The History of Hacking: Stories from the outlaws of network culture

The History of Hacking is an interesting documentary by Discovery Channel which shows interviews and stories of some of the early hackers. It features the must-see story of John Draper, aka Captain Crunch after a whistle found in the cereal box to hack into telephone networks, who is one of the pioneers of hacking.

As Michel Foucault mentioned: “We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.” (See: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings) The counter-discourse of hacking provides the ability to use the existing networks in ways they were not supposed to by the reigning power. Nowadays phone tapping, a way of hacking someones phone line, is legal for the only institution that also has the monopoly of violence, namely the government. Besides the monopoly of violence, there is thus also the monopoly of surveillance through networks.

The cyberpunk movement of the 80s shows a glorification of the hacker as an outlaw: A modern day cowboy who challenges the system and is always one step ahead of it. Swift and uncatchable, almost like a liquid substance seeping through the cracks of the networks. The stories of Philip K. Dick often feature characters that have abilities to unravel mysteries of computer networks. Rick Deckard in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is one such outlaw. A grim person who has an extraordinary ability to recognize humanoid cyborgs.

A real-life outlaw story was experienced by Kevin Mitnick, who was wanted by the FBI from 1992-1995, however shows the criminalization of the art of hacking into networks. He was sent to prison in 1995 for five years and was released in January 2000. The story told in this documentary shows the duality of hacking. It is a kind of voyeurism, but it is also a heroic way to challenge networks and lay bare their vulnerabilities. No wonder many hackers also work as security advisers, Kevin Mitnick is no exception.

Hacking remains popular nowadays, but is no longer restricted to the outlaws. Simple tools to hack Hotmail or Myspace are provided by organized hacking troupes. This poses the question if hacking has lost its romance and has been degraded to a horrible nuisance, or even a nightmare for the everyday user of a network.

The documentary provides a really good basis for everyone interested in the early days of hacking. To see the whole documentary, which also includes an interesting interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on hacking and the early Apple days, check out the embedded video below.

Fiona Raby at the University of Amsterdam: Designs for fragile personalities in anxious times

Room F201C of the University of Amsterdam’s Oudemanhuispoort building for an hour was the domain of Fiona Raby. She presented her ideas on design, which has close links to the design practice of Anthony Dunne. It is therefore no surprise that they also work together as Dunne & Raby on various projects. It is a vision on design that is not of technological futuristic visions, but of the fragile people, but still not pessimistic and depressing, but optimistic. Below is my account of the presentation.

Technological Utopias and Fragile People
According to Raby, the emotional world is taken from the home toward a medicinal state and the result of this shift we are seeing already in society in the growing pill culture. The space for imperfection is becoming smaller and we keep changing ourselves and, through the pill culture, to strive for perfection. This process is about the denial of our fears and anxieties instead of the much need celebration of these imperfections. And if we continue to surround ourselves with a technological utopia, Raby says that we are in fact really fragile people. What is interesting is the frailty of humanity and not the utopian vision.

Raby presents design as a way of problem solving and says that ‘it is at the heart of what we do’. In this way design can provide a counter discourse that revolves around society instead of just design. It is about checking the needs of society, look at its imperfections and in turn use that to solve problems. Don’t create a technological utopia based on a vision with no links to society, but try to use the imperfections instead of ignoring them.

But what happens when these problems become more complex and unsolvable? And how do we go about solving these problems? In this light Raby showed various design examples to emphasize these theories, below is a selection of those. The design project mentioned in the title can be found here: Designs for fragile personalities in anxious times.

Shopping Centre ‘BioLand’
A project by Dunne and Raby that relates to these questions is BioLand, a project worth checking out about a shopping centre that focusses ‘on deeply human needs and how biotechnology will impact on the ways these needs are met and understood.’ According to Raby, the future of the biotech world might be on the outskirts of any city. BioLand can be seen as a sandwich of all these different products that express the desires of what we really want.

Raby mentioned that ‘it is hard to imagine how design and the world of genetics can engage with eachother.’ BioLand is their idea to solve that problem. It is a search for something else than a technological utopia, it is a way ‘to develop proposals for hypothetical products and services which will be used as tools in later stages of the project to facilitate debate between the public and specialists about alternative biofutures.’

The shopping centre consists of seven departments:
1. IVF Land (Passion Conception Centre)
2. BioBank, Utility Pets, Clonetopia.
3. Immortality Inc.
4. ForEverAfter
5. GM Love
6. Future Perfect
7. Clinic

Evidence Dolls
Part of BioLand are the Evidence Dolls (2005) by Dunne and Raby. It is their response to genetics. Evidence Dolls, according to Raby, tries to show that in the future matching will not be about income or status, but about genetic material. The project consists of one hundred ‘specially designed dolls used to provoke discussion amongst a group of young women about the impact of genetic technology on their lifestyle.’ Basically the idea is that you can write on the blank doll and draw how you would like that part styled. Besides that ‘the Dolls come in three versions based on penis size (small, medium and large). A black indelible marker allows women to note down interesting characteristics of their lover. Hair, toenail clippings, saliva, and sperm can be collected and stored in the penis drawer.’

The dolls show a utopian view, the idea of a perfectly composed human being according to our personal standards and without the imperfections. Four single women reflected on the design. ‘Lady 01’ provided the most interesting responses : ‘Isn’t it selfish to pick what is best and not be happy with what nature gives you? I would like to clone this lover as a dog.’ Raby responds on this by mentioning that perhaps we can’t change humans, but we can do anything with the rest around us, such as our dogs.

The Technological Dream Series: No. 1 Robots
Because of lacking funds to actually launch this project, Fiona Raby shows us a short movieclip showing the main idea behind it. Raby says that we ‘grew up with idea of robots that would look out for us,’ and that society pushed robots towards ‘human-like things.’ But on the other hand, computers are disappearing inside our infrastructures. This project looks in between the two views in the form of five types of robots. What is society’s stance against robots, how would the interaction be with robots?

First: The autonomous robot that we have to co-exist with. It is alongside the human and doesn’t contribute much for us. It is completely autonomous and disconnected from us. This is visualized in the form of a person stepping in a circle. The circle does nothing besides just being there.
Second: A nervous robot that is anxious with social security. It senses everything in the room and it is very paranoid about what it is actually sensing. The form is cone shaped.
Third: An object where you stare in (for example an irisscan) which Raby sees as something you stare in, rather than you move through for example a gate at an airport. Interesting here it the relationship between the robot and yourself, before it realizes who you are or not .
Fourth: A robot that is constantly asks for attention and can’t be left alone. It wants to move around, but it can’t, so the human has to have some connection with it. The form is a lamp.
Fifth: This one is about Microbial fuel cells. What if a robot had to be fed in some way through a stomach, would that change our relation to what this thing is?

Mass production and Critical Design?
The aim of Dunne and Raby’s design is a way to reflect which they call Critical Design. What is interesting and made me think about after the lecture is the question if there is any goal to actually implement these ideas into massproduction. But within its meaning, I think Critical Design also opposes real commercial interests which is perhaps more on the side of technological utopianism.

The idea of society shopping for mass produced Critically Designed products at their BioLand is both intruiging and disturbing. But on the other hand: aren’t we already at a point that products placed in society create critical, or as Anthony Dunne calls them, psychosocial narratives of the design? For designers it is interesting to think about the design, for theorists it is perhaps more interesting to look at these psychosocial narratives used en masse in society. How do people actually interact with society and how do they apply their own meaning to products provided by the (forced) technological utopia?

As ‘Lady 01’ said it in Raby’s last slide: ‘Everything comes 10 years later. Usually the general public know about it at the last moment when everything falls apart. It’s too late, you can’t do anything about it anymore because its already here. I think we are being kept in ignorance.’

Google Geoday Benelux 2007 Report

When the invitation for the Benelux Google Geoday 2007, shaped in the form of the Google Maps marker which has risen to fame in the past years, landed in my mailbox it promised to become an interesting day in Amsterdam’s EXPO XXI this Thursday. With presentations by Bernard Seefeld (Google/Endoxon), Brandon Badger (Google) and Remco Kouwenhoven (Nederkaart) in the morning and workshops on Google Earth and the Google Maps API in the afternoon. With a big thanks to the people at Generation Next who were responsible for my ticket in the first place.

Google’s Geo development (Google Earth and Google Maps) has taken a big step in the previous years, with the coming of Earth and Maps there is a definite focus on adding layer after layer of information on the globe. Like graffiti on a wall everyone can apply meanings to the maps made available by the Google Geo team. As Lev Manovich noticed in The Poetics of Augmented Space: Learning from Prada when talking about Augmented Space: The 90s were about the virtual, the 2000s will probably be about the physical. Not the infinite Internet, but the finite space of the physical land. And it seems that Google eagerly agrees with this prophecy. Below is my account of the day.

Keynote by Bernard Seefeld
Dangerous dragons were used in the early days of mapping if parts of the map were not known yet to the cartographer. This is one of the examples Seefeld uses from the early mapping practices, which stands for the improving of the image and the filling of the gaps. The early cartographers did not have the information to fill in the holes so they just drew dragons. Another example given is the map of New Holland, or what is now called Australia. The interesting thing is that the Portuguese probably reached this land first, but the Dutch were the first to draw a map of it and therefore being ‘responsible’ for the discovery of the land (a discovery from a Western perspective, anyway, as the Aboriginees were already there).

Seefeld takes the first example and also the mapping of New Holland, which was not accurate at first to say the least as the shape of the land on this image shows, to the present. He notices that the Google Geo team faces a similar situation in pasting together the best available satellite imagery to create the globe of Google Earth. Sometimes the information is available, sometimes not and in that case lesser detailed imagery has to be used. It is not about drawing dragons, but about improving satellite images.

So now we have an explanation of Google’s basemap philosophy, pasting together a globe in a way that perhaps reminds us of the patched body of Frankenstein. Building on top of that basemap is the next step and this is also the core of the Google Geo team’s stated mission: Organize the world’s geographic information and make it universally accessible and usable. Which is derived from Google’s overall mission statement, which is actually the same but doesn’t include the term geographic.

Instead of discovering new land, like in the age of navigation and in the second example given above, the user is now able to discover new information, the era of the information age. The emphasis here was especially on the enhanced content applied to the base like web links, reviews of places, photographs and featured content. Seefeld actually went as far as too say that the base is nice and the content makes it great. The base is always the same, just like the physical. But it is information and meanings applied to the physical space that make it what it is. The new idea is that meaning is applied with the use of the virtual, leaving aside the physical. Through the geo applications new discoveries can be done in the physical space, as an example Seefeld showed the Google ant; a species that got discovered with the help of geo applications.

But all this information applied to the surface of the Earth requires a way to search the information. This is the territory of the spatial web, which is all about geotagging, KML and more. Making the meanings applied to the Earth searchable. But nowadays discovering the earth isn’t as dangerous as it used to be. The dragons are gone; discovery has become a safe practice. Boring? Perhaps. You can always try the navigation option in Google Maps and Earth and follow the directions, even if it asks you to swim across the Atlantic Ocean.

What is fascinating is the applying of so many meanings to the finite globe with the help of this virtual reality. I asked Seefeld the question what his views are on potential conflicting meanings. He emphasized the role of the user and also said that it is important to have access to all opinions. Getting everything 100% true is very difficult but the goal is to fix it again and again until it is good, with the help of user opinions. This really reminded me of the already infamous Wikipedia wars, which is more about events, persons, etc. while Google Earth is about space and meaning. As Dorling & Fairbairn say in the chapter Alternative Views from their book Mapping: Ways of Representing the World: ‘Maps have always presented pictures of ‘truth’ and just as many people have many different truths, so there are many maps to be drawn.’

“From API to mashup” by Brandon Badger
The key to presenting all these various views on planet Earth and what a website developer can show his/her visitor are mashups. Using the base map and applying content, meaning, to it. Badger emphasizes the essential role of the user and giving us a rather simple and commercial equation: Google’s tools + You = Victory. A more convincing model for the concept of the mashup was that the sum of the two parts makes for something more valuable than just the sum of the two parts: 1+1=2,53542. I guess it is a good thing Time magazine named us as persons of the year, but it also makes us a lot busier with supplying content for Web2.0 applications. When will “we” get too busy with supplying content until the point that we don’t want to do it anymore? It will probably mark the end of Web2.0: The death of the user.

Mashups by Remco Kouwenhoven
On his website Nederkaart.nl Remco Kouwenhoven shows lots of examples of mashups with the use of the Google Maps API. He showed us some of these on the screen, but the one that struck me the most was this map about the air traffic above Schiphol. What it intents to show is the high density of airplanes at Schiphol airport paired with complaints about the noise.

This reminded me of a remark by Mark Monmonier in the Dorling & Fairbairn piece I already mentioned above: ‘Cartographic propaganda can be an effective intellectual weapon against an unresponsive, biased, or corrupt bureaucracy.’ These mashups can provide this cartographic propaganda in real-time. Current issues can be addressed with the help of real-time information gathering. On Kouwenhoven’s website a lot more examples can be seen and it is a definitely worth browsing and importing some of the examples into Google Earth.

The Workshops
After a morning of presentations the afternoon was reserved for us, the user, to start creating content using the tools supplied by Google as Badger pointed out. Although I’m not sure for how long these links will be online you can check out the small assignments of the workhops at these links: Google Earth workshop and Google Maps API workshop. More technical info is also available through code.google.com. There was one jawdropping example in the Google Earth workshop that I didn’t know about, which is an incredibly detailed 3D city model of Berlin. Definitely a must-see.

After spending two hours being immersed in the representation of the physical space on the screen, the pavement on my way to the train station also had some new meaning applied to it. A strange awareness of how easy meaning can be applied to the physical space we navigate each day, or to the places where we live. Being unaware which meaning has been applied in the virtual to the places we call home. What also struck me after this day is the dependence of Google on the user, who is responsible for supplying the content. It makes you think, but for some reason I’m just feeling lucky right now.