Oblomovka

2004-05-19»

“A revised version of the Pratimoksha (Buddhist Monastic Code) was released on Monday March 31, 2003 in Seoul, Korea, which is one of the Mahayana Buddhist countries of Asia. This version has been compiled by the venerable Thich Nhat Hanh in the International Buddhist Practice Center called Plum Village in France. Thich Nhat Hanh and his monastic delegation are currently on a teaching tour in this country.”

44. A bhikshu who has his private e-mail account with the result that he spends an inordinate amount of time in making unnecessary communications or communications which foster attachment commits an offence for which he must express regret.

…

46. A bhikshu who plays electronic games including those on the computer, commits an offence for which he must express regret.

So many new sins, so many regrets.

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2004-05-18»

Let’s see if this works. I’m writing a small piece for the New Scientist on RSS, and I wanted to chat with people who read more than 400 RSS feeds daily. So – Robert Scoble? Frank Arrigo? Jay McCarthy? George Kelly? Phil Wolff? Are you guys really reading this, along with hundreds of others? Would you like to talk briefly about it today? Get in touch!

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So here’s what I’m doing with my gmail account: I’ve set the filters to archive everything as soon as it comes in, and I’m now forwarding all my mail to it. So it’s not so much a mail reader, as google for my mail archive. That’s something I’ve been after for a while.

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2004-05-17»

My favourite emails these days are the ones from a lady reporting transmissions from the Virgin Mary who prophesies (sometimes with her son, Jesus) really quite specifically about the dangers of flag-burning, the Unholy Ray, and the devilish communist threat of Russia.

Do not be deceived, My children, Russia is not free. It is a cosmetic act to delude you. Lenin and Stalin used the same tactics, My children. Why do you not learn from your errors? For it is their plan to subdue you, once they get the billions that they need in aid, to bring up the economy and buy more armaments. (Our Lady, June 18, 1992).

How sneaky is that? The cc: list for the people who get this includes loads of bishops and cardinals. Good god, think how much crank mail you must get if you’re an bishop. And how do you write a spam filter that catches this stuff, but wouldn’t give a false positive if you actually received an email from Jesus? I hope the Christ worked out some sort of secret sign before he ascended, because this false prophet business is just going to get worse and worse pre-rapture. Spam; a sign of the end-times. Mail.app for Apple discards this stuff as junk; Spamassassin isn’t so sure.

As the prophecies go, I like this one:

CHASTISEMENT DELAYED

Veronica – Our Lady said that the Chastisement has been delayed

It’s sort of like a rail announcement, isn’t it?

I think that will be the new open threat in our house. “Your chastisement has been … delayed. This time.”

I’m currently delaying a fair bit of chastisement myself right now. I’ve been working through a lot of the Lifehacks stuff. It was all supposed to be very anthropological and objective, but now I realise that my position as hyper-disorganised person peering in isn’t going to work out. Mainly because I’m currently being far too disorganised to actually get this done.

My horrible dawning realisation is that to do lifehacks stuff justice, I’m going to have to experiment on myself.

Our Lady of the Postponement, have mercy on me!

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2004-05-02»

I have no idea why I haven’t mentioned this before: I’m speaking at two conferences in June: London’s NotCon and Los Angeles’ LayerOne. Both are shaping up to be pretty fantastic.

First up is NotCon, which is the mutant monster one-day convention that sprang out of our post-Emerging Technology ‘ConCon’ summaries. I’m going to toss a coin about what I’ll be speaking about here. If I’m chicken, I’ll do an updated reworking of my Emerging Tech talk “Lifehacks”. If feel braver, I’m going to dredge through four years of trying to mentally inhabit Silicon Valley and the UK tech scene simultaneously, and see what horrors emerge. ConCon is on Sunday, June 6th at Imperial College Union. Price at the door, but it should be pretty cheap.

The Lifehacks stuff will be at the core of my LayerOne talk. This convention looks to be shaping up really well. Two of the smartest and most lateral-thinking security folk I’ve meant, Dan Kaminsky and David Hulton are speaking on their current secret projects. There’s presentations on at least four of my current and/or long term obsessions – emergency broadcast networks, the EFF’s current take on the DMCA, geek sub-culture viability, and Eldritch Global Banking Conspiracies. All for $40. I hope I can live up to the standards of the rest of the line-up.

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2004-03-24»

So there’s a guy who is sharing our home Wi-Fi connection. Which is just fine – we have, most seconds of the day, bandwidth to spare, our connections are pretty end-to-end secure (remember kids, trust no-one). We leave out AP open all hippy-style for exactly this reason.

I know he’s out there, because he shares his iTunes via Rendezvous and I have once seen him on my Rendezvous iChat Window.

There’s a reason I’ve only seen him once. He messaged me to say “Hi?” and I replied “Oho! Who is this hiding in my network?”. As everybody with a dash of social sense told me, that could be perceived as being a bit scary, and he immediately signed off. I’ve never seen him again, until today when I spotted his iTunes collection. His name’s Matt, and he’s the only person I know who bought the Daredevil soundtrack album. (Well, “know” is perhaps too strong a word, given that’s *all* I know about him.)

I’m trying to work out the politest way of saying “Hello neighbour”. So far, I’m sharing a bunch of fake music libraries called “Come say hi on ichat!” and “Are you across the street or next door?”. Still sounds a bit creepy, but can you do?

No response yet, but judging from the crappy streaming from his laptop, he’s got a pretty weak signal. We could probably fix that with some judicious aerial re-alignment. If only I could get in contact with him. And, dammit, I want to borrow that album. Or at least talk to the only other person in the world who liked Daredevil.

Practical upshots

Idea for Freshmeatable app: a program which scans DHCP allocations and tells you when somebody joins your network. For extra points, packet sniff their traffic until you’ve built up a reasonable profile of their email address, IM screenname, homepage, etc. Bounce all that into your favourite social networking app and pull out a picture, and other privacy-leaked data of who you’ve got on your network.

This is sort of like Kevin‘s wardating idea. Wardating involves sniffing for IM packets on shared wireless cybercafe networks, and then IMing the cutest people and ask for dates. Kevin is cute enough to get away with this.

My version is for people who don’t go out much, and lack the social skills to strike up conversations event with people who owe you a favour, and are already practically in your living room anyway. Warcocooning?

Maybe you could write it as a plugin forDashboard. Clues from strangers!

(Moral and legal conundrums of sniffing people who are using your network are left as an exercise for the reader.)

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2004-03-23»

So I’ve been considering getting a Vonage VoIP phone for home. They seem like a pretty good deal for $16.00 a month, and now I’ve found instructions for using your Vonage number via a softphone on the laptop when I’m not at home, the deal seems even better (I always felt I’d look a little stupid talking on a normal-sized wired phone at conferences. Sort of like bringing out one of those old candlestick models and yelling “OPERATOR!?” into it in a restaurant.)

The issue most mitigating against going Vonage, though, is that I get my connectivty via DSL – which means I’d have to keep my old phone anyway. It feels a bit like I’m being held in some awful Catch 22 by the phone company here.

So I was suggesting to Quinn that I get my revenge by getting a mobile phone with an all-you-can-eat data plan, getting a pocketPC softphone, and then just talking over that. Admittedly, it’s the sort of revenge that involves going to a lot of effort and actually paying your enemy rather more money in order to get some sort of artificial symmetry in how much you’re screwing each other.

But isn’t that what revenge is all about?

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2004-02-17»

ConCon rocked. Well, the audience rocked. I was my normal shambolic self, constantly asking the air whether the video and audio were working as people frantically tried to tell me by shouting and waving into my blind, unhearing compere’s face. We survived.

The speakers were great, too. Lightning talks are a lot harder than they look, but everybody seemed to have a good sense of when to get on, and when to get off. I even got an echo of the same kind of info overload that etech brings on from the post-talk discussion, as people stumbled around recovering from 12 dense talks in less than 90 minutes, meeting new and old friends, excitedly talking about Jonathan’s social networking security exploits (the guy from Orkut was very intrigued), and munching on the pizza and free food Marc commandeered.

Next up: ConConUK!

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2004-02-16»

Could you bring it along to ConCon tonight? The VGA lead they have doesn’t quite reach to the projector from where we’ll be putting the laptops, so we’re going to try and stick some together to cover the gap.

Failing that, we’ll go for World’s Longest Chained Video Cable.

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2004-02-15»

Will Davies has a very good post on the nature of gaming a system, the immunity of entrenched political systems to “hacks”, and political differences between the US and the UK.

There’s a lot here I agree with. But there are many places where my conclusions veer wildly in the opposite direction from Will’s. The greatest of these is probably the subtlety of the term “hack”, which has more delicate and deeper undertones than Will imputes.

Hacking is one of those words which people spend many long evenings arguing over. It’s a word that a very diverse sub-culture has hung all its ethics and all its aesthetics upon. But it’s not concept so broad as to be empty of any meaning. As the Jargon File (which is I think best described as a pretty successful, 16 megabyte definition of this one word) quotes Phil Agre in the chapter The Meaning of ‘Hack’:

The word hack doesn’t really have 69 different meanings… In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context.

I think one of connotations has some application to Will’s other points, and highlights our differences well.

Will says that “hack” means “simply means studying something in it’s respective parts, to work out how it functions as whole”. That’s one aspect, but clearly there’s a more active sense to the word too. Hacking security, hacking Python, hacking politics are all much more intrusive than mere analysis.

In fact, in some contexts, hacking sounds far more like the term Will explicitly contrasts with it: gaming.

Someone who hacks, say, a social network can be doing something very close to gaming a social network: they can play tricks, like creating Fakesters, or map it out and find correspondences which they can then exploit.

What’s the difference between gaming a system and hacking a system? Neither break the explicit rules, both exploit them in unexpected ways.

The difference is that gaming generally breaks the game. A good hack extends the game.

People often say that what separates a hack, in its strong secondary sense of a practical joke, is its harmlessness. The canonicalMIT hacks were all brilliant, sneaky, unexpected and hurt no-one. Part of this harmlessness, I think, comes from the recognition that in a hack, you don’t destroy the existing structures of the game you’re playing (whether the game is protecting the fragile dome on Building 10, or the content of a lecture. Practical jokes can be controversial when not everyone agrees that they were harmless: a truly great hack is one where everyone can appreciate them, even those who are supposedly the victims.

How does this apply to Will’s other points? Will is developing, I think, a set of connections between gaming and coding. That you can only game explicitly defined code, and that codifying something leaves you at risk of being gamed . And if you try and artificially model something that isn’t following your rules, you could easily end up playing your own private game. So you’re a Howard Dean supporter: you think you’re creating a groundswell of support that will sweep you to power, when in fact you’ve just worked out a way of filling a pub full of people who think the same as you. You’ve made some new rules, but they’re not the rules of the current game. You’re just playing some other game that has no impact on the result.

I think this is a useful point of view. It’s very hard to build any system that isn’t easy to game: and its a clear sign that a model has failed to represent reality when the simulation can be gamed far more easily than the real world. Where I disagree is when Will says this:

However, politics already has code. It has laws, rules, winners, losers and points. You can already ‘game’ the political, by packing the Supreme Court or using ancient constitutional amendments to defend a (frankly corrupt) system of campaign finance. Building new political codes and rules without taking down the old ones (which is what Dean’s campaign did) gets you precisely nowhere.

As a rule of thumb,you can: code the social (then game it), game the political, hack neither.

I’m not sure what definition Will is using for hack here, but I’d argue that hacking politics is the definitive non-revolutionary way of executing reform. A hack of politics is to fix the game, using its own existing, broken, rules of the game.

As with practical jokes, it sounds like the difference between gaming and hacking is in the eye of the beholder. A great hack, though, isn’t like this. A great hack takes all the existing rules – written and unwritten – and and sets up a new play which is so clearly representative of the consensus underlying the codified game that no-one can argue with it. It doesn’t break the game, it extends it.

Let me give the example of FaxYourMP – not just because I’m tangentially involved in it, but because Will gives it as an example of an effective piece of political social software.

We crafted FYMP explicitly as a hack on the political system. It’s aesthetics and techniques are drawn directly from the hacking tradition (in the sense of the Jargon File, not the sense of the computer cracker of course).

FaxYourMP provides something which some (by no means all, but some) MPs really don’t want – a low-cost way of hassling your elected representative.

It’s really hard to object to this, because the rules of the game state that MPs represent their constituents. Over time, other forces – party political and the media mainly – have bypassed those rules so that some MPs do very little constituent tending. This is a gaming that has been very hard to stop. Bad MPs have a lot of excellent techniques for avoiding their constituents. Some are just inaccessible. Some have a great excuse that they try to meet with their constituents, but those apathetic buggers simply refuse to turn up to the surgeries.

We knew that the inaccessibility excuse was just rubbish. If Mr Blair gave your MP a call, they’d be very accessible very quickly. Mr Blair isn’t your MP’s boss, by the stated rules of the game. You are.

We thought that these days, surgeries were a bit of an anachronism. You shouldn’t have to wait until your MP breezes back to your hometown for a chat. It should be incumbent on MPs to improve contact with their voters, not hide behind old systems.

We also knew that all MPs had fax machines, because that’s what the infrastructure of party organisation required. (Secrets of FYMP – our original, more radical plan, was to make it an SMS to pager gateway. Tony Benn describes Labour backbenchers as being “pager-controlled”, and we thought – ooh, we want a bit of that.)

By setting up the fax gateway – a dirt cheap tech fix, we took those excuses away, and didn’t provide any new ones. We tried to rig the forces that broke the MP/constituent link to work for us. When a fax machine doesn’t work, it’s not us that has to fix it. It’s the whip’s office, who need to keep in touch with their MP. When MPs don’t reply to faxes, we don’t do anything. We just alter the public statistics, which the press read and respond to.

But best of all, it’s really hard for people to complain about our existence, because we’re working within the rules of the game. In fact, people now think we’re *part* of the rules of the game. A sizeable minority of people using FYMP think we’re a government service, and get angry at us when they’re MP doesn’t reply.

So that’s a hack. Great hacks flourish not in simple codified systems, but in complex social settings too. Part of the growth of hacker culture, the bedrock of the wider technical culture that has grown in the last decade, is realising that the complex aesthetics of hacking can be applied to other areas: social, political, philosophical.

As I say, this is possibly the point on which Will and I disagree, but it’s important to work out whether we disagree because of a misunderstanding over what hacking means or more profoundly.

The other part of Will’s analysis, which I really liked, is the difference between the UK and the US. I can bang on about this for weeks, and will, one day, I promise, but I’ll keep it short here. Will claims that “here in the UK, voters are geographically, culturally and financially closer to the political system. As such, social software that works with the grain of representative democracy, rather than towards new imaginary democratic constitutions, seems a lot more attractive.”

I agree with the conclusion, but not the causality. There’s a great deal more tendency to talk of utopias and bright abstract promise in the US, but that’s a long-standing cultural predilection that has little to do with the any contemporary alienation within the US political process.

And having spent time in both California (possibly the most alienated-from-DC place in the US right now) and the UK, I’d say that voters in both places are equally culturally and financially divorced from the heart of politics. Britain may be smaller, but that cuts both ways. Will, for instance, is writing from London, which would be like him commenting in the US on alienation from the comfort of his Washington offices. From the outside, Washington looks a corrupt and stinking place. But from what glimpses I’ve seen into the courtiers clustered around Westminster, the British body politic shows no sign of being any less marbled with green mould.

Both provide strong obstacles to real substantive useful change that would be – eventually – seen as a universal good. Both have deadlocks that require a great amount of creativity to unlock. I really do think that on both sides, hacks – small, culturally-precise, low scale chisel blows on some very subtle fracture lines- are the safest, perhaps only, way to change anything.

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