“If we don’t create a society, that at least knows there is a thing called programming, then we will end being not the programmers, but the users and worse: the used”

In my not so humble opinion everyone should at least learn the basics of programming so that every citizen at least knows our society is running on hardware and software. And I’m not just referring to the practical art of programming. Perhaps more people would understand the need for open, interoperable and transparent systems instead of black boxes of which we know little of the inner workings. Maybe more citizens would request society’s hard- and software to be built upon the philosophical views common among Free and Open Source software proponents regardless of their political colors.

Check the video below, I will be ordering Rushkoff’s book.

Via: Boingboing.net

Thanks Nat Torkington of O’Reilly Radar

You probably have had the same experience as I had with legally purchased DVD’s. Before you can watch the movie, you’re forced to watch an anti-piracy advertisement propaganda. I never really understood this. Why are you trying to indoctrinate those that actually bought the film legally? It seems to miss the point completely. C’mon I already bought the film, don’t bother me with propaganda otherwise I’ll download the movie, which is usually:

• cheaper (ISP account + power)
• quicker (the more popular, the faster a download works, at least using Bitorrent)
• more convenient (no need for leaving the house to visit a store)
• no silly DVD-region encoding or other lame artificial digital rights restrictions

Writing the above makes me wonder why I bother to buy films at all?

Anyway, some people decided to create an answer to the over the top, stupid and annoying anti-piracy propaganda and created a short film (view it above this post in crappy YouTube galore or download it using bittorrent) which ridiculous the rhetoric of ‘downloading equals stealing’ dogma.

In case you wonder why downloading is not the same as stealing: downloading a film or music does not mean that I take away your film or music. The metaphor of physical objects versus digital information does not work. Period. You can make unlimited copies from a digital work without quality degrading between copies. In fact it would be hard to tell which is the copy and which is the original. Perhaps cloning would be a better word to describe this process?

Some food for thought….at least for me

No haiku spam , no penis enlargements(neah, not going to link this one. I had my share of aspiring but clearly illiterate porn actresses/actors), no vicodin , no russian dacha’s (yes, I really got these!) for sale nor am I asked to assist in transfering a large sum of money so that my Nigerian friend can safely leave the country with his fortune. None of these were present in the message used in the spam I received. There were also no attachments to the spam message which is odd. Nowadays spammers do anything to penetrate through spamfilters using images, pdf files and apparently even mp3 files to get their sleazy messages across. More often than not I get spam message with attachments. These ones however were just plain HTML messages.

What also sets these two messages apart is that they are in Dutch, which is also rare for me. Now the contents of message is just plain strange. It talks about the Dutch city Amsterdam having been contaimenated with radio-active radiation and it states that the government does not openly acknowledge this, but only in private. I like that last sentence. They’re willing to admit it, but only in private. For those able to read Dutch:

Op internet-forums is er een melding verschenen over een stevige explosie in een nederlandse Atoomcentrale in de buurt van Amsterdam.
De getuigen beweren dat die explosie op 4 november rond 15 uur plaatsvond. Een inwoonster van de stad belde haar familie op en vertelde
dat er in de stad de telefoonaamsluitingen worden uitgeschakeld, zodat de mensen niemand konden opbellen.
Zij beweert ook dat er inderdaad een explosie, zelfs een heel ernstige, op het Atoomsentrale plaatsvond en dat de radioactive wolk zich op
dit moment snel verplaatst.
De overheid bevestigt deze informatie niet officieel maar wel tijdens de prive gesprekken.
Toch plaatsen de inwoners op het internet fotos van de gevolgen van de explosie en diens slachtoffers.

In this message there is ony one link cloaked with another link, both are Geocities urls and both point to the same site. That seems odd. Why cloak a url when both are pointing to the same address? Why are both untrusted and non-popular websites instead of popular and ‘trusted’ websites as most spammer tend to do, so people are easily tricked in clicking the link? That doesn’t make any sense to me. The ip address used by the site (58.65.238.36) is according to the whois database part of a Chinese ip range as you can see:

inetnum: 58.65.232.0 – 58.65.239.255
netname: HOSTFRESH
descr: HostFresh
descr: Internet Service Provider
country: HK
admin-c: PL466-AP
tech-c: PL466-AP
status: ALLOCATED PORTABLE
mnt-by: APNIC-HM
mnt-lower: MAINT-HK-HOSTFRESH
mnt-routes: MAINT-HK-HOSTFRESH
remarks: Please send Spam & Abuse report to
remarks: abuse@hostfresh.com
remarks: -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
remarks: This object can only be updated by APNIC hostmasters.
remarks: To update this object, please contact APNIC
remarks: hostmasters and include your organisation’s account
remarks: name in the subject line.
remarks: -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-++-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+
changed: hm-changed@apnic.net 20060612
changed: hm-changed@apnic.net 20060613
changed: hm-changed@apnic.net 20061018
source: APNIC

person: Piu Lo
nic-hdl: PL466-AP
e-mail: ipadmin@hostfresh.com
address: No. 500, Post Office, Tuen Mun, N.T., Hong Kong
phone: +852-35979788
fax-no: +852-24522539
country: HK
changed: ipadmin@hostfresh.com 20071025
mnt-by: MAINT-HK-HOSTFRESH
source: APNIC

The accompanying webpage tries to trick you into downloading somekind of executable file (seems targeted at machines running Windows) called iPIX-install.exe I tried to install it (don’t try this at home…), but get a 503 service unavailable message. According to this post on 22th of octobre from the German Chip security blog this piece of malware was not well-detected by most virus and/or mallware scanners at that time, so be careful!

This has to be the weirdest spam I had in ages. The whole message feels to me as a sort 21th century version of Orson Welles’ radioplay of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds . Instead of the radio, email is now the medium and stage. Instead of entertaining (or frighten…) people with sound, this message aims to ‘frighten’ (in a quite amateuristic way) people using somekind of conspiracy or sci-fi text while in the meantime infect as many machines as possible.

I wonder what kind of people create these annoying, horrible yet intruiging storytelling ‘artworks’ also known as spam?

ps: for the spam vigilantes among us, here are the original messages including headers (spam1.txt , spam2.txt) saved as plain text for your own private digital forensics fun. Enjoy! I already sent an abuse email, but feel free to do this as well.

UPDATE: Apparently this particular spam message attracted some more attention. Even the mainstream media such as nu.nl are reporting about it: “Opnieuw golf aan virusspam over ‘kernramp’ “ 

Download the complete film using Bittorrent (direct link to the torrent on The Pirate Bay) and support the authors here.

If you like these kind of documentries / topics and you haven’t seen it already, you should definately also check out ‘Steal this film’, a documentary also about copyright, culture, filesharing and The Pirate Bay in particular.

Nice initiative to gather some data about webworkers (= all the workers doing work directly related to the web, such as design, development, accessability etc) from the people behind A List Apart. I took the survey and it took me less than 10 minutes. It’s a good idea to get more data about who we – webworkers – actually are. So if you’re a webworker take the survey.

Rosalind Gill also did some research on webworkers and recently her work got published by the Institute of Network Cultures.

Her Creative Commons licensed (CC-BY-NC-ND) paper called ‘Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat”(pdf) can be downloaded for free or you can order the dead-tree version from the Institute of Network Cultures.

It’s an easy to read paper of forty plus pages on new media work in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The format is really nice to read as it consists mostly of stories from webworkers in Amsterdam entwined with comments, observations and thoughts of the author. Even if you don’t have the time to read all of it I would strongly recommend reading the summary especially if you are a webworker or if you need to work with a webworker on a regular basis. It contains nice recognizable anecdotes, some surprising data and offers an interesting look into the kitchen of the people creating the web.

Ps: there is also a video (direct link to the 275MB mp4 file) available of Rosalind Gill speaking (transcript) at a Decade of Webdesign conference 2005 on this topic. It takes some time to download and is older than the report itself, but it will give you the information straight from the horse’s mouth.