And not just at the Circle-K...

I just got the strangest comment-spam yet. What usually happens is some bot crawls through your site and puts up a bunch of links to online poker, pharmaceutacles or (rarely, actually) porn. Sometimes they contain some weird randomly-generated text that can be oddly intelligent.

But this one was little droplets of floridly phrased philosophy. It wasn't randomly generated, more like randomly chosen from a deck. They all point back to this site, which as far as I can ascertain is some kind of art. This page leads (via a clever url-based hack on Sony's website) to this bit of fun, which is also art or prank and is of further interest.

Diving into WHOIS records for the latter I stumble on a name (there was no name on the first site) and uncover this post from my friend Sam Tressler is the first result on google. Which is weird. I owe him a phone call.

What's going on here? "Dickgenthechev's web-templates gambling advice," is clearly art, but the owner of the domain seems to have been a serious gambling operator. Is this spam alerting us to art-hacking? I don't know. Strange things are afoot on these here internets.

I've been feeling interestingly fluid in the past week I've been here. Decompression I think they call it. I'm enjoying the room to spread out, to live spaciously, to masturbate when I feel like it. It's an important American freedom, and one we'll surrender shortly after our right to bare arms. First they come for your sleeveless shirts, then they want you to quit jerking off. Two openings on the supreme court, people! It could happen.

Actually my evening was deeply thrown off course earlier when I caught some of the Hollywood shows that are on in the same timeslot as the Simpsons in syndication. That network dead zone between the news and prime time where the televised equivalents of People, US, In-Touch and the like do their trade.

Oh my god who watches those shows! Sycophantic emptyheaded worshipping of B-list celebrities combined with a kind of spectacular moralizing. There was one bit about how a current contestant on The Apprentice was formerly a stripper who's #1 client had been comitting murder to pay for the exotic dancing. It was covered on "Inside Edition" at the time, with a trashy yet by modern standards quite earnest effort to actually capture the strange moral dimensions of the situation. The contemporary piece tried to play this with an air of scandal, that a person with such a checkered past would be allowed on The Apprentice. The producers said, quote, that they "felt she had paid her debt." Whether that's for trying to transcend her social position as a stripper or for having a murderer as a client is unclear.

After that there was a bit about nominated Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts' son, who's 4, and apparently misbehaved on live TV during Bush's announcement of his nomination. The story is he's back, but he's been on much better behavior at this week's Senate hearings -- now apparently rascally cute, which you didn't quite get before. Roberts being a conservative darling and staunch Catholic, I imagine this caused some embarassment 'specially for the missus.

Finally there was a raft of random teasers about Donny Osmond's near death experience, the baby Angelina saved, a look inside the life of some grey-haired good-looking rich guy (mogul of some sort I'll assume) with younger/blonder special lady... it all gave me the fear, quite frankly. So I took a bike ride to clear my head. It sort of worked.

It's strange. I feel more uncomfortability and fear biking the quiet streets of Eugene than I do cruising through supposedly "bad" neighborhoods in Brooklyn. I think it's a matter of not really knowing the lay of the land. Even though I grew up here, the topography is somewhat unfamiliar. I don't quite know what the deal is.

And that pretty much sums up my general state. The guy I told you to vote for in New York got trounced. Scored under 20,000 votes. Hopefully a learning experience for those involved. In the mean time, I'm hosting a meeting in a chat room called #revolution. What the fuck. The internet's a weird place. Today I met this guy, who just decided to go there from SF and be the media. I gather he does this thing kind of often. Hell, it works out all right.

The human power people are there now when the need is greatest, and that's cool, but they'll be run off when the rezoning orders grind on through just like the remaining population. Ain't gonna be the Big Easy like before. They'll save the tourist parts, but the rest of it gon' change. It was going that way anyhow, you know. But now it's drastic. Bloody. The Diaspora of New Orleans has begun. Hallelujah.

Hey nerds, let's have a meeting about the revolution. Back in the day when I first started taking this shit seriously we had some. It worked out pretty well, all things considered. Let's do it again.

Thursday, September 15th
5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern - 1 hour timebox
#revolution - freenode
(here's the upcoming.org node too)

That's in IRC for any non-nerds out there. Feel free to join in or listen. The conversation won't be highly technical, just a lot of people with tech in their blood doing the typing. This sort of meeting tends to piss off real organizers because it's so damn slow, but I've found the low-impact nature of a chatroom meeting to be conductive to thought. It helps if you know how to type.

The hand system will be in effect. Anyone know where the bot is that handles this? Help and feedback is nice.

This Is My Agenda -- What's Yours?
A lot of people are getting really busy as the things we dreamed up in the past few years are assimilated into the establishment. There's a lot of work around, and that's good. Time was this whole thing was all-volunteer. But as the sphere of people who we came up with become professionalized, maybe it's smart to keep our own council and our own heads.

What I'd like to try and do is:

1) Keep an evolving community of developers connected on extra-professional levels. It shouldn't just be about the work, and we need to make sure that as we begin working for different (and in many cases competing) groups, we don't fragment.

2) Get some opinions from the group on what the big picture issues are, and what the big picture ideas are that motivate us. Perhaps develop some consensus here. An ethic and some goals would be nice.

3) Pick some further actions to take. Some projects we drive rather than just assist on. Things that are really ours. Things that are risky, that only an informal group can pull off.

We've spent a good amount of time developing and deploying tools based on what our clients want. That's good. Responding to the market is necessary to produce widely usable products. But we shouldn't count ourselves out in terms of trying to influence things, in terms of guiding the course of progress. That's what players do, and we want to be players, don't we?

I mean, come on. The Boomers have been looking to our generation to program the damn VCR since we were 5 years old. We've got to take some initiative and show them the way.

But we've got to think big. The structural change is on and the Big D is in the mail. Truckers love wifi, and the rest of the country will soon be as (un)wired as NYC or San Fran. Opportunity is knocking. Let's get ready.

/join #revolution

Towards Revolutionary Communications For The 21st Century

Step I - Private Communications

This is a post about private communications. This communication itself isn't private. It's a blog. Although I've sent the link around to a number of people via email, anyone can read it, whether they're a casual reader of mine or a google-sent random. I'm using this public communication to talk about secure private communications. Down the line I plan to use private communication to talk about public communication. Sneaky, oui?

If that tickles your funny bone...

The Pitch
Here's the deal cats and kiddies. We need to be able to talk to one another in private and with trust. Since the dawn of time this has meant doing things in person, careful of where you're doing the talking and how loud. That's not going to change, but this is the 21st Century. If we rely on face2face for secure communications, we're one step behind the bad guys.

Basically, we need to take advantage of mediated communications, and to do so securely. There are three basic steps to take. First of all we need to establish security, that it's even possible to have communication protected from eavesdroppers and interlopers. Secondly we need to establish identity, that we are who we say we are. Third, we need to establish privacy or exclusivity, a means of keeping the pool of con-versants trustworthy.

I personally think that we're going to need to communicate around certain legal and regulatory barriers in the coming decades in order to get things done. We're going to need to coordinate across zones of jurisdiction, even internationally. We're going to need to be able to converse without fear. We're going to need to maintain the element of surprise. I'm going to write more about why I think we need to learn more about private communications (in addition to the massive experiments already ongoing with public communications), but for now I'll just get right down to the hurdles as I see them.

Security
Cellphones can be easily tapped by amateurs. Landlines are more and more vulnerable to wiretap without notification or judicial oversight, and can also be tapped by moderately skillful professionals. I'm not saying that your phone is tapped. That's not very likely, although depending on how things shake out it could get more probable.

But anyway, phones are on their way out. The problem is that when we get to the internet, the world of websites and forums and blogs and email and IM and Voice Over IP -- the world where our revolution is supposed to have its fertile roots -- the situation gets a lot more troubling.

Law enforcement agencies filter email traffic in bulk for keywords. They can read your or anyone else's email on US networks at will. For that matter, so can any high school geek who sets his or her mind to it. IM conversations are just as vulnerable to eavesdropping. If you converse online without encryption, anyone who wants to can easily listen in. This isn't generally too much of a problem -- most conversation is too banal to worry about -- but sometimes you want to make sure no one is looking over your shoulder.

Identity
Beyond the threat of unknown third parties, there's the question of identity, of verification. How do I know that you are who you say you are? Do you want me to send you an email that seems to come "from" you but says things you'd never in your lifetime say? I can do it in five minutes. So can thousands of other technically-literate humans. People with decent social-engineering skills (grifters and con-men and identity thieves) can do much worse.

As we move through our lives and this process, we meet new people all the time, people who are eager to help, who are eager to get involved, but people who we do not know. In large-scale public campaigning, these people must be trusted by default, and vetted more or less on the job. It's the only way to go forward.

However, when attempting to establish a more tightly-knit and enduring community of inquiry and action some additional qualifications are needed. We'll need to be able to vouch for one another as real people.

Privacy
Moving to the realm of group communications, many have been stung by posting something in a forum or a blog that the wrong people end up seeing, maybe when they Google their own name or maybe the author's. We need to be conscious of who is a party to our conversations. More than that, we need to be empowered to make it a choice. We need to control the dimensions of the sphere of information.

This goes to the question of trust, of vetting, of privacy. Beyond simply knowing someone is who they say they are, we also will need to be able to include or exclude people from our communications. Some people are disruptive. Some are unqualified. Some may even harbor malicious intent.

It's also true that in any oppositional system we have adversaries. Beyond taking steps to prevent them from disrupting our communications, it's also tactically powerful to preserve the element of surprise. Large-scale conjoint action from an unexpected cohort of diverse activists can really make a big impact, especially when the establishment doesn't see it coming. Running a major national campaign in the 21st Century will require the virtual equivalent of the old "War Room," where strategy can be frankly discussed without telegraphing things to the opposition.

Luckily for us, these problems are not new. There's no need to reinvent the wheel, but we do need to start building our skills sooner or later. Through encryption, secure signatures, and a web of trust, the above concerns can be met with solutions which are technically sound, and only as fallible as the people who operate them. This is the best we can do, and it's pretty fucking good all things considered. Here's how to start:

Acquaint Yourself With GPG/PGP.
These are the common schemes for implementing military-strength encryption on your data. GPG is free and open-source, PGP is commercial, but both work on a common protocol (meaning they can usually work together) and both get the job done.

What you need to do is download some software to do the encryption. Then what you need to do is create an identity by means of generating a "key pair." A key pair is a set of keys, one which is public and which you can use to "sign" messages so they can be verified as coming from you. This public key can also be used by others to send you an encrypted message which only you can decrypt. The other end of the pair is private, and is used to decrypt messages which have been encrypted for use by use of your public key.

You then collect public keys for all your correspondents, and make sure they all have your. When you want to send out a message that is secure, you use their respective keys to encrypt the message. There are relatively friendly graphical applications to make all this happen for both MacOS and Windows. If you use a web-based email system like gmail or hotmail, you can still use this technology. It's just a matter of composing your message and encrypting it before pasting the result into the webmail message window.

If you want to know more about how it all works, try this tutorial. There's no reason not to start. Ask for help if you need it. Once you're over the setup it's really pretty painless.

Start Building a Web of Trust
As you collect public keys you can "sign" them with your verification. This means that you say the person who uses this public key is who they say they are. You get people to sign your key. That way people know that you, who says someone is who they say they are, are in fact who you say you are. Following? If you were to draw it out it would be a web. This is a web of trust. You've already got an informal one operating in your life, maybe you've even got a web of Friendsters. Let's start making real use of this stuff.

After the technical task of signing one another's keys (side note: as a best practice, this should only be done after a face to face meeting where both parties produce paper printouts of their keys to prove validity, but if you actually know and trust someone you can make your own decisions) the next logical step is building a sphere of trusted association. We need to band together. We need to learn to find likeminded people who are honest and responsible and to quickly bring them in to our community. One way to do this is through referrals. Friends of friends, associates. This can get a lot of people in the door, and it establishes a chain of accountability to boot.

This is a good way to start, but it has certain limits. Your social network, while large, probably has limits in terms of diversity. Most do. Making diversity of race, class and background an initial priority is going to be important. The right seeds need to be found or recruited.

Going beyond that, if we're talking about establishing a real community for the revolution, we're going to need some way for people who we don't and can't already know to work their way in. We're going to need a way for people who are just coming of age -- or just coming of consciousness -- to find their way in. More on this later when we start talking about public communication.

Converse with Confidence
As we create secure means of conversation and secure spaces to converse, it's time to open up the avenues of discussion. We are people of action who are in search of influence to improve the world around us. It's time to get down to brass tacks and do it. Be bold. Be a radical. Be an outlaw. Be a hero. Help us all save ourselves.

Let's start with some email. My public key and some links to resources are included below. If you want to be a part of this, use my public key to drop me an encrypted line. Include your public key so I can respond in kind. The next steps will come as they do.

If, on the other hand, you find this whole exercise stupid, feel free to ignore it. If you have questions or comments or would like to continue the public discussion, by all means leave a comment and I'll respond with one of my own or maybe a whole new blog post.

The Nuts and Bolts

My Public Key:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin)
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=nhXP
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

General GPG info: http://www.gnupg.org/
MacGPG: http://macgpg.sourceforge.net/
GPG for Apple's Mail: here

If you're a Mac user you need to install MacGPG, then the Mail bundle. If you're a *nix user you probably know what you're doing enough to figure it out from the general GPG info page. If you're a Windows user, check out this tutorial. Google is your friend if you need help. Best of Luck. Hope to hear from you soon.

I don't really have any fresh insights on this date, even with the Katrina paralell. So here's a repost from two years ago, still one of the better things I've written. It's obviously not completely how I feel, but it still hits. Cheers and rememberences, and here's hoping New Orleans comes back as strong as NYC.

The Inevitable Reflection (repost)

It's Monday, September 9th 2002, and I am very very sad; very heavy in the heart. I see the country I call home heading in directions that I cannot follow, and I feel as if our leaders are using 3,000 ghosts to blackmail me into going along for the ride. Heavy 9-11 memorial coverage has begun in every media outlet, and although my original idea was to steer clear of commenting on this sort of thing, I've found the overall atmosphere too aggravating to stay mum.

I'm going to make a horrible admission of guilt, but I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. On September 11th 2001, when the towers had just fallen, when I was riding my bicycle down an empty 5th avenue wondering how I would make it home, there was a moment in which I felt a strange surge of hope for the future. I optimistically imagined that everyone had been evacuated, that there would be only a few casualties, and somewhere in my heart, thinking of everything represented by the twin towers I thought, "well, they had it coming."

Today even writing these words makes me nervous. They don't sound especially patriotic, and this is a time in which people have been told to watch what they say. I'm not kidding around here or trying to take a cheap shot at Ari Fletcher. There's fear in the air. I'm scared to talk to people, scared to speak to anyone other than my friends about the brewing war with Iraq because of what they might think about my lack of chauvinistic national pride. I'm scared to exercise my rights.

Before I get too far into that, let me try to clear my name. In spite of all its faults and shortcomings, I love this country. I love the idea of it far more than the reality, just as a child will love his perfect mother more than his annoying younger brother, but I nevertheless love them both. And as one of the great metaphysical pinnacles of the American Idea, I love New York City.

The World Trade Center embodied many of the marvelous characteristics of this nation and this city that make them both such wonderful, exciting places: enterprise, diversity, technology, devotion, a brash, dashing can-do attitude. These are the things that make this country sing and hum.

But as is to be expected of any great institution, the towers also embodied a lot of things I don't especially like: greed, excess, exploitation, hegemony, corruption. Shopping malls in the basement and board rooms on the top, the whole place pulsed with careless money and the stink it brings wherever it goes.

In the days following the attacks, in spite of the fear and uncertainty, I felt an encridible lightness. Not only was Something Happening, it seemed like it might even be Something Good. It seemed that the negative elements had been exorcised from my town, and most of the positives left intact.

Individuals were waking up to their gross material excess and rediscovering the virtue of charity. Packed onto subway cars, fearful of anthrax, New Yorkers were speaking to each other freely, reaching out across divides of race, class and culture. Communities were banding together for their own collective good, to survive, to grieve, to rebuild and to prosper again. I don't know what it was like elsewhere, places removed from the direct disruption, places where the President's message to keep on shopping was perhaps remotely practical, but here in New York City people were connecting in the face of adversity, and it was incredible.

All that changed very quickly when the focus became war. Though defense is necessary for any nation, war is very rarely in the interests of the people. As it became clear that war would be the outcome of these attacks the consensus became forced, the feeling of lighness evaporated, the sense of city-wide community broke down and in my perception the healing process was stalled.

From the beginning the frame was set: these attacks were an act of war despite the fact that no nation-state claimed responsibility. What should have been considered the most dreadful and heinous of criminal acts, what should have been the impetus for multilateral action in creating an international legal framework to deal with these threats, what should have been the chance to bring the world together in condemnation of violence and support for peace became an excuse to drop bombs on human beings.

And now I see this memorial coverage, the victimized families coming forward to tell and re-tell their stories, the pundants sounding off their views, the footage before deemed too shocking to air finding its way to light, and it makes me sick. Sick to remember, sick to relive, sick to witness such enormous pain, to empathize with the fear and loss, but even more sick because I feel manipulated through all of it. I sense the machinery working behind the scenes that brings these flickering ghosts to life in my living room and my guts turn sour. The feeling of manipulation grows, and despite my best efforts to resist it, catalyzing cynicism creeps in, turning my sickness to rage. I watch helpless as everything that I loathe about this country, this city and this situation parades in front of me, and I'm forced by sheer emotional arm twisting to endorse it with my silence.

I watch politicians inoculating the populace with war fever just in time for the election season. I watch trillion-dollar lawsuits spring to life like the demons of greed that they are. I watch victims avoid dealing with death and am dragged along into their pathos, numbed by the overwhelming sadness they continue to exude, and I want it all to stop. It's the year that everything changed and nothing has changed at all. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer and we'll jolly well have a real war again soon, plenty of coverage for the 6-o-clock news.

I can't help but think that a raw wound has a lot more use to those in power than a healed one, and while I don't believe that there's some vast conspiracy with malicious intent to keep the American people in a constant state of worry and fear, I do believe that's something the media does. I don't believe that Bush, Cheney and Co. are really evil people, but I do believe in the seductive power of subconscious desire, the human ability to rationalize. I certainly don't trust these people to do the right thing. They don't represent my interests or share my view of the world. They're not doing what I would do, and I don't believe in the end that they know better than me.

And that's where my bundle of sickness, sadness, fear, disgust, love and anger finally becomes unbearable. I feel alone with it. I adamantly disagree with every institution spouting the party line, every sentimental memorial broadcast, every mealy-mouthed patriotic speech. It's manipulative and it's disrespectful. On the other hand, I don't buy into the real paranoid whacko conspiracy theory bullshit either, so I'm basically on my own with my views. I don't see anyone with any real power saying anything I can really get behind, and that's almost enough to break me, the feeling that I am an island of rational dissent in a sea of insanity.

Except I know I'm not. I can't be. Statistically speaking, there must be others like me who feel similar to the way I do. I don't know if it's what you'd call a "silent majority" but I know a lot of other freethinking, intelligent, rational Americans are staying out of this for fear of sounding disloyal to their nation. If you're one of these, I encourage you to break your silence, expose your viewpoint, take the risk, because shutting your trap in the name of patriotism is no service to your country. We need trustworthy leaders with clear views, transparent motives and ethical opinions, but given the state of politics in this country that's not likely to happen any time soon. The best we can do is try with all our might to hold whoever we've got to that standard.