Alejandro@Oxford

For all of those like me that couldn’t go this year OpenTech in London, you can access their good quality audio recordings on their website. For those that don’t know what OpenTech is, let me copy&paste their description

Open Tech 2009 is an informal, low cost, one-day conference on slightly different approaches to technology, democracy and community. This year’s theme [was] “Working on Stuff that Matters” [...] Totaling 33 talks across 3 sessions covering 7 hours, some space hijacking and plenty of time to talk in the bar after sessions which challenge, inspire or talk about something that makes you want to help how you can.

I haven’t still listened to any of the talks. Have you?

Enjoy it!

Great video about a guy who dances unstoppably in Sasquatch Music Festival and makes everybody dance. Interesting to see the collective action going on. From the guy alone, one guy joins him, a couple of more, until all of a sudden everything breaks loose! The creator, the early adopters, the followers and the laggards.

On Saturday 11 July, fifteen people gathered in an isolated field in Sowton, Exeter (UK) to celebrate Andrew Poole’s 30th birthday with a barbecue and some beers. Before they plugged the music in, at around 4 pm “eight officers with camouflage pants and body armor jumped out of their vehicles and ordered everyone out about an hour into the party.” They were part of a team of four police cars, a riot van, and a force helicopter dispatched to the location to stop an “all-night” rave party advertised on Facebook. Andrew Poole explains that his party had the “overnight” tag in case anybody of his friends and family invited to the event would like to stay to sleep there. The police insists, a spokeswoman for Devon and Cornwall police said that “had it gone ahead, it is likely that far more of our resources would have been used to police the event and there would have been considerable disruption to neighbouring properties.”

How did the police get news of this party? The BBC says that the police was warned by locals fearing that a rave was going to take place. Did the police have a look at the Facebook event to check out the story or they just believed whoever told them about it? How did the neighbours got to see a private event announcement on Facebook in the first place? Were “the locals” invited originally to Andrew’s party? Or is the police (or someone out there) permanently monitoring the Internet and “the locals” is just a way of hiding a fearsome system that scans and records our communications on the net?

And what about this culture of prevention that is becoming the rule in British police? It makes you a criminal even before you have committed a crime. Remember Tom Cruise’s movie, Minority Report?

Jon Worth says in one of his latest blog posts on a supposedly generational gap between political leaders and younger political “activists”.

How can political parties accept risk takers, leaders, people with drive, people with ideology, and bind them into a party structure rather than making them annoyed and demoralised? For me that’s the central question, not some vague notion of generational change.

They can’t. Political parties are structures made for a hierarchical type of politics. As he rightly says

it is hard to run a political party if there are too many people in it who are too intelligent, determined or opinionated, so you can get somewhere precisely because you are not any good, not a threat.

And that’s exactly the problem “you have to run a party.” Solving problems in “liquid modernity” (Baumann), where “Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organise their lives” (Wikipedia) is not a simple matter of who knows best or has more power or has the better ideology, but of a granular participation of many individual intelligences that are constantly changing. An organization with hierarchic permanent structures that pretends to possess the truth, and which goal is to get as much power as possible by evangelizing people about that truth is unsuitable for this different reality.

The digital book is in its infancy. Yet I think at the end of this year we’ll see new developments that might change how books are commercialized. Although books are in many ways different than music, they are also susceptible of digitization and sharing, and therefore they are somehow affected by the extension of Internet use and capabilities. There is still something missing in the ebook market, and that is an iPod for books. Amazon’s Kindle is not this game-changing device; it is not a bad product, but it is not revolutionary, either. There are many people that are waiting to buy the technology that allows them to download books with good quality, great design and no constraints (i.e. no DRMs). Authors, publishers and bookshops might find themselves very soon in the position that their colleagues in the music market are right now.

Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski, co-founders of Psiphon, have written a great article about Internet freedom in the world and cyberwar, “Ottawa needs a strategy for cyberwar“.

Around the world, governments are engaged in a major arms race to develop and refine cyberwar capabilities. During the recent cyber security review, U. S. President Barack Obama’s administration publicly acknowledged the world’s worst kept secret: that as part of its comprehensive strategy for cybersecurity, the administration intends to develop operational capabilities to fight and win wars in cyberspace. Last week, the U. S. Department Of Defence announced the creation of U. S. cyberspace command. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom announced a Cybersecurity Czar of its own. From Bishkek to Baltimore, Tehran to Beijing, cyberspace is being militarized and weaponized.

Glyn Moody on Open… proposes

how about setting up a database – a surveillance of surveillance database – that has pictures and locations of CCTVs in the UK? It could be crowd sourced, and anonymous, solving problems of scaling and legal issues.

And Richard Rothwell writes in the first comment:

Open Street Map has a proposal for a CCTV icon – adding the locations to OSM with an associated image might be the way forward.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Key:Surveillance

Interesting.

Glyn Moody on Open… proposes

how about setting up a database – a surveillance of surveillance database – that has pictures and locations of CCTVs in the UK? It could be crowd sourced, and anonymous, solving problems of scaling and legal issues.

And Richard Rothwell writes in the first comment:

Open Street Map has a proposal for a CCTV icon – adding the locations to OSM with an associated image might be the way forward.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Key:Surveillance

Interesting.

On Mousavi’s Facebook page a message says

The complete staff of Mr. Mousavi’s official Newsagency (Newspaper, Websites!) are arrested !!!!!

Earlier, Mousavi news page, GhalamNews, had been hacked and used to gather information about protesters. Now the page is disabled.

There is not only a physical and brutal crackdown of the opposition in Iran, there is also an online persecution. Outside Iran thousands of people look horrified at what’s happening in this country. Impotent to the violence and brutality of a regime controlled by thugs. The connection to the outside world is slowly closing as the police and the security apparatus tightens the control of information technology inside Iran. So what can we do? I reckon we can do a lot. We only need a few trusted and brave people in Iran close or with contacts with Mousavi’s and/or Karroubi’s organizations, a group of volunteers and a few servers spread all over.

The “free web structure” to protect the production of information by opposition parties for coordination and information, and the access of citizens to this information via secure connection I propose is composed of two parts

(1) A series of mirror servers with a Wordpress installation which will be filled by Mousavi’s supporters to communicate news and messages to all Iranians.

(2) A network of proxies and VPNs available to Iranians.

The most affordable and immediate is part (1). This is where a small group of people could work on. VPN is a harder enterprise, but there might be already there VPN that can be used. On the proxy said, Austin Heap and others are doing already a good job.

Internet communication is not only important for the minority that have access to the web, but to everybody else. For those that have access work as proxies that relay the information through other means, including mouth to mouth. The web gives power to the people!

What we need?

- Web servers
- Expertise in web security, server set up and mirroring and Wordpress
- Contact people in Iran close to Mousavi and/or Karroubi
- Any geek with technical knowledge willing to help civil resistance in Iran

If you want to help: send an email to webforiran@gmail.com