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by Eddan Katz

For those concerned that Sudo Room is the corrupting the minds of the youth ... Going to try to make it to Kopimism worship today. If there's time, I'd like to read it aloud. Also, a reminder that we have to have Ludlow over to check out what we've been up to. sent from eddan.com APRIL 13, 2013, 1:36 PM Hacktivists as Gadflies By PETER LUDLOW Around 400 B.C., Socrates was brought to trial on charges of corrupting the youth of Athens and “impiety.” Presumably, however, people believed then as we do now, that Socrates’ real crime was being too clever and, not insignificantly, a royal pain to those in power or, as Plato put it, a gadfly. Just as a gadfly is an insect that could sting a horse and prod it into action, so too could Socrates sting the state. He challenged the moral values of his contemporaries and refused to go along with unjust demands of tyrants, often obstructing their plans when he could. Socrates thought his service to Athens should have earned him free dinners for life. He was given a cup of hemlock instead. We have had gadflies among us ever since, but one contemporary breed in particular has come in for a rough time of late: the “hacktivist.” While none have yet been forced to drink hemlock, the state has come down on them with remarkable force. This is in large measure evidence of how poignant, and troubling, their message has been. Hacktivists, roughly speaking, are individuals who redeploy and repurpose technology for social causes. In this sense they are different from garden-variety hackers out to enrich only themselves. People like Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Bill Gates began their careers as hackers — they repurposed technology, but without any particular political agenda. In the case of Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak, they built and sold “blue boxes,” devices that allowed users to defraud the phone company. Today, of course, these people are establishment heroes, and the contrast between their almost exalted state and the scorn being heaped upon hacktivists is instructive. For some reason, it seems that the government considers hackers who are out to line their pockets less of a threat than those who are trying to make a political point. Consider the case of Andrew Auernheimer, better known as “Weev.” When Weev discovered in 2010 that AT&T had left private information about its customers vulnerable on the Internet, he and a colleague wrote a script to access it. Technically, he did not “hack” anything; he merely executed a simple version of what Google Web crawlers do every second of every day — sequentially walk through public URLs and extract the content. When he got the information (the e-mail addresses of 114,000 iPad users, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff), Weev did not try to profit from it; he notified the blog Gawker of the security hole. For this service Weev might have asked for free dinners for life, but instead he was recently sentenced to 41 months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of more than $73,000 in damages to AT&T to cover the cost of notifying its customers of its own security failure. When the federal judge Susan Wigenton sentenced Weev on March 18, she described him with prose that could have been lifted from the prosecutor Meletus in Plato’s “Apology.” “You consider yourself a hero of sorts,” she said, and noted that Weev’s “special skills” in computer coding called for a more draconian sentence. I was reminded of a line from an essay written in 1986 by a hacker called the Mentor: “My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.” When offered the chance to speak, Weev, like Socrates, did not back down: “I don’t come here today to ask for forgiveness. I’m here to tell this court, if it has any foresight at all, that it should be thinking about what it can do to make amends to me for the harm and the violence that has been inflicted upon my life.” He then went on to heap scorn upon the law being used to put him away — the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the same law that prosecutors used to go after the 26-year-old Internet activist Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in January. The law, as interpreted by the prosecutors, makes it a felony to use a computer system for “unintended” applications, or even violate a terms-of-service agreement. That would theoretically make a felon out of anyone who lied about their age or weight on Match.com. The case of Weev is not an isolated one. Barrett Brown, a journalist who had achieved some level of notoriety as the “the former unofficial not-spokesman for Anonymous,” the hacktivist group, now sits in federal custody in Texas. Mr. Brown came under the scrutiny of the authorities when he began poring over documents that had been released in the hack of two private security companies, HBGary Federal and Stratfor. Mr. Brown did not take part in the hacks, but he did become obsessed with the contents that emerged from them — in particular the extracted documents showed that private security contractors were being hired by the United States government to develop strategies for undermining protesters and journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for Salon. Since the cache was enormous, Mr. Brown thought he might crowdsource the effort and copied and pasted the URL from an Anonymous chat server to a Web site called Project PM, which was under his control. Just to be clear, what Mr. Brown did was repost the URL from a Web site that was publicly available on the Internet. Because Stratfor had not encrypted the credit card information of its clients, the information in the cache included credit card numbers and validation numbers. Mr. Brown didn’t extract the numbers or highlight them; he merely offered a link to the database. For this he was charged on 12 counts, all of which pertained to credit card fraud. The charges against him add up to about 100 years in federal prison. It was “virtually impossible,” Mr. Greenwald, wrote recently in The Guardian, his new employer, “to conclude that the obscenely excessive prosecution he now faces is unrelated to that journalism and his related activism.” Other hacktivists have felt the force of the United States government in recent months, and all reflect an alarming contrast between the severity of the punishment and the flimsiness of the actual charges. The case of Aaron Swartz has been well documented. Jeremy Hammond, who reportedly played a direct role in the Stratfor and HBGary hacks, has been in jail for more than a year awaiting trial. Mercedes Haefer, a journalism student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, faces charges for hosting an Internet Relay Chat channel where an Anonymous denial of service attack was planned. Most recently, Matthew Keys, a 26-year-old social-media editor at Reuters, who allegedly assisted hackers associated with Anonymous (who reportedly then made a prank change to a Los Angeles Times headline), was indicted on federal charges that could result in more than $750,000 in fines and prison time, inciting a new outcry against the law and its overly harsh enforcement. The list goes on. In a world in which nearly everyone is technically a felon, we rely on the good judgment of prosecutors to decide who should be targets and how hard the law should come down on them. We have thus entered a legal reality not so different from that faced by Socrates when the Thirty Tyrants ruled Athens, and it is a dangerous one. When everyone is guilty of something, those most harshly prosecuted tend to be the ones that are challenging the established order, poking fun at the authorities, speaking truth to power — in other words, the gadflies of our society. Peter Ludlow is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. His most recent book is “The Philosophy of Generative Linguistics.” Copyright 2013 The New York Times CompanyPrivacy PolicyNYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 sent from eddan.com

11 years, 1 month

Whose monitor etc in common room?

by Cyrus Farivar

I met someone on Friday whose name I've forgotten who has the monitor etc in the comment area to be used with a raspberry Pi. I was using it again today to try to setup my Pi. Whoever it is, would it be possible for me to take it home to setup my Pi tonight or another night this week? I'll bring it back, I swear! If not, no biggie. --- Sent from my iPhone Cyrus Farivar +1 510 394 5485 (US) http://arstechnica.com/author/cyrus-farivar/

11 years, 1 month

kopimism services: sympathetic SImpsons portrayal of the Fountainhead

by Romy Ilano

My brothers and sisters, I will stop making fun of Ayn Rand today and play a sympathetic view of the Fountainhead. What gifted,creative child has not experienced being smashed and oppressed in such ways? http://www.popmodal.com/video/2549/Ayn-Rand--Simpsons-Fountainhead *Good morning! Is everyone ready for kopimism worship today at 2pm?* - this week we discovered from the Public School Dance teacher, sucked into our fold, that dance and choreography has been and can be copyrighted! - we are thinking of modifying the Scientology e-meter (which is a modified ohmmeter) without getting massively sued https://sudoroom.org/wiki/page/Kopimism#Kopimism_Hardware - we have absorbed the experimental music group and the conceptual information arts (CIA!) into our group as a subsect http://userwww.sfsu.edu/infoarts/ they will be creating our group chants and hymns https://sudoroom.org/wiki/page/Kopimism#Ritual_Chants halleluja!

11 years, 1 month

360 panorama of sudoroom

by Romy Ilano

@sudoroom Hacker Space in oakland Click to view interactively: http://360.io/WApjMW Captured with --- Romy Ilano Founder of Snowyla http://www.snowyla.com romy(a)snowyla.com

11 years, 1 month

Yuri's night at Rainbow Mansion

by Ryan Bethencourt

Hi All, It's Yuri's night tonight in at the Rainbow mansion. I''ll be going with a bunch of friends. Any other Sudo'ers want to join? ****** Join us for Rainbow Mansion's annual Yuri's Night party! There will be DJs, dancing, drinks, real NASA folk, space pirates, and more! Come dressed as your favorite space character, alien, astronaut, or soviet super-human. Anything that is space or soviet/russian related will do. A costume is not required, but if you don't dress up, you will make your host cry and no one wants to see a grown man cry at a party. At the door suggested donation: $5-$10 (please). We have to pay for the booze some how! Yes, you can invite/bring friends! Please park either past our driveway, or on the cross street before Rainbow Drive. Look for "No Parking" signs on Rainbow Drive before our driveway! (These are actual signs, not like the ones from God.) Address: 21677 Rainbow Drive, Cupertino CA 95014 What is Yuri’s Night? Yuri’s Night is the largest annual celebration of space exploration encompassed by humankind’s curiosity through scientific and technical achievements. Taking place each year in hundreds of cities around the world, Yuri’s Night was established to commemorate humankind’s first venture into space by Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on April 12, 1961. -- Ryan Bethencourt Tel: (415) 794 6463 ryan.bethencourt(a)gmail.com www.bamh1.com www.linkedin.com/in/bethencourt www.logos-press.com/books/biotechnology_business_development.php

11 years, 1 month

MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference (volunteers needed this weekend)

by Jenny Ryan

Happy Caturday, sudoers! I'm a lead volunteer for the upcoming Psychedelic Science Conference,<http://www.maps.org/conference/>and our very own Ray the Ice Cream Man will be providing delicious holistic nutrition for staff and volunteers throughout the weekend! MAPS <http://maps.org>, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, is looking for some local Oakland folks to pick up some of the early (Wednesday) and late (Monday) volunteer shifts. If you've been thinking about attending, volunteering is a great way to interface with the amazing international array of artists, scientists and therapists in the psychedelic community. Signing up for 3 4-hour shifts also earns ya a discounted $125 ticket to the conference. Shoot me an email for details!

11 years, 1 month

Hack the Gallery tonight!

by Patrick Schmidt

Dear friends, come on out tonight to hack the Gallery in Berkeley, we are having a community art show 'Networks and Transitions", artist reception from 7-10 pm with wine and snacks. Hope to see you then, Patrick 415-425-3240 1861 Solano Avenue A Berkeley CA 94707 With Bus 18 from Oakland (or Downtown Berkeley) towards Albany, get off "Solano Avenue / the Alameda" at the oaks Theater. Walk down a bit and turn right into the small all, voila.

11 years, 1 month

Sudo Room featured in Permacities game!

by Vicky Knox

My friend Alfred Twu developed a free online educational game in which you can alter the cityscapes of a number of northern Californian cities (such as Oakland and San Francisco) so that once-blase storefronts can become food cooperatives, streets that once favored cars can be loaded with bike lanes and bioswales, big banks can be occupied and entire city blocks can be CONQUERED BY SUDO ROOM (This is a new feature. Not kidding)!! While making these changes, you can have the option of following external links to learn more about the topics covered. I'm dying of laughter. This is awesome! Find a photo of the Sudo Block ("Sudo Square"?) here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=506178112774900&set=a.2315910069002… The full game launches in the summer, but in the mean time, you can warp Oakland and other cities here: http://permacities.com/

11 years, 1 month

[To: Announce] DanceSound LED Collab - 6pm Saturday meeting - come by!

by Romy Ilano

Hey folks, The Public School dance teacher is at SudoRoom today at 6pm. Come by to brainstorm, participate! She's going to be rehearsing and is open to new ideas about how to integrate LED lights, electronics, possibly sound? https://sudoroom.org/wiki/page/DanceSound Welcoming: - Dancers - you don't have to go to all of the rehearsals, and you can perform in front of the audience. Rehearsal is every Saturday at 6pm until May 3rd. see wiki for details - Sound experiment / light artists / costume artists- to give Jen ideas - Costumes welcome when: May 3rd @ Berkeley Museum 7pm Yeah!

11 years, 1 month

Live-tweeting #oaklandnightslive

by Eddan Katz

I was doing it during the first half, but now have to head home during the intermission. Can the Sudo folks there do some tweeting plugging #SudoRoom and #oaklandnightslive for the second half? There are a LOT of them there by the way. Re-tweeting does count as helping, but only half. sent from eddan.com

11 years, 1 month

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