Slashdot Mirror
Hemos & CmdrTaco @ O'Reilly P2P Conference
Well, we try to avoid posting stories about Slashdot, but I figured at least a couple of people would want to know that we'll be speaking at the O'Reilly P2P conferences. For those of you registered, we'll be speaking at the collaborative journalism panel along with Dan Gillmor (Hi Dan) and Dave Winer (Hi Dave) and moderated by Katie Hafner from the NYT (can you fix that required login thing?). Anyway, it's on Thursday, Feb. 15, 11:15-12:00, in San Francisco. Come on by if you are attending the conference.
So you are saying that her nasty libel was a punishment for him not talking? That sounds like blackmail.
Blackmail isn't a word that scares me, but I don't know if it applies in this case. "Punishment", however, very much does. If Hafner had said to Mitnick something along the lines of "How else is your side of the story going to appear in my book if you don't let me ask you a few questions?", then in some way that might be an unpleasant level of pressure, but nothing a reporter for Newsweek wouldn't be using in the daily course of business anyway. Many subjects don't want to be interviewed, especially when they know their cases are notorious and already overblown, and when the wife of the journalist who got your face on the front page of the New York Times as an FBI's Most Wanted Computer Hacker is there with a pen and a notebook, you already know the article/book being researched isn't going to laud your existence anyway. Mitnick, who was not exactly resplendent in monetary fortune, is not all that out of line to ask for compensation to tell his exclusive story to a couple of book authors who are going to rake in some bucks for splattering his name across the front of their primary-colored book on "Outlaws on the Computer Frontier". And Markoff/Hafner wouldn't be the first authors to not stay their hands in writing about their subject after they're turned down.
By the way, I'm not the first to delve into the intricacies of this debate. And I'm sure I won't be the last.
- Jason Scott
textfiles.com
Hi Dan! I wish the guys would slashdot me we can handle it. http://www.scripting.com/ See you in SF!
Cody's is still there, and still a great book store. But don't forget Moe's, which is right next to it.
Josh
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... take JonKatz with you so we don't have to listen to him :)
The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...
SIG: HUP
Because most of us are just looking at porn on valentines day anyway.
"pr0n": An anagram of "porn," possibly indicating the use of pornography. - www.microsoft.com
Well. Why doesn't Slashdot create it's own login for the site? Then the viewers, acting as agents of Slashdot, of course, can legally view the link through Slashdot's account.
Well?
-S
Scott Ruttencutter
We Apprentice Developers and Designers
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
"Well, we try to avoid posting stories about Slashdot"
No you don't! You just did and you've done t numerous times in the. That first lines shows that you know the slashdot community hates you for but your trying to cover your ass before you post it anyways. tsk tsk.
Hey, Dan, is O'Reilly going to make available streaming video, archived audio, transcripts, chiselled slates, papyrus, or some other method for telepresence? I can't be there, but I'd like to hear your session. I also understand that Marshall Burns, a custom 3D fabrication futurist is going to speak with a colleague about Napsterizing design of 3D stuff.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
I suppose it would be unwelcome to note how little Katie Hafner has done for the hacker community, and how unpleasantly she has portrayed people who share a love of computers in general?
After looking at your links, and having read the book, I can't think of any instances in which she even mentions "hackers" or "people who share a love of computers in general", at least in my vocabulary. I assume you're using those terms as euphemisms for malicious crackers and halfwit script kiddies.
You're right that she doesn't perceive them as lovable, brilliant scalawags -- but that's hardly a prerequisite for being a technology advocate.
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I've been fascinated by the peer-to-peer concept for a long time. Like the open source movement peer-to-peer offers every member of a community the chance to contribute to that community the best way they know how. I love to see sites like slashdot, kuro5hin, and metafilter all thrive, it's encouraging to know that people will contribute to a project for no other reason than for the sake of contributing. It's a shame I live on the wrong coast to attend this conference.
Hierarchical business models are clumsy beasts. To have an editor, five assistant editors, a handful of associate editors, a copy editor, a content editor, and a fleet of executive assistants to service them, all just to publish a small document or website is ridiculous. Perhaps some of you aren't yet too old to have forgotten your high school newspapers. Perhaps you were even a part of yours. Weren't they just terrible?
My school is very uptight about controversial opinions being expressed among its students. It offers us an opinion board and a newspaper but it censors both on a very regular basis. The student newspaper is essentially nothing more than a vehicle of propaganda. The opinion board has been partially reclaimed by a band of students who regularly point out the idiocy of the administration and the poor treatment of the students. But still, our administrative staff doesn't like it. They talk amongst themselves of "those unappreciative kids" in the halls.
Many of the frustrated voices in the school community, student and teacher alike, are reaching their breaking point. I've been working hard over the past several weeks to lay the groundwork for a new student newspaper. One developed by and for the so-called counter-culture of the community. I put together an initial team of people whom I believe will best be able to launch the project and since then we've been working on developing a publication and distribution model.
We have no official backing from the school, obviously, and our resources are limited to our home PCs and printers. There is no hierarchy, the entire publication is built on user submission. That means that we have gone out and asked certain individuals in the school community to contribute articles and media to the first edition. It is hoped that after the paper premieres there will be enough interest in the project to generate submissions without our having to beg for them. You see then, that the submission model is very similar to that of slashdot or kuro5hin. A team of moderators would then sort through the submissions and choose the best articles for the text publication. In addition to the text publication there will be an online supplement in which all submissions, even those not included in the text document, will be published.
To print over four hundred copies of a five to ten page document is no small task. We have adapted the idea of distributed processing to this problem. Rather than force one individual to spend the time and money to print four hundred copies we will instead have each contributor print twenty or so copies and then compile each set of twenty into the final group of hundreds.
We have no choice but to distribute the document peer-to-peer. Any other distribution would most likely be against the rules of the school and, of course, we want to obey the rules. This means that everyone, moderators and contributors, will handout copies to people in the school eventually reaching near complete distribution.
And so, after that long-winded and, I'm sure, entirely uninteresting preamble I actually want to pose a question to the slashdot community. What problems do you foresee a project like this facing? What hurdles have other projects based on user submission had to overcome? Is there a significant difference between user submission in real space as opposed to on the web? Is this project even feasible at all? We're really going at this by the seat of our pants, please tell me if you think we're also going ass backwards.
yay for ultra-mega-mega long posts,
-zak
p2p stands for Pier To Pier. It's a really cool concept. You take a big seaworthy freight ship and fill it with DAT tapes of CD-Rs at your closest Pier and send it on its way to your destination Pier. It's the highest bandwidth data transport solution there is.
It's been around forever for use with people and boxes of cheap goods, I'm surprised to see people just finding out about it.
We're going to give a presentation on the implications of P2P file-sharing technologies for the manufacturing industry as "Fabbers" come online.
Fabbers are solid imagers or basically 3D printers capable of printing out CAD files.
If you thought that the record industry is getting pissed off - imagine what will happen when you can trade rolex.fab files!
Check it out (Links to all sorts of Fabber stuff.)
Looking forward to the Collaborative Journalism forum for sure. Came from Australia to do this conference! Cheers James
Hey Ian, just a head's up from the Espra team; we're all going to be there too along with some other ESP employees. We'll be watching all the Freenet developer talks, so hopefully we can meet up and do some dev talk afterwards.
One burning example of her approach is her hatchet job on Mitnick in Cyberpunk, which is captured wonderfully in Charles Platt's review of Markoff's later book Takedown, where Hafner admits quite freely that she never talked to Mitnick before writing the book, and professes ignorance of her subject.
In the chat transcript that you link to Hafner says that she tried to interview Mitnick, but he only wanted to talk to her for money, which she declined.
Can anyone decipher?
Don't forget to hit Cody's in Berkeley (hmmm, is it still there?) - and it's a blast to walk down Telegraph, it's like you're transported back in time 35 years...
-- Ed Carp, N7EKG erc@pobox.com PGP KeyID: 0x0BD32C9B What I'm up to: http://intuitives.mine.nu
Just a joke. =)
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
I suppose it would be unwelcome to note how little Katie Hafner has done for the hacker community, and how unpleasantly she has portrayed people who share a love of computers in general?
Of course, everyone has to make a buck, even if it's off the backs of talented, driven people. But it would be good to know beforehand about their motives.
Hafner in a Chat from 1992
Mixed Reviews of Hafner's Book with John Markoff
Kevin Mitnick's view of Katie Hafner and John Markoff
It would be really sad if Katie Hafner were allowed to shunt her past work and reinvent herself as a technology advocate. She is anything but.
Well, this puts me into an interesting position, Jon, because I like you even less than I do Katie Hafner. But until Ms. Hafner asks me why I don't like Jon Katz, I'll answer your questions.
1. Does she have to be a technology advocate to be on a panel?
No, she doesn't have to have any credentials at all to be on any panel, although one would hope the credentials one does have would lend themselves to whatever the subject is at hand. Her speaker bio for this conference certainly leads one to the impression that she is not only a technology writer, but has been one for 17 years. One would hope, in that sort of starry-eyed mistiness I get whenever I think about journalism, that someone who writes about a subject for such a long time would have some small respect for the figures within that subject, and more importantly would be focused on bringing to light the story that a group or subculture might have to tell. It's not altogether earth-shattering to note that there's people who like computers or who are really driven to create things, but it is important that someone who calls themselves a journalist help these folks express their motivations and story in a way that people not intimately involved with them will understand or at least have a clear picture of what these folks are about. If you're not using your skills as a writer to bring your audience an improved awareness of your subject, then you're just another sideshow barker, gaining a quick buck for your publishing masters by redrawing perfectly normal/human people as scary, freakish monsters bent on the destruction of all.
I see very little evidence that Katie doesn't "use" her subjects, a technique possibly learned from Markoff. She certainly doesn't bring, in her writing, the thoughts of the people she's writing about in the hacking/hacker community; she DOES do an awful lot of finger-pointing and telling you what they're thinking. This is a subtle difference, but important. These figures that she and Markoff choose to cover are alive, and quite capable of communicating, but she chooses instead to speculate on what they're thinking (which she generally doesn't know) and guesses at motivations. She doesn't quote; she narrates. This is not a very flattering approach, and often not all that accurate.
Nowhere in her writing, I might add, does she ever profess an understanding of the draw of technology. She might as well be talking about serial killers, pharmacists, or alligator wrestlers for all she brings to the table in writing about her subject. I can make a pretty assured bet that she would write about all these subcultures with the same distant lack of fundamental characterization. She can string sentences together, but she does her subject (and audience) no favors.
2. You really think she's anti-hacker. I didn't get that from her book at all..plse explain.
There's many examples, and remember she's written several books and articles on hackers and hacker culture, so you can't just say "her book". One burning example of her approach is her hatchet job on Mitnick in Cyberpunk, which is captured wonderfully in Charles Platt's review of Markoff's later book Takedown, where Hafner admits quite freely that she never talked to Mitnick before writing the book, and professes ignorance of her subject. Platt goes on to Focus on Markoff, worse than the two of you (Katz/Hafner) combined, but my insistence that she has not only a lack of understanding of the Hacker Subculture, but a fundamental distrust/dislike of this group of people, stays firm.
As for her upcoming book on The WELL, I'm one of those folks who has really cringed at the Canonization of The WELL by yourself and others, and another "Book of Revelations" onto the pile will no doubt add to that mythology, but I would say that I have very little faith that Hafner will capture anything but a surface glimmer of the motivations of the hacker psyche, assuming of course she actually touches on it at all in this book! There's actually a very good chance she could avoid that aspect entirely. But now we're running into a smorgasbord of conflicting dislikes I have about this whole rotten business that Hafner, Markoff, Yourself, and Littman have in what you've all done.
I apologize to any outside readers if my dislike of Katz has distorted the clarity of what I'm trying to get across. I'll probably cover it some time on my site, in better thought-out detail, starting from Richard Sandza and progressing forward.
- Jason Scott
TEXTFILES.COM
I'll be there, giving a presentation on a subject dear to the hearts of slashdotters: how to find the good stuff amidst the bad stuff, even when some of the moderators are malicious.
Of course, my real goal will be to find out how other p2p systems work in order to use the knowledge to improve Mojo Nation. Therefore one of the talks I'm most looking forward to is Wes Felter's overview of technical decisions in the deployed p2p networks.
Regards
Zooko
Regardless of what anyone's views of what Mitnick did or didn't do, there is much truth to him saying that the entire first section of her book (I assume you're speaking of Cyberpunk) was by and large potentially libelous material, speaking of incidents like they were the absolute truth when, in fact, they were, at best, third hand information. How would you feel if you were awaiting trial and someone labeled you as the "Dark Side Journalist"?
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
l. Does she have to be a technology advocate to be on a panel?
2. You really think she's anti-hacker. I didn't get that from her book at all..plse explain.
jonkatz@slashdot.org
I'm looking forwward to this session, though 45 minutes for 4 speakers plus moderator is pretty short.
I find myself wondering if P2P is being overdefined, whether too many things and ideas are being put under the P2P umbrella. But if anything qualifies as P2P, it's Slashdot and other user-fed sites.
cuz i'm not missin valentines day
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