Slashdot Mirror
On Hacktivism
z84976 writes "Oxblood Ruffin, of cDc fame, has produced a nice article discussing various aspects of hactivism and some of the approaches used by their own Hacktivismo group in supporting freedom (of thought, mainly) on the internet. Check it out over at The Register when you get a chance."
You know, the antics of the music industry (and the kind of thing that MS is kowtowing to with their DRM scheme) really pisses me off, but also convinces me that there will eventually come something to replace them both. But, know what? It's their property. If they want to fuck up their distribution channels, fuck em. I can do without "so-called" modern music anyway. I go see live bands locally, get lit, and have a great time and I didn't need to buy a fucking copy-protected by the DMCA CD or cassette or anything. These guys are out there trying to make a living, maybe you should check em out. And if you catch them after the show, you might can convince them that they should distribute their songs on CD's for cheap and ask them (ask them) about how they feel about MP3's and music-sharing in general. Of course, they might not agree with you (or myself), but they have that *right* to do so. So, I encourage, nay I *challenge* each and every one of you who would boycott MS or the RIAA to pick up a local newspaper and see what's going on in y our town this weekend. Chances are, there's a band or two actually worth checking out, and hey, it's not like you're going to meet chicks sitting behind your monitor. Oh, and on-topic: Rock on Beale! I'm encouraged to see that grassroots hactivism coming alive! :) (hacker used in "coder" definition) Keep up the good work and keep fighting the good fight.
If anyone is ever in a cybercafe in Mauritania or Elbonia, let's mail them 64k of encrypted random data. Let the government snoops try to decode that!
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Advanced research and technical notes are being handed over to the Chinese without question. It couldn't be going better for the Communists.
Can anyone back up this claim? I mean it doesn't seem like good business sense to just give things away for free to a competiting nation...
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
Hacking is a contact sport.
The more people who have contact with one another, the better.
-- Shaolin Punk,
Proxy Boss,
Hacktivismo
Yea, totally. I'm routing for the Bears!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
"Hacktivism chooses open code, mostly." Guess this means a lot of people will be against it because its not totally open.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Wow, is it just me or was that just a lot of fluff!
If you consider some of his topics and questions that he introduces, there is no resolution. While trying to detail what hacktivism is, he makes one statement about it being about creating, rather then destroying, but on the other hand he says that people should be writing disruptive code. Also in the same vein, while talking about writing disruptive code and what should be made, there is a big Closed source bad/open source good (except when you want to hide something malicious). P2P turns into H2H, why napster shut down.. blah, blah, blah.
While I applaud the use of key phrases and liberal use of rhetoric, I walked (or clicked) away with the sense that I wa no more enlightened...
The article quotes McLuhan: "World War Three will be a guerilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation."
I firmly believe that this is true, and is going on right now. But I wonder if it is appropriate to mix this concept with hacktivism. Consider Bush's current position. He's convinced most of the world (most of the US, anyway) that he should be given free reign to wage war anywhere in the country, all in the name of fighting terrorism. I'll keep theories about military-industrial complex profits to myself, at this point.
The point is, he is using major media outlets to spread his message, and in the mainstream media, very few people are questioning him. And at the moment, it is the mainstream media that carries the perception that it reflects the national consciousness.
Not enough people have switched off their TVs and let their corporate newspaper subscriptions expire to make hacktivism effective. It's unfortunate, and I expect (hope) things will change in the coming years, but for now, it's largely irrevelevant.
To quote cDc at DefCon a couple of years ago.
Personally I think 'hacktivism' is a grossly overused excuse for vandalism. Hacking sites as a 'service' to the operators is passe... now the kiddies have to act like they've got some sort of noble political agenda.
This is in keeping with the biblial imperative:
"Thou shalt not kill"
Torture is another matter entirely, however.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
This article tells us of some of the horrible things going on in the world and all, but it is nothing we didn't know was going on.
Hackers collaborate over the web to fight oppression and close mindedness!
Sound at all like a certain upstart OS?
I really did like this article, don't get me wrong but it is very lite on the important information like what they are actually doing about it. I doubt making it easier for a Chinese person to rip music off of the internet is going to bring them to the enlightened western thinking necessary to invoke social change.
What apps are you creating to further this change, where can I get the source (since you sited open source as being the obvious choice among hacktivist coders)? What can I do to help? This article, while being interesting, served no real purpose.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
In 1968 the Canadian communications guru Marshall McLuhan stated, "World War Three will be a guerilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation."
/. effect an attack? Maybe we should call it a /. blitz or /. offensive. On that note we've been hitting a lot more good guys than bad guys, sheesh! Us geeks can't even get a techie war right!!
So if the war is being waged on the Internet by civilians would that make the
I stole this Sig
I have two things to say about this article.
1) It was VERY VERY long2) I really liked the analogy of OSS to Resturants.
Think about it. The majority of people never think twice about never seeing the ingrediants, but there are some who feel "I'm putting this stuff in my system, I have the right to know what's in it!". Some even have good reasons like peanut reactions and so forth.
The resturant will say "If we tell you how we made it, we will lose business". I think that's nonscence personally. Ten to one, I'm not going to be able to cook that by myself anyway, and I'm just going to come back to the restaurant to get it donecorrectly. Plus if I do make it and feed it to all my friends and they say "where did you get that recipie?" and I tell them, don't you think they are going to go check out the menu for themselfs?
And finally, what if the majority of the people eating at your restaurant wanted the food cooked a different way, but didn't have any other choice on the menu? They are going to take those ingrediants and make the food better. If the cook was smart enough, he might be able to learn from what the other cook did, and make his own product better!
Am I making my analogy clear here, or is this just gibberish?
Sigs are out of style, so I'm not going to use one...oh wait..
Losing your rights (and especially your right to privacy) is not going to happen in one fell swoop.
Rather, it's more like the oft-spoken-of boiling frog - if privacy is taken away in tiny little increments, then before long it will be compromised in a big way without any substantial opposition.
I'm not saying that we should all wear tinfoil hats - but constantly recognizing (and opposing, where necessary) the gradual erosion of our right to privacy and governmental abuse of information is our only defense against being... boiled alive.
The government wants to know more and more about us these days - the excuse du jour is homeland security and counter-terrorism. Throw in stopping child-porn and just about any legislator will support any bill that enables more monitoring of citizens.
Better to be watchful and vocal - without screaming that the sky is falling - than to sit quietly, watching the privacy we enjoy now disappear for our children.
Back in 1995 I had some arguments... that is um... discussions (in Cannes at Milia) with Nicholas Negroponte and John Perry Barlow. Both Negroponte and Barlow believed that the Internet was an unstoppable force that would inevitably make countries like China become free.
My argument was that the Chinese and other repressive governments would be sure to set up national proxies with filtering that blocked out sites the government didn't want people to see and kept track of what people were accessing.
Both Negroponte and Barlow told me that was impossible and would never happen. They also pointed out that the TCP/IP is designed to route around obstacles.
Well, I've been proven right (so why am I not running Media Lab or flying around the world giving speeches?). China and other countries (Singapore, etc.) have in fact put in national proxies and are blocking thousands of sites, tracking people's usage, and putting people in jail.
On the other hand, I think that there is a hope that Barlow and Negroponte will eventually turn out to be right in the end, as hackers and other renegades put in alternative links via satellite and other means, which bypass these government blockades.
If enough of that happens, the blockades will come down, since they won't be useful any longer.
But I think there will be a long hard struggle befoe that happens.
Someone who screams incessantly about something they know nothing about.
Then they'll get the hidden message in the random data. ;)
Like playing Ann Murray's Snowbird backwards and getting the message about the impending Canadian invasion...
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
The guy who is decrying the free speech crowd is posting as an AC.... could their be a greater irony?
Out of curiosity, at exactly what points are "rights being killed"? Your argument seems to be that if the entire free world doesn't come to an end with chaos in the streets, that a particular trend in society isn't anything to worry about.
The right to personal privacy and the right to free speech are perhaps ill-understood and used as an excuse to justify crapulent behaviour, but that doesn't change the fact that those rights are the cornerstone of quality of life in a civilized country. Rights can be destroyed all at once (Communist invasion of Czechoslovakia fer instance) or eaten away at gradually (recent trends in the G8). The end result (given enough time) will be fundamentally indistinguishable if the brakes aren't put on.
Maybe you'd prefer to examine your rights in the context of "things I can identify because I used to have them", but I'd rather not....
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Our definition of hacktivism is, "using technology to advance human rights through electronic media."
You might not know it from reading the manifesto, but cDc and Hactivismo have actually been working on a product called Peekabooty that allows users to sneak through the firewalls that oppressive regimes set up to restrict access to the Internet.
Hacktivism chooses open code, mostly.
Peekabooty is open source under the GPL but the FAQ advises people who would like to do testing: "You should have enough equipment to run at least three nodes, which means three MS Windows machines (we are in the process of porting it to Linux). You should also be skilled with tracing through code using Visual C++ or your own favorite debugger."
the main challenge for hackers is to keep focused on the goal of liberating the Internet.
There seems to have been some kind of falling out between cDc and Hactivismo over Peekabooty. The lead developer Paul Baranowski (aka Drunken Master) said he has "decided to sever ties with the Hacktivismo group but he will continue to develop the Peekabooty app. Occasionally developers can't find the environment they need to do their best work and now is one such time."
Now let's get a piece of that article linked above...
What's this about? Are they friend of foe??? And lastly, the thread was modded -1, offtopic. Evidently somebody didn't want us to see that....
josh crawley
The article reads better with a tin-foil hat.
Hey really? Do they sell them at ThinkGeek? I want one with Tux painted on it!
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
So, in my mind, hacking a web page can never really be justified--no matter what the cause is. On the other hand, refusing to obey government censorship (in places like China) by hacking through their censors is, in my mind, is a very noble thing.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Firstly the police would have to have a warrant by a superintendent or above. Secondly they would have to be watching the communcations when the email has been recieved. Thirdly they would have to show that there is reasonable reason to believe that the target has the keys.
So yes, if you were being monitored by the police and suspected of a crime, and you were sent an encrypted message, you might forgive the police for trying to decode it.
That said, there is a lot about the RIP bill that is controversial. But compared to the Patriot Bill over in the US, it's pretty tame; warrants are still needed here for surveilence.
Re: China...
/ ch.html
...
If I said I could *quadruple* the living standard of the poorest 20% of the globe in less than 3 decades, would you laugh? If I really did it, might you be impressed?
The Chinese govt did just that between 1972 and 2000. Quadrupled the average income of the nation from about $800 to $3,600. Without spilling buckets of blood (see Stalin, Mao South America). http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos
Yep, their govt is corrupt from stem to stern, a true cleptocracy. But it is undergoing change much more rapidly than gov't in the west, (which are selling their children's health and souls to big corporations).
Can you really claim they the Chinese persecution is worse that the US war on drugs? Or the Israeli's treatment of the Palestinians? Or the US in central America?
Don't fight them, wait, watch, keep perspective. Change is happening.
The Oxblood essay is kind, progressive and well intentioned. But if you want to make a huge change in people's lives, stop playing in the
Internet, go where help is needed and pick up a shovel. Or sign a check to feed a starving kid. Or help develop a better strain of rice. Or
It's easy to be Robbin Hood. High-profile heroics is more fun than the hard work, but doesn't feed more people. Which, oddly enough, is
what the chinese govt has been doing with amazing success.
rant over,
=brian
List of other anonymisers
I put that up when my mum was blocked from reading my own website at school... I don't know which would be worse, someone at her school blocking a free-software/free-speech site, or the site being added by censorware companies themselves.
I'd add an anonymiser myself if I had the bandwidth, but it would give people too much false-security to be able to use one without an HTTPS connection
"I am of the opinion that activism is amoral whereas civil disobedience is not only moral, but one's duty. I think a good portion of hackitivism is not civil disobedience but instead just activism."
The essay posits a new, more constructive definition for hacktivism, which doesn't include what you're using the word for. Here's the relative bit:
Our definition of hacktivism is, "using technology to advance human rights through electronic media....." From the cDc's perspective, creation is good; destruction is bad. Hackers should promote the free flow of information, and causing anything to disrupt, prevent, or retard that flow is improper. For instance, cDc does not consider Web defacements or Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to be legitimate hacktivist actions.
Your example of defacing a web page certainly doesn't fit into this definition. What you stated as noble (hacking through government censors) is what the article supports as hacktivism, and I agree with its classification as activism rather than civil disobedience. Regardless of the definition of hacktivism, activism and civil disobedience are well-defined and agreed upon.
Civil disobedience requires putting yourself out in the open, blatantly violating the law and likely getting arrested. Activism is simply working hard to support a cause-- there's nothing amoral about it. You can be amorally acitivist just as much as you can be amorally civilly disobedient.
The problem, as you've aptly demonstrated, is that certain words take on connotations that people don't want associated with them, and have to be wary of. While I've rarely seen activism associated with amoral (it's generally seen as highly moral), "hack" is one of those big bad words in the public eye. Calling someone a hacktivist will likely have most of the world thinking they're some evil guy who steals their credit card numbers from Amazon and uses them to buy guns for guerrillas.
Of course, I should have inserted irony tags, since the purpose of most surviving world religions is a better world, peace, etc. Although local definitions of what this means will vary. YMMV
And of course, most people can only view the world based on the instructions of their own personal demons and devils.
Pick the hot button of your choice. Use often.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Quoting:
Svend Robinson, the NDP Foreign Affairs critic, also criticized the government. "If ever there were any evidence needed that Canadian troops should not be in Afghanistan under United States command we have seen the tragic evidence of that," Mr. Robinson told a news conference.
"If Canadian troops cannot be certain that they're not going to be fired on by Americans we have no business being there."
This just shows how far from reality Svend Robinson is. Military operations (even training) are inherently risky. Co-operative operations with nations that operate usually with different equipment, protocols, and ROE are even more risky.
There has never been a military operation where one group of troops could be certain that they would not be fired on by another group. And it is usually the infantry on the short end of the stick. That doesn't make it right, but right doesn't have a lot to do with war.
And the day a nation becomes so averse to casualties taken (for any reason), it ceases to be able to exert itself even in the cause of peace or stability.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."