Task 8: Reflection on project work

After all's said and done, my ethnographic study of a team prior to toolset migration is finished. It took me quite a few hours of work, many of those comprised of simply sitting quietly while writing furiously everything people were doing. Interpreting hours of scribbling proved challenging and the fact I knew what most of those people were doing made the notes a lot more biased than I'd hoped for an academic document, but in the end it's fine for its pragmatic application.

Shadowing alone didn't do the trick, which was an unexpected result. Since I had prior knowledge of how the team is structured and how it theoretically relates - I was even partially responsible for the training of some of the newer members of the team - I was able to build a good theoretical map of the relationships between sub-teams and the toolset, but shadowing revealed behavioral quirks, technical misconceptions, work vices and other work characteristics that needed clarification. Therefore, a couple of short interviews were executed to better understand what was actually going on.

The result was a much more complex relationship map than previously anticipated. That was a sobering experience and I'll try to remember not to assume I understand how a team works only by superficial observation. This is the most important lesson I expect to carry into future field research projects. The good news is that I left the endeavor with a great understanding of how each sub-team uses the tool differently, how previous assumptions shaped current work vices and how to prevent these during the migration to the new tool.

It has also taught me an important lesson that I tried to convey in the final document - that while people are fixated on what functions tool A possesses and how to achieve the exact same function in tool B, the really important thing is that both tools allow for the same workflow, even if functions are not exactly analogous. Less focus on functions and a more holistic view of how work revolves around the tool will help us shape not only the migration effort, but also training for the new tool.

Different People, Digital World

The task at hand is a rather touchy one for me - discussing how a minority group can or uses the internet to reduce alienation and prejudice. It's touchy because it is, but also personally, because I'm a huge advocate for equality. I'd state I'm a feminist, but my girlfriend being a radical feminist, I know this is anathema as radfem declare that the oppressor cannot be a feminist, which is a view that I respect (but of course, I politely disagree with. But that can be my white male heterosexual privilege talking. Enough of that).

That said, I'd like to hijack this post not to talk about how women use the internet to reduce alienation and prejudice but instead how they use it to mobilize and support each other. I'm a great admirer of the many times extremely ad-hoc but always fantastic mobilization power or Brazilian radfem, how they are massacred by every side, including liberal feminists, how they're deviled and called feminazis and still when their sisters are in trouble, be they other radfem or libfem or not really feminists at all, it's always a huge support network of radfem organizing through social networks and mobile chats who get shit done.

While libfem are worried about including men in the debate or organizing polls or whatnot, radfem go and flashmob wherever there's trouble brewing and clash with authority and give their blood (sometimes quite literally) to keep sorority alive and kicking. I admire not only their spirit, but their non-tech savvy, patched together approach that gets great results even if most of them have no idea of the underlying tech that's enabling them to fight the good fight.

And maybe that's one of the beauties of living in the times we live today - you don't need to be a techie, you don't really need to read an RFC on how to implement a protocol or a big manual on how to configure a server to run a top-notch support network for your social movement. You just need to have a need and will to set things right.

Fun times.

Browsing the Jargon File

It always brings a smile to my face every time a link begins with http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/

So much of how we communicated in Internet Relay Chat could be traced back to the Jargon File, though we didn't know back in the day. I'm still a great user of language hacks like soundalikes - no one gets by me running Microsoft's browser without me exclaiming how I hate Internet Exploder and no day goes by without me making fun of my girlfriend being disclexy.

But my favorite story in the Jargon File is A Story About ‘Magic'. In the best tradition of laziness or respect for the original content (you'll never know which), I'll quote it integrally instead of discussing:

Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).

You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were the words ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. The switch was in the ‘more magic' position.

I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no wire on its other side.

It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer instantly crashed.

Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless restored the switch to the ‘more magic’ position before reviving the computer.

A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it, still in the ‘more magic’ position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.

The computer promptly crashed.

This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.

We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch was magic.

I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it set on ‘more magic’.

1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case, which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn't necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then wired in the switch as a joke.

Original file can be found here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html

The values of hacker ethic in the new century

Hacker ethics arguably have had as much influence on the last few years of the 21st century as Protestant work ethics have shaped the spirit of Capitalism. Many an entrepreneur, inventor or maintainer of some of the cornerstones of modern society were greatly influenced or completely guided by hacker ethics.

Freedom, for instance, is one such value which can be found in many of the technologies we use today, or which defines one of several famous dichotomies from which there are still no clear winners. One such dichotomy is the iOS versus Android battle, which once seemed lost to the hordes of proprietary software married to Digital Rights Restriction Management wrapped in a walled garden of curated content of Apple Inc., but nowadays it seems more and more like the open-source (if not entirely Free Software), free-for-all and laissez-faire Android alternative has been winning this battle, which is still far from over.

Hackers' approach to money and profit has had a tremendous influence on the current world - from the open standards that enable the web to be what it is today to Free/Libre software to producing content for free for projects like Wikipedia. Money is good and no hacker (ok, few hackers) is preaching Communism, but a challenge is much more important to a hacker - the paycheck he gets for cracking those challenges is just the icing in the cake. Also, "the right way" is not something that appeals to hackers much - "burn the manual, lets have an intellectually stimulating debate about this" has a lot more value. It's this painting outside the lines habit that has given us some amazingly weird stuff like location sharing services or ephemeral chat tools.

Caring is an interesting quirk of hackers which has been migrating to the mainstream through one of the least predictable of sources - hipsters. Those cappuccino-sipping, Apple loving, fashion-oriented skinny people who are otherwise the antithesis of hackers are great at caring and passion. While Gen-Xers at this age were fighting for BMWs and high-rise apartments and cocaine, hispters buy local, ride their bikes to work, integrate into the community, subvert capitalism, work smart and not more. I almost feel disgusted with myself for saying this, but hipsters are direct descendants of hacker culture.

Last but not least, network ethic is now a basic tenet of society. You're not an island anymore, what with your constantly connected smartphone and smartwatch and who-knows how many social network accounts. People no longer expect news to come from the media (and the media is suffering dearly for its nearsightedness in recognizing this trend) and now trust the free flow of information between peers more than anything. This distrust of established top-down hierarchies is and will remain shaping society for years to come.

Stay tuned.

Public Wifi: Security and Privacy - a review

This is a review of the wiki article on Public Wifi: Security and Privacy located at http://ethandlawpubwifi.wikidot.com/

Phishing over the air

Interesting section, but the rhythm is kind of weird - it spends a huge amount of time exploring what email phishing is, its history and estimated social costs, but it then flies over what phishing over the air is (which admittedly has little to do with email phishing) and sprinkles it with technicalities (OpenWRT, PHP, HTTPD) while explaining very little. Special bogus points for "Fig. 1" with no accompanying image ;)

Viruses over the air

More to-the-point than the previous section, but it confused me - if Chameleon doesn't change the router's firmware, how does it infect it? So I Googled Chameleon and ended up on the Malwarebytes blog, where they were perfectly non-informative as well, so maybe those University of Liverpool researchers have some bad publicists. I still don't know what Chameleon does.

Wifi Sniffing

Interesting section with no major flaws but it rubbed me the wrong way - do the authors think public Wi-Fi in intrinsically good or bad? Or do they avoid going the black-and-white route on purpose? My two cents is that people should encrypt any sensitive data anyway, so the fact that the Wi-Fi network they are accessing is unencrypted becomes immaterial. And unencrypted Wi-Fi makes for more universal access so I'm all for it.

Packet Sniffing technology

Very well written albeit overly long section - I'll avoid breaking down every single packet sniffer they've listed because a) there are so many sniffers around so either you cover every single one of them or make a generic post about all of them and they went for a middle ground solution and b) TL;DR

What can be done to protect yourself and your network?

Last but not least, a very interesting section on practical recommendations for a safe Wi-Fi network, though it starts with a bullshit suggestion - setting up a readable set of rules people have to agree to to access the network is a waste of time because TL;DR people won't read it and will do whatever they please so if you don't want people to do something, enforce it with good network configuration (to their credit, they do recommend that anyway). All in all a very sane list of recommendations but it lacked what in my opinion is the sanest of options for a safe work environment over wireless networks - have two separate Wi-Fi networks, one free-for-all open SSID so people can BYOB (Bring Your Own Device, which they'll do anyway) and another, restricted, encrypted, password protected SSID and if possible use a MAC Address Filter so only devices that were previously approved by the IT department can have access to this second network where all sensitive information resides.

My (rather long) two cents, given ;)

A Constructive Proposal For Copyright Reform - The Pirate Party's approach

It's no secret that copyright is a mess: between impossibly long copyright terms to draconian rules that treat corporations and natural people the same, the laws that rule over our right to intellectual property are outdated, eschewed and sometimes just plain wrong. The Pirate Party, which was born out of the Piratbyrån of Pirate Bay fame, has some very interesting proposals on copyright reform that I'd like to discuss here.

First, they'd like all non-commercial sharing to be free, meaning that if you're not basing your business around making copies of other people's intellectual property, your copies are not illegal. That seems a bit broad at first glance, but it's actually a very sane proposal - we have made personal copies before copyright was even defined and have since been protected by fair use rules. But 1976 was a greedy year (remember Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists?)  - Walt Disney and friends managed to get US law to protect copyright for the life of the holder + 50 years (to be fair, the Berne convention had already done so in 1886) and Universal tried to stop fair use by suing Sony into copyright violation by manufacturing VCRs. From then on, corporations have been working very hard to reduce the reach of fair use and to restrict it through non-legal means, like Digital Rights Restrictions Management. My take? Fair use should get proper legislation - the fact that there's no proper written definition of the limits of fair use makes it more of a nuisance than a right.

Which brings us to the next proposal, which is reducing commercial monopoly to 20 years. Again, we've been giving life + 50 years as the standard copyright term for most of the world for almost 130 years, so this sounds harsh at first glance. But corporations have been working very hard to extend copyright indefinitely, not coincidentally passing new laws as soon as Mickey Mouse's copyright protection is about to expire - 50 became 70 and in some cases protection can go to 120 years or more(!) The Pirate Party has a very fair point - no investor in their right mind expects a return on investment of 120 years, so why are we giving copyright protection of over a century (in fact, it goes against the spirit of copyright, which is to protect the creator, to give rights that extend after their death). So here's my take personal spin on their proposal - copyright protection should last the life of the creator OR 20 years, whichever comes latest.

Next issue is orphan works - copyright starts counting at the moment of creation, but the fact that it counts automatically creates a legal issue in that since the creator doesn't need to register his creation to be protected, some never will so you have a whole universe of orphaned works whose copyright protection is fuzzy because no one knows if the author is dead or alive or even who (s)he is, so you never know if this has reached the public domain or if you're in violation of copyright. Their proposal is very sane - copyright counts automatically from the moment of creation and if you have any commercial interest in protecting it, you have five whole years - not from the moment of creation but actually from the first publication, which can come many years later - to register. If at the end of this period you have not tried to protect your work by registering it with the proper authorities, it goes into the public domain. Sounds fair enough and I have nothing to add to it.

Then comes free sampling, which is the right to make derivative works, to cite existing works and to parody. I point to my original take early on that the limits to fair use needs to be properly codified and should contain these rights. Which brings us to the last important part, which is the banning of Digital Rights Restrictions Management. I say good riddance, as the law should be all protection that copyright needs and any external restriction to hard-coded legal rights should be illegal in the first place. While they're at it, they should also ban clickwrap/shrinkwrap agreements (where you enter into a licensing contract simply by installing a piece of software) and End User License Agreements which restrict user rights further than what's in the law, like the 'newish' trend between commercial software developers to state that you don't own the software you paid for, but merely have a license to use it which can't be transferred, sold or even moved between two of your own machines.
So yes, the Pirate Party has my vote, definitely ;)

The Uneasy Alliance: Free Software vs Open Source

To most people, Free and Open Source Software are the same thing. Some for over-simplification, some for ignorance. But Free Software is a philosophical approach as old as software itself, as most of the software in the 50s and 60s was written within academia and shared freely like all proper scientific discoveries should. Even as early as 1953 the operating system for the UNIVAC version A-2 was fully FOSS (free and open source software). It was only in the late 60s that the cost of development became high enough that software began to be seen as a market in itself and the first proprietary software came to be. In 1976 Bill Gates wrote the first treatise in defense of proprietary software (the Open Letter to Hobbyists), where he argued that copying Micro-Soft's Altair BASIC without a license was stealing.

The fact is people kept sharing and proprietary software never had 100% of acceptance, but it became a huge business model nonetheless. So in 1985 Richard Stallman published his own treatise, the GNU Manifesto, with views of getting rid of AT&T's grip on UNIX and creating a new operating system that was free to use and modify (which of course implied that the source code should also be fully open). The following year the Free Software Foundation would be created and, with it, the Free Software Definition - software that ensures that the end users have freedom in using, studying, sharing and modifying it.

1992 would see the creation of Stallman's dream when Linus Torvalds decided to publish his Linux kernel, which he had open sourced as soon as created, under the GNU General Public License. This was the first time that GNU was a complete software stack, as it finally had a free, open kernel to run on. GNU/Linux (simply Linux to most of us) was born.

This is when things became confusing.

GNU/Linux was too interesting to pass and would soon attract commercial interest. But Free Software was "tainted" by Stallman's license, which, by being nonrestrictive, restricted commercial usage of it (or so went the argument by 1997/1998). When Netscape decided to publish their Communicator openly, a few members of the Free Software movement saw this as a decisive moment to jump in and come up with a more pragmatic/less broad definition that could appeal to commercial software while still making the source code fully available. this Open Source Definition would give birth to the Netscape Public License, effectively the first Open Source License. Stallman objected that the focus on Open Source meant most philosophical debate was being ignored (and he was right) - but an uneasy alliance would soon form - 1998 was also the year of the infamous Halloween Documents - once again, Microsoft (no dash by now) would seriously attack the Free/Open Source scene.

In the end, both pragmatic and idealistic approaches have their own merits - Open Source attracted many players to the field and Free Software has kept it honest - but both have their shortcomings. The debate will not go away anytime soon - GPL 3 and its push against DRM has made some interesting enemies likes Linus Torvalds himself - but all have to gain with Free/Libre Open Source Software, whatever narrow or broad definition you want to give it.