dyne:bolic is a GNU/Linux bootable operating system shaped on the needs of media activists, artists and creatives as a practical tool for multimedia production: you can manipulate and broadcast both sound and video with tools to record, edit, encode and stream, all using only free software!

Just boot a CD: you don’t need to install anything, if you want to run from harddisk you just need to copy a directory: the easiest installation ever seen!

It is optimized to run on slower computers, turning them into a full media stations: the minimum you need is a pentium1 or k5 PC 64Mb RAM and IDE CD-ROM, or a modded XBOX game console.

GO TO: dynebolic.org

dyne:bolic ISO file runs from CD, DVD, USB or VM on your computer

]]> http://www.dyne.org/dynebolic/feed/ 0 http://www.dyne.org/warscape-sonata/ http://www.dyne.org/warscape-sonata/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 07:15:05 +0000 vlax http://www.dyne.org/?p=992 A sound art composition about the use of viral media to bypass the war on drugs in Mexico

viral messages about narcowar

Warscape Sonata is a sound art production that remixes information related to the current drug war in Mexico. RSS news channels, microblogging hashtags, and viral videos are used as sources for an electronic registry of the historic moment of militarized Mexico.

The information obtained from these sources is manipulated using GNU/Linux software to extract sound archives which are then used to create a noise musical structure that places aesthetic emphasis on the media aspect of the war.

This sound art composition also highlights the way in which Mexico’s civilian population experiments with information technologies to confront propaganda, social control and fear.

http://sonata.warscape.info

This social experiment with mass media is generating new forms of pop culture charaterized by intense human drama.

Listen/download a mp3 clip!

Warscape Sonata is produced with the DyneBolic nomadic media lab

Warscape Sonata is a work in progress by Vlax, a digital artist and multimedia journalist based in Southern Mexico.

This project will be exhibited at Linux Audio Conference 2012 and hosted at Nau Côclea Contemporary Creation Centre.

…watch the promotional video

We believe that new cultural an economic spheres can be generated promoting collective returns in favor of Free Culture and social development.

We participate in the world movement to establish new conditions for cultural creation in order to allow the production of common works to which everyone can contribute to the benefit of all.

Warscape Sonata is published under Free Art Licence: you can freely copy, distribute, and transform the work’s resources. This license grants you the right to use this work, and acknowledges the right holder’s and the user’s rights and responsibility.

Warscape Sonata is based in collective return

We seek the social return of investments and for this reason apart from individual returns, this project is based on collective returns for the development of the commons (open code and/or free knowledge).

You can participate in many ways:

• With collective financing (monetary contributions)
  With distributed collaboration (services, infrastructures, microtasks)

Please use the Goteo crowdfunding system to participate in Warscape Sonata

http://www.goteo.org/project/warscape-sonata

We announced our intentions on the tor-talk mailinglist, as well the story of TorTV hit the news on Slashdot.

You can follow the progress of this project, read and download its sourcecode as well the ready-to-use app.bin for the WDLXTV system on the TorTV webpage.

If you like to see TorTV developed for more hardware platforms, please consider a donation!

This release improves hdsync stability by implementing a parallel watchdog process, fixing a freezing bug that occurred after playback for a long time. It also enhances logging, adds an option for manual network configuration, and increases the accuracy of sleep timing adjustment to micro-seconds.

News

Cedarliberty by Elena del Rivero and Leslie McCleave

This version of HDSync, including the recent fixes, is being useful for the New York State Museum, where it is running inside the exhibition Reflecting on September 11, 2001 (with thanks to Nicholas Lue for testing and bug hunting) and for the BAK Utrecht where it is deployed to show the installation “Route 3″ by David Kelley and Patty Chang.

Take a look to the XSSer website to see new features implemented, screenshots, documentation, etc…

xsser.sf.net

You can download original code directly from sourceforge:

Or update your copy from the XSSer svn repository:

$ svn co https://xsser.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/xsser xsser

Also, you have on the main website some pre-compiled packages (ArchLinux, Debian/Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc..)

“Are you ready for the Grey Swarm!?”

Happy cross hacking!

What’s new

Critical bugfix

The previous version of Tomb had a critical bug: passwords containing odd characters where badly interpreted and split at spaces. This means that if you password was ‘I am 12!! perfectly 7^!@^#38123 secure' it has been understood by tomb as simply ‘I’ being split at the first “odd” character. So even if you thought you have a long pass-phrase, instead it might have happened that you were using a single character one.

Now this bug has been fixed. However, it won’t fix the password for the tomb that you created and used so far: you need to change the password using the new command tomb passwd.

For more information see: Password-Spaces-Bug.

New features

• Warn if tomb is almost full
• Block if user has swap activated (unless --ignore-swap is used)
• color output
• better integration between cli and tray

Bugfixes

• Mountpoint is deleted after mounting
• Password with spaces were not hadnled properly; now they are
• exit code is now nonzero if errors occur. This will easy the integration into GUIs
• Packaging fixes: archlinux and debian packages should work better now!
• minor fixes

Internal improvement

• New option parsing system
• code cleaning

30c862e documentation updates for release also updated authors information
040b3fe FIX #59 : --no-color do as expected includes documentation for --no-color
fb5d1d2 Give info about used swaps on swap warning and error
f9f8b16 fix 69eca5c1d71e69, source tomb source was exiting
1b4c08e fix #55: deleted obsolete $NOBIND global var and used the more powerful option_is_set() function to check wheatever the -n flag is missing or not
72fcc7c Merge branch 'fix_user_home_search'
e7e71aa fix #52: when trying to get user home directory in exec_safe_bind_hooks, the grep and sed commands doesn't output the right result when multiple lines occours. Now, we use awk to do so
5d54a3b Merge pull request #53 from davinerd/fix_remove_mountpoint_51
350eeb7 fix #51: added a check into umount_tomb() before removing mount point: if it's the default one, then delete it
262855f Merge pull request #50 from boyska/exitcode
69eca5c Better exit code handling, #49
3c09c5d man doc: minor fixes
9de9722 MAN doc: -k -
f4b8a22 Update documentation: swap, --ignore-swap, -k
a3f0c7c clean up mount code and list output ( fix #32 )
70e4a5d fixed #40, added a check to $keyfile in decode_key(), which abort the execution of tomb in case of keyfile already present
86db18b Merge pull request #48 from boyska/fix_47_gpgpwd
4fa04ee FIX #47: handling of special chars in password
a752005 tomb-status launcher in a command 'status'
ec43b95 fixes for desktop integration
cb6fa07 fixed tomb umount
5eebc89 fix correct use of mktemp
f0cd7f5 FIX #36 pinentry and password with spaces
ab7beeb Merge pull request #41 from davinerd/feat_set_keyname
d486c45 added extension .tomb.key to a specified key file (-k param)
d979ebc Merge pull request #35 from davinerd/fix_permissions_tomb
9fbb620 added feature #25: an user can now specify a key name when creating tomb, using the -k flag
ce7edc1 FTR #31 : support key from stdin with -k -
13a9142 FIX option_value problems with "strange" values
f2ba413 Fixed integer checking of -s param
3fe53af webpage updates
fdcdd52 fixed chown and chmod tomb file path, that prevents from change the owner and permissions on newly created tomb
103788f FIX mime packaging problems
f8e9837 FIX help was "always" showing up
3d611d2 new opt parse missed 'source' command, now in place
a73e0a3 Merge pull request #28 from davinerd/feat_issue_1
7b08b49 added check in list_tombs(): if a tomb usage is greater or equals to 90%, then the script prints a warning
938cb01 Use rmdir instead of rm -r (refs #7)
1eb5157 Fix #7 tomb's mountpoint persistence
9c9e335 More readable option check
7e4a56d check if swap is on; fixes #4
f76a355 Merge pull request #24 from davinerd/feat_issue_21
4d4d69c Merge pull request #22 from boyska/fix_nosubcmd
7584dc7 added support for the --force option, which cause slam_tomb() to not wait 3 secs between kills
a580734 fix invalid kill with multiple pids
582cce9 ./tomb -v works fine
32ee4c7 If no subcmd use a default. tomb -h or -v works
20c1097 feature request #21, now slam_tomb() tries to kill 3 times the pids holding the tomb, workflow: 1- kill -SIGUSR1 2- if there are remaining pids, wait 3 secs to get harder 3- kill -SIGTERM 4- if there are remaining pids, wait 3 secs to kill 'em all 5- kill -SIGKILL
afd785b fixed issue #20: created slam_tomb() that take cares about killing and checking pids
21be9e2 Merge pull request #18 from boyska/only_optparsing
a252f62 Fix #14: problems with spaces in option arguments
d5ca188 [Optparsing] do a shift to delete subcommand
6495099 [Optparsing] Support options in whatever position
d0e0044 Changing optparsing, tomb-open needs changes
89d4b8d Optparsing: add other commands
c71bd81 New optparsing, with zparseopts
58e2b26 Merge pull request #16 from davinerd/dependencies
7b2fc78 Merge pull request #17 from davinerd/fix_issue3
d4de059 added cryptsetup and pinentry binary checks to check_bin()
3f0d3da fixed issue #3: a simple file check on the key is now performed before creating the tomb
b18ef6c webpage updates for new release
04120a5 documentation for release
556d300 no terminal
bdef885 better close messages
ac0dcd9 pinentry gtkrc icon
472189f also key
17df4b6 filetype icon in hicolor
0677d5f fixes share
69d91b6 fixes
c47e48a fixes for distcheck
c5c2461 fixing mime defaults and icon installations
5b82352 TODO and VERSION update
bf9cc30 refuses to open a tomb that is already open
e9e584a better dialogs, also for tomb-open
2c26903 tomb list now output also size and usage information
3baa72b new -o flag to manually specify mount(8) options used in tomb open updated documentation
130c98f correctly set ownership to user on newly created tombs
41738e7 make it possible to call tomb-open wizard when no X screen is present
16f0412 Merge branch 'debian0'
eb9c456 small TODO update
2e2fcab fix to close a tomb that is open twice on the same mountpoint
ddff7a7 documentation update for release
657f317 updated task list
7d535e7 kill only if status found running
85b01dd kill the status tray when closed from cli
ccdd2aa fixed slam for a single tomb
7345596 better install in datadir
a891858 Merge branch 'master' into debian1
ddd41af agian
0bf4c99 Merge branch 'master' into debian1
bc96c5e better datadir install again
dee6151 new debian packaging
9497bbc better install in datadir
a65cb29 Revert "fix mime installation also when xdg-mime is not present"
1affad0 fix permissions of new tomb and notice if tomb hasn't right permissions
e8c7120 fix mime installation also when xdg-mime is not present
6cb3571 Fixed tombsize_4k
a4b4af7 deactivate intl and po builds for now
b62df89 little usability fixes
65b2fe4 internationalization
cb9a6bf substituted echo with print in code
052549a colors!   and documentation for tomb list
3ef6398 new tomb list command
25333c5 Fixes 1594b2c :usage of 'try()' in tomb
5029c28 ignore generated gtkrc
1594b2c safe_dir supports mktemp
0095a89 Key generation provides better feedback
600ffb1 Simple style guidelines, as discussed in ML
2b62a97 some fixes to tomb-open
d2d8668 fixed expr bug and added tomb mktemp internal command
e1ba5a4 build deps are converted to checks
461b50b removed dependency from bc now expr is used
a425674 fixes to indentation and whitespace cleanup
449d6ae fixes to tomb close
8771d10 Added slam command
4b47f94 release documentation added more contributors
27a8bf2 removed backup
3a8c90e Merge branch 'anathema' into merge
a04f64f avoid debianutils dependency
569a4d3 improvements
1b38029 Some critical changes in umount_tomb() and some other small fixies
64f8df2 Some general bug fix
521ff6b Pinentry dava errore di parametro LC_CTYPE non definito, e si piantava con cpu sparata al 100%. Non capiva su quale TTY si trovava. Per farla breve, necessitava di sti due parametri: OPTION ttyname=$TTY OPTION lc-ctype=$LANG BELLA LI'
983ba2f Migliorato howto con istruzioni per addare la key del repository gnupg con esempio/istruzioni facili da cut'n pastare.
c31ff0a manpage symlinks now removed
afdfd02 duplicate manpages
8592a32 Added fatal test for needed programsp
1e1e4b2 Added support to libnotify (>= 0.7)
837a22a update submodule
1778d04 updated webpage about building and OS ports
847872a more documentation updates

DYNDY is an effort at building a Pattern Language for Alternative and Complementary Money Systems to inform and empower grassroots communities with concepts and tools to overcome scarcity, instruments and reflections for the Exodus from proprietary money.

 

 

 

CCCB – URGENT! – 2011

 

 

 

Freecoin – P2P currency software suite

 

Prepare your shop for new currencies!

 

 

 

Chaos Communication Camp 2011

lecture “Imagine the Future of Money”

Weaver Birds nest, homage by Doll_Yoko

You are welcome to join the new wheel spin of our history.

This document is an open, collective and still in fieri expression of a large network of hackers and the beliefs motivating their actions. We aim to compile a programmatic, visionary and inclusive document to reclaim space in societies for the GNU generations, proposing a plan to be shared and that already is being shared by many.

The dyne.org hackers network has become 8 years old in 2008; to celebrate the anniversary we released this document on the day 8/8/8. This text doesn’t just talk about “us”: since dyne.org is a network we are including multiple contexts around the world, with which we share mutual help; as with our free software development activity and the sharing of on-line and on-site spaces. This document talks about our dreams, as they slowly but steadily are becoming reality.

For all this we are infinitely grateful to the GNU project, that let us discover how to get hold of knowledge, take control of the architecture we live in and start building a new planet.

Dharma youth

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars. (Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums)

First let’s declare who we are: after 8 years we are able to trace a common denominator among the people active in our network, interconnected by a nomadic approach to development and life.

We are young dreamers, as we often like to stir limitations and invent different models to learn, communicate, share and live than those proposed by the societies where we are caged.

We have in common that we survived out of the commonplaces, we cultivated our thoughts and sharing methods, knowledge and tools, keeping them out of any box.

This is the time in our history in which we’ll speak with young voices, when we are moving some crucial steps on which we’ll base our architectures, hopefully mixing the inner with the outer, the Ying with the Yang.

Some of us are nomads, some settle in different places time to time, some live in the same marginal neighbourhoods of the world where they were born, some are working for multinational IT companies, some are riding bicycles all around the world, some are lecturing in schools, some are exhibiting in art galleries and some are squatting houses. And yes, probably you are one of those, or you have been in contact with us, at least once.

What we are proposing here is a new model and we finally acquired a practical vision to develop it in harmony with our different environments. Please continue reading if you like to discover why and how.

Freedom of Creativity

The growth of the network rendered the non-propertarian alternative even more practical. What scholarly and popular writing alike denominate as a thing (“the Internet”) is actually the name of a social condition: the fact that everyone in the network society is connected directly, without intermediation, to everyone else. The global interconnection of networks eliminated the bottleneck that had required a centralized software manufacturer to rationalize and distribute the outcome of individual innovation in the era of the mainframe. (Eben Moglen)

Free software (as in “Libre” and Free and Open Source, referred as FOSS) is a set of principles endorsed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), envisioning a new model for distribution, development and marketing of immaterial goods. While recommending you to have a look at the philosophy pages published by the FSF, we’ll highlight some implications which are most important for us by making our activities possible and motivating them.

FOSS implies an economic model based on collaboration instead of competition, fitting in the fields of academic research where sharing of knowledge is fundamental , and development where the joint efforts of different developers can be better sustained when distributed across various nodes. In this regard we like to quote John Nash (Mathematics Nobel in 1994) saying that “the best result will come from everybody in the group doing what’s best for himself, and the group”.

Imagine then that all creations re-produced in this way can also be sold freely by anyone in each context: this opens up an horizon of new business models that are local, avoiding globalized exploitation, still sharing a global pool of knowledge useful to everyone.

Here is where the difference between free software and open source starts to matter. Open source focuses on new model for development. Free software is not interested in how the program is developed. We are interested in the ethics of how the program is distributed. (Richard M. Stallman)

Furthermore, in the fields of education we believe that the inherent independence of FOSS from commercial influences is crucial in order to empower students with a knowledge that they really own, not making them dependent from merchants owning their creations by imposing licenses on the tools they’ve learned.

And lastly just consider, and feel free to invent more on these tracks, the impact of Free and Open Source models in fields such as communication, social networking, games, media and… evolution.

To elaborate more reflections on these issues up to the formulation of “policy recommendations” for those that are currently in power, a good starting point is offered by a recent collective effort we joined: the Free Culture Forum.

Now we want to liberate our minds and those of the ones who will come.

No nationhood

Per far che i secoli tacciano di quel Trattato che trafficò la mia patria, insospettì le nazioni e scemò dignità al tuo nome. (A Bonaparte liberatore, Ugo Foscolo, 1778-1827)

Our homelands are displaced and sometimes very different, difficult to be put in contact with the boundaries given by nations. In fact we think that nation states should come to an end, for the borders they impose aren’t matching with our aspirations and current ability to relate with each other.

During the few years of our lives we have been taught to interact and describe ourselves within national schemes, but the only real boundaries were the differences between our languages, while we have learned to cross them.

From our national histories we mostly inherited fears and anger, but with this network we have learned how to bury them, as they don’t belong to us anymore. What’s left is a just a problem that can be solved: we will stop representing us as part of different nations. Even if we could, we don’t intend to build our own nation, nor to propose to you a new social contract, but to cross all of these borders as a unique networked planet, to start a new cartography.

One Planet, One Nation (Public Enemy)

We have a planet! and it is young enough to heal the scars left by the last centuries of war, imperialism, colonisation and prevarication that left most people around us cultivating differences and fake identities represented by flags and nationalist propaganda.

We aren’t claiming to open the borders to the speculation of multinationals, since we are well aware this can be a rhetoric used by “neo-liberalist” interests to tramp over the autonomy of developing countries. The Contextual Integrity (Nissenbaum, 2007) of different social ecosystems needs to be respected, but still as of today the national borders haven’t succeeded in preserving it.

With some exceptions, most of the national programs and cultural funds we agreed to work with were intending each of us would dress a flag, as we were recruited in a decadent game of national pride and competition, with an agenda of cultural, economical and physical domination, tracing all our movements, assimilating them to leviathans that are playing their last violent moves in a chess game for which we are just seamless pieces.

This doesn’t make sense anymore to our generation, we refuse to identify with the governments holding our passports, while we look forward to relating with each other on the basis of dialogue and exchange, approaches and architectures that can be imagined globally and developed locally, in an open way the channels that let us speak to you right now.

Therefore we declare the end of nations, as our generation is connected by a way more complicated intersection of wills, destinies and, most importantly, problems to be solved.

Networked cities

Creo que con el tiempo mereceremos no tener gobiernos. (Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986)

Naturally our cartography draws connections among nodes, hubs of intelligence that are closer in cyber space than in the physical one. In the last century we have learned how we can share music, lyrics, stories and images, since for a few decades we are able to copy them with marginal costs across the whole world.

This let us relate to each other with an outreach that is amplified by the density of our living environments, the urban spaces that somehow offered enough gaps for our agency. Those who pretend to govern our living are now busy in controlling those voids, as every tree in a public square represents an obstacle for their cameras, omnipresent eyes patronising our evolution.

We found shelter in the ancestral practices of trance, opening the doors of our perception to the unknown, resonating our own bones, enhancing the agility of our tongues to follow the hip hop flow of radical thoughts, skating over the universe we are constrained, painting fantasy over the imposed walls of our cities, jumping higher to join the loose ends of our parkours.

These practices are now among all of our cities, seeded by our own need to evolve, to influence a governance that doesn’t listen to us. Some kids turn into a dark army of vengeance, some lose faith in the future, some fall in the virtual loopholes offered by the magnetic startups of the dot.com boom. We need to offerourselves an alternative to this hopeless conflict and the first step is to build a narrative that respects all choices, that doesn’t neglect suffering.

All this creativity and despair is shared among our cities, stuffed by unnecessary needs and mirages of success of the “creative industries”, while we already elaborate a concentric vision that is linked to the density of our lives and the cultural flow of our errant knowledge.

Therefore we declare the birth of a planet of networked cities, spiral architectures of living swirling above our heads and across our fingers, as they evolve in a common practice of displacement and re-conjunction, joining the loose ends of our future.

Our plan is simple and our project is already in motion. In fact, if you look around yourself, you will already find us close. While the current economical and political systems face the difficulty of hiding their own incoherence, we are able to implement their principles better and, most importantly, we are elaborating new ones.

We are reclaiming the infrastructure, the liberty to adapt them to our needs, our right to property without strings attached, the freedom to confront ideas without any manipulative mediation, peer to peer, face to face, city to city, human to human.

The possibility to grow local communities and economies, eliminating globalised monopolies and living up from our own creations, is there. We are filling the empty spaces left in our own cities, we are setting our own desires and we are collectively able to satisfy them.

Furthermore, some of us are seeking contacts with the lower strata of societies, to share a growing autonomy: as much they are excluded by the society they serve, that much they are close to freedom, while it is clear that autonomy is the solution to present crisis.

These marginal communities were the villagers who, mostly because of rural poverty, could no longer survive on agriculture, as well as the migrants and refugees who had to escape their birth places, or never had a homeland. They came to the city and they found neither work nor shelter. They created their own jobs out of the cynical logics of capitalism, mostly in refuse recycling. They look ugly to the minorities in power, while most architects and urban planners unjustly call their shelter “illegal settlements”. Some of them organise themselves to gain power with solidarity, and those are the squatters.

During the past decades we have learnt to enhance our own autonomy in the urban contexts, diving across the different contexts composing the cities, disclosing the inner structure of their closed networks, developing a different texture made of relationships that no company can buy.

The Code riverbank was considered an “illegal settlement” of squatters, while Romo Mengun has been active between 1981 and 1986, gathering the sympathy of intellectuals believing that these poor members of society should be accepted and helped to improve their living conditions. The government of Indonesia planned its forced removal in 1983, but as protests followed the plans were cancelled. Nine years later in 1992 Kampung Code was selected as the winner of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. The Code riverside settlement continues to exist until this day, as a remarkable example of urban architecture. “Burung-Burung Manyar” means “Weaver Birds” in bahasa Indonesia, it is also the title of a book by Romo Mengun published in 1992 by Gramedia (Jakarta).

We are the Weaver Birds, Burung-Burung Manyar, we share our nests in a network, we flow as the river of the spontaneous settlement of Code in Yogyakarta⁹, the gypsy neighbourhood of Sulukule in Instanbul, the Chaos Computer Club, all the hacklabs across the world, the self-organised squatters in Amsterdam Berlin Barcelona and more, the hideouts of 2600 and all the other temporary hacker spaces where our future, and your future, is being homebrewed.

This document is just the start for a new course, outlining an analysis that is shared among a growing number of young hackers and artists, nourished by their autonomy and knowledge. Our hacker spaces are quickly proliferating as we don’t need to build more space rather than penetrate existing empty space, we are highly adaptive and we aim at connecting rather than separating, at being inclusive rather than exclusive, at being effective rather than acquiring status.

To those who feel threatened we ask: do not resist us, for we will last longer than you; and leave us space, for you don’t use it while we do. Do it for the good of all of us, because we are your own kids.

Horizontal media

Whoever controls the media -the images- controls the culture. (Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1997)

Our concern about freedom in media is serious, the current urgency justifies all our acts of rebellion, as they become necessary. One of our main activities is patiently weaving the threads for open networks that put us all in contact. But greedy national regimes and criminal organisations threaten us as if they can avoid their fascist nature to be known, while opportunist provokers use our open grounds to have granted the right to offend and generate more wars.

About media we certainly accumulated enough knowledge to trace a clear path for our development, as we have been doing since the early days of our existence: we are active in implementing the liberties that the digital age grants us. This intellectual freedom is very important for the development of humanity, for its capacity to analyse its own actions, to weave its faith in harmony.

Our plan is to keep on developing more on-site and on-line public space for discussion, following a decentralised pattern that grants access to most people on our planet. We created tools for independent media, to multiply the voices in protection of common visions, to avoid that a few media tycoons take over democracies, as is happening in many different places of this world.

We are aware of the limits of the present implementation of democracy: while they are busy celebrating their own success over archaic regimes, these systems stopped updating their own architecture and have fallen in control of new enemies which they cannot even recognise anymore.

The solution we propose is simple: maximise the possibilities to recycle existing media infrastructures, open as many channels as possible, free the airwaves, let communication flow in its multiplicity, avoid any mono-directional use of it, give everyone the possibility to run a radio or TV station for it’s own digital and physical neighbours, following an organic pattern that will modularise the sharing of sense and let ideas propagate in a horizontal, non hierarchical way.

If these media architectures will be linked with education models that foster tolerance we have hope to accelerate the evolution of our planet and grant protection to the minorities that are populating it.

Freedom of identity

If you want peace of mind, do not find fault with others. Rather see your own faults. Learn to make the whole world your own. No one is a stranger my child: this whole World is your own! (Sarada Devi, Gahanananda, 1920)

We believe that current governmental efforts of biometric control by governments, private data mining operated by companies and public schools watching over students activity, profiling programs that are targeting people worldwide are a crime against humanity.

Each of those efforts are not taking into careful consideration what can be done when dictatorial regimes take control of such systems. In fact, this already happened as half a century ago when the first action of the Nazi was numbering people and labelling them with a symbol marking their biological ethnicities (as biometry can nowadays).

Conscious of the lack of responsibility of current governments worldwide, we will oppose with all means necessary their efforts to number and control all people in the name of a safe and unreachable security that, as we hackers can demonstrate, cannot be enforced by such means.

As hackers we are well conscious of information flows and how several leaks in the digital domain are actually disclosing personal information of large amounts of people worldwide. We do believe that people shouldn’t be numbered and included in databases, which probably is what still differentiates governments from operating systems merely suppressing the processes that aren’t optimised for their tasks.

Our generation includes a large critical mass concerned on these issues, let it be proof the recent success of Freedom not Fear, while an entertaining and poetical description of our feelings is also depicted by the movie Gattaca.

Education

Because this New Order of ours is a military order, an authoritarian order, commando style, there is no education. There is only instruction, a mere taming experience. (Romo Mangun)

As privatisation of educational structures progresses, the academy assumes a corporate and business mindset, while we assist to a shift of the educational mission in society from inclusive to exclusive.

The semantic nucleus (Sinn) of the word “Economy” has remained almost invariant and that has permitted to extend the word to new denotations (Bedeutung). This phenomenon is somehow similar to what has happened in our days to the term Enterprise which, with the consensus of the majority of interested subjects, has been extended to contexts indicated by the term University, which originally had nothing to do with it (Agamben, 2007)

The influential play of industries has permeated most academical disciplines, in particular regarding the adoption of technologies. The choice of educators has become biased by logics of short term profit, rather than Solid Knowledge.

On the other hand, notions are rapidly becoming universally available. Heuristic, maieutic and infrastructure functions provided by academies are best satisfied by the global action of the free software communities which are horizontally sharing methods, experiences and working implementations, on distributed and versioned R&D platforms.

As components can be combined and redistributed, copied and modified students learn a knowledge that is durable, without restrictions on their rights to produce and redistribute creations. This situation will provide an advantage for new generations, as it does for developing countries.

Media hubs and hacker spaces constitute a great potential to activate cultural growth, fulfilling an educational role that is progressively lacking in higher schools and universities.

In 1998, during the first edition of the hackmeeting in Firenze, its assembly launched the idea of independent universities of hacking, spawning numerous hacklabs across the networked cities, with annual meetings that have been taking place until today in various places in the south of Europe. We believe the results of these initiatives have been greatly influential for our own cultural and technical development, as they hosted an errant knowledge otherwise dispersed and neglected by the academies, with the participation of people like Wau Holland, Richard Stallman, Tetsuo Kogawa, Andy Muller-Magoon, Emmanuel Goldstein and even more collectives and individuals.

With such a short but intense history behind us we are well motivated to continue developing our independent paths of knowledge, an auto-didactic literature that liberates the students from corporate interests and opens up an horizon of variety and creativity that cannot be envisioned by the most advanced, yet faulty, implementations of the so called “creative industries”.

Cooperation

Nadie es patria. Todos lo somos. (Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986)

Thanks for reading this far. In case we sparked some interest in you with this document and you have suggestions to expand it, please contact us.

This document was drafted by Jaromil in eight years of extensive travels in very different contexts around and between Europe and Asia, nourished by several exchanges along the way and finally made public on the 8 august 2008. While it is impossible to enumerate all of us and our collective soul, we still like to say thanks to the following individuals for witnessing the birth of this document, after 8 years it would be too long to thank everyone involved, so let the people now remind the many others not mentioned: Richard M. Stallman, Gustaff Harriman Iskandar, Venzha Christawan, Irene Agrivina, Timbil Budiarto, Viola van Alphen and Kees de Groot, Gabriel Salsaman Finch, Elisa Manara, Julian Abraham, Nancy Mauro-Flude, Gabriele Zaverio: they witnessed the birth of this document under the Volcanoes Merapi and Etna, our minds in vibrant exchange during the Cellsbutton festival and Helarfest on the island of Java.

Thanks, a thousand flowers will blossom!

Bibliography

A new version of the source (and binary build) of HDSync is out: 0.6 codename “Sunflower”.

Go to the brand new syncstarter homepage to read about it and find out more about this project.

Release details

Announcement on Freecode

Here below a summary of changes:

• Improved stability
• Fixes to the looping of videos
• Fixes to network handshake
• Documentation updates
• New website, mailinglist – and here we are

as usual you can download the latest version of HDSync sourcecode as well MIPSEL binary builds (WDLXTV app.bin)

This release gets us to a good point, but HDSync still is in a BETA stage of development and we don’t have yet 100% precise frame sync.

Hence, the primary development goals towards 1.0 are: making the loop more steady (avoid freezes) and making the sync frame precise. In particular for the frame precision sync I’m planning to rewrite the network handshake and sync mechanism: while it is currently using a shell script and code from GNU netcat, I expect to lower the latency adopting the 0mq library.

Feel free to subscribe our new mailinglist to stay in touch and discuss further development.

Tomb aims to be an 100% free and open source system for easy encryption and backup of personal files, written in code that is easy to review and links commonly shared components.

“All I know is what the words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead.” Samuel Beckett

Tomb generates encrypted storage files to be opened and closed using their associated keyfiles, which are also protected with a password chosen by the user.

A tomb is like a locked folder that can be safely transported and hidden in a filesystem; its keys can be kept separate, for instance keeping the tomb file on your computer harddisk and the key files on a USB stick.