Re: Hack License
Stephen Dunifer - Pirate of the airwaves takes crusade to television Rick DelVecchio, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, February 11, 2005 http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/02/11/PNG66B7CP81.DTL Visit the TV section of a consumer electronics store, and then check out Stephen Dunifer's electronics workshop. You'll see radically different visions of what it means to live in a wired world. The store is the place to go if you want a better picture. Dunifer is the man to see if you want to control the picture. The tinkering rebel behind Free Radio Berkeley and the local godfather of the idea that broadcasting is a free-speech right instead of something the authorities give permission to do, Dunifer is offering a course this weekend on how to build your own low-power TV station. A simple station is easy to set up and costs only a few hundred dollars, said Dunifer, who is internationally known for his support of locally owned, low-power FM radio as a counterforce to corporate owners' control of the major airwaves. Because of the actions of Dunifer and others in persuading the Federal Communications Commission to open up the nation's airwaves a crack, hundreds of noncommercial, low-power FM stations have gone on the air since 2000. But few of them are under local control, most carry religious programming and hardly any operate in a big city. Much more work needs to be done before media power is broadly democratized, said Dunifer, 53. Low-power TV is the latest thrust in the campaign, which Dunifer sees as global and revolutionary. "Our whole approach to this is electronic civil disobedience on a mass level," he said. "They gave us a few crumbs off the table. I'm tired of battling for a few crumbs. I want the whole pie, or cake." Under a 1998 federal court order that shut down his Free Radio Berkeley as an unlicensed FM station, Dunifer is in no position to resume broadcasting on his own. But there's nothing to stop him from offering training and equipment to other electronics do-it-yourselfers. Free Radio Berkeley may have been silenced as a pirate station, but it's more visible than ever as a pirate flag. That pirate radio flourishes in spite of the threat of legal sanctions has much to do with the availability of low-cost, homemade and inconspicuous equipment. Dunifer's TV setup extends the strategy. The heart of it is a $140 Mitsubishi modulator that Dunifer recently discovered works for TV as well as for FM. With a $150 amplifier and a $75 antenna, both made in Dunifer's workshop in West Oakland, and a DVD player or camera, one has all the gear needed to distribute television programming. Of course, that's the easy part. Finding a frequency that doesn't bump up against other signals and make licensed broadcasters and the FCC mad remains a barrier. In urban areas where the airwaves are packed, the barrier would appear to be all but impenetrable. But one Dunifer devotee who runs a pirate TV station in San Francisco said the benefits are worth the risks. The broadcaster, a 23-year-old Web designer who gave his name as "Monkey," said he isn't bothered by the 160 warning letters he has received over the years from the FCC or by the possibility of interfering with other broadcasters. Monkey ignores the letters, reasoning that although he may have his equipment seized, it's unlikely he'd be prosecuted for broadcasting illegally. At the same time, he works hard to stay out of the way of other broadcasters by controlling his signal so it doesn't drift. Monkey said five volunteers run the TV station, which he said broadcasts from "a little island in the middle of the bay." Branching off from Pirate Cat radio, which broadcasts on 87.9 FM, the station airs talk and public affairs programming, and its signal travels as far the I-5/I-580 interchange between Tracy and Manteca. On Jan. 20, it covered the San Francisco protest against the inauguration of President Bush, airing speeches by using cell phones in place of microphones. Monkey said the pirate broadcasting movement is in its third generation, with Dunifer as the grandfather. "He's taught hundreds of people how to build transmitters," he said. Inside Dunifer's workshop recently, two young men soldered transmitters for different radio stations. One of the two, Tom Belote, 23, of San Jose, said he planned to go on the air with Radio Libre, offering a mix of music and talk. Two underground FM stations operate in the East Bay, three in San Jose and three in San Francisco, with one more under development in each area, said Jack Brink, Dunifer's chief of television development. Brink, 35, whose day job is waiting tables in San Jose, said he is working on a low-power TV station that will go on the air this month on Channel 23. It will broadcast politically oriented programming from a transmitter in the North Berkeley hills. An air of prudent mystery surrounds the venture. "Jack is not setting
Re: Hack License
--- "R.A. Hettinga" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> quoted: ><http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/03/issue/review_hack.asp?p=0> > > Hack License > By Simson Garfinkel March 2005 [snip] > > Stallman wrote in 1985, "the golden rule requires that if I like a > program > I must share it with other people who like it." Stallman continues, > "Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each > user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with > other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a > nondisclosure > agreement or a software license agreement." [snip] Interestingly enough, Stallman expects people to use one of the GNU software licenses when they release a product. Big deal. Ideology and people change. Today the significance of the open source 'movement' being in conflict with the 'vectorialists', or rather the commercial and proprietary software community is that the polarization of the industry is limited to two poles: commercial, for-pay software or free open-source software. Alternatives, or hybrid licensing agreements are generally unknown to the computing public at large. Thus the software industry largely resembles the basic structure of the United States federal political system. Republican, or democrat : open source, or commercial software. Code that I have that is waiting for completion and formal release (some of it has been stolen and distributed in advance of its completion) I intend presently to license under a hybrid license that essentialy grants unrestricted use for non-commercial and non-military purposes, but which requires a license agreement for any commercial use. My thinking was that under the existing arrangement, commercial vendors largely benefited from the efforts of many thousands of open-source developers, thus reducing R&D costs, without necessarily returning anything either to the community, or to the developers themselves. Furthermore, unless one is a high-profile open-source developer it is next to impossible to make a living writing code that is given away to free to all takers. Of this last problem, it may become moot one day if the world economy moves away from the use of money as an intermediate medium of value exchange, but today it is necessary to have money so the developer can pay his rent and buy food and purchase computer hardware tools. Of the former problem, some few vendors have recently exposed their proprietary software to the open source community. Sun Microsystems has recently put their operating system on the table; the NSA released SE Linux, and of course many smaller examples abound. There are other considerations that remain largely unaddressed by the present status quo, however, and I wanted to address some of them. For instance, I wanted to stop my software from being used by a military force in the process of developing proprietary (and presumably classified) weapons of mass destruction or weapons designed to be used against [domestic] civilian populations. Of course, I wouldn't also want my software to be used by terrorists such as the Ted Kaczinski's of the world. As an individual developer, I didn't realistically expect that I would actually halt the unlicensed use of my software for, say, illegal purposes, but I did expect to force such people and organisations to actually have to _steal_ the software rather than handing to them on a sliver platter, with my tacit blessing. While the existing judicial and legislative environment doesn't seem to be friendly to the idea of people taking responsibility for the purposes that their creations are put to, I think that software professionals should put some thought to the moral dimension of the application of their products. The concept of "know your customer" exists today, however badly it is deployed by extant legislation. I believe it may be done well by intelligent people, and surely it can also be abused. A group of Klansmen might release software that contained a licensing agreement restricting its [free] use to aryans. I think Tim might say that they should be free to do so, because "coloured" people as well as concerned caucasions would have the ability and right to produce nominally equivalent software to compete with the Klansman's code. However this view relies on the minimalist view of government regulation, a point of view that is not much in favour today. Whatever the particulars of any given scenario, the point remains that the two-pole system that dominates the software community has some rather large holes. I expect that one day I will be able to afford to replace the computer(s) that were stolen by the local "authorities", despite their ongoing and malicious interference and harassment. Then, I may end up finishing off a few things for release;
Hack License
<http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/03/issue/review_hack.asp?p=0> Technology Review TechnologyReview.com Print Hack License By Simson Garfinkel March 2005 As cultural critic and New School University professor McKenzie Wark sees things, today's battles over copyrights, trademarks, and patents are simply the next phase in the age-old battle between the productive classes and the ruling classes that strive to turn those producers into subjects. But whereas Marx and Engels saw the battle of capitalist society as being between two social classes-the proletariat and the bourgeoisie-Wark sees one between two newly emergent classes: the hackers and a new group that Wark has added to the lexicon of the academy: the "vectoralist class." Wark's opus A Hacker Manifesto brings together England's Enclosure Movement, Das Kapital, and the corporate ownership of information-a process that Duke University law professor James Boyle called "the Second Enclosure Movement"-to create a unified theory of domination, struggle, and freedom. Hacking is not a product of the computer age, writes Wark, but an ancient rite in which abstractions are created and information is transformed. The very creation of private property was a hack, he argues-a legal hack-and like many other hacks, once this abstraction was created, it was taken over by the ruling class and used as a tool of subjugation. So who are these vectoralists? They are the people who control the vectors by which information flows throughout our society. Information wants to be free, Wark writes, quoting (without attribution) one of the best-known hacker aphorisms. But by blocking the free vectors and charging for use of the others, vectoralists extract value from practically every human endeavor. There is no denying that vectoralist organizations exist: by charging for the distribution of newspapers or Web pages, such organizations collect money whenever we inform ourselves. By charging for the distribution of music, they collect money off the expression of human culture. Yes, today many Web pages and songs can be accessed over the Internet for free. But others cannot be. The essence of the successful vectoralist, writes Wark, is in this person's ability to rework laws and technology so that some vectors can flourish while other vectors-the free ones-are systematically eliminated. But does Wark have it right? By calling his little red book A Hacker Manifesto, Wark hopes to remind us of Marx and Mao. Does this concept of "vector" have what it takes to start a social movement? Are we on the cusp of a Hacker Rebellion? The Communists of the 1840s had more or less settled on the ground rules of their ideology-the communal ownership of property and social payments based on need-by the time Marx and Engels wrote their infamous tract. By contrast, many individuals who identify themselves as hackers today are sure to find Wark's description circumscribed and incomplete. When I was an undergraduate at MIT in the 1980s, hackers were first and foremost people who perpetrated stunts. It was a group of hackers that managed to bury a self-inflating weather balloon near the 50-yard line at the 1982 Harvard-Yale game; two years later, Caltech hackers took over the electronic scoreboard at the Rose Bowl and displayed their own messages. (Another group had hacked the Rose Bowl 21 years before, rewriting the instructions left on 2,232 stadium seats so that Washington fans raising flip-cards for their half-time show unknowingly spelled out "Caltech.") Hackers were also spelunkers of MIT's tunnels, basements, and heating and ventilation systems. These hackers could pick locks, scale walls, and practically climb up moonbeams to reach the roofs of the Institute's tallest buildings. By the late 1980s, the media had seized on the word hacker-not to describe a prankster, but as a person who breaks into computers and takes joyrides on electronics networks. These hackers cracked computer systems, changed school grades, and transferred millions of dollars out of bank accounts before getting caught by the feds and sent to the pen. Finally, there were the kind of hackers MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum had previously called "compulsive programmers." These gods of software saw the H-word as their badge of honor. Incensed by the hacker stereotype portrayed in the media, these geeky mathlings and compiler-types fought back against this pejorative use of their word-going so far as to write in The New Hacker's Dictionary that the use of "hacker" to describe "malicious meddler" had been "deprecated" (hacker lingo meaning "made obsolete"). I remember interviewing one of these computer scientists in 1989 for the Christian Science Monitor: the researcher threatened to terminate the interview if I used the word "hacker" to describe
