Re: Rhizome's revenge

[{ brad brace }]

On Tue, 28 Jan 2003, t.whid wrote:

 brad,

 you have yet to make a decent argument for whatever your alternative
 system may be...

That's merely an old trap that prolongs the misery. Artists
would have much better careers/work if they didn't also have
to pay insipid institutional homage/extortion at every
juncture. Everyone is compelled to pay (on many levels) for
the subsidized institutional artworld -- that 'network'
enslaves. Rhizome's done little for me -- yet I've done
plenty for it: and now it wants me to pay for the
'privilege.' Its desire to join the ranks of major cultural
imperialists on the insufferable 'new media ticket' is
clear. Its priorities are blinkered and suspect. This is how
institutions 'work': they practically prevent individual
creatives from building their own careers, grassroot support
systems, and reliable, integrated networks. How likely is it
for an individual, or even a small alliance, to 'compete'
with (often) million(s)-dollar and 'critically validated'
subsidized art institutions -- institutions that for
centuries have refused to even pay (any) decent
fees/royalties to artists/heirs? Has Rhizome, or any other
art institution really helped you sell your work? Have they
just paid you some trinkets to further _its preemptive
cause? What exposure does it provide that you could not
build (and be better for it) yourself? [You may scoff at my
simple networked delivery of 'old media'(?) but what gallery
these-days would exhibit/sell a subsequent image of mine to
hundreds of dedicated viewers per day every day all over the
world?]



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{ brad brace }   < [EMAIL PROTECTED]   ~finger for pgp

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
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Bohos in Purgatory

[McKenzie Wark]

Bohos in Purgatory

Andrew Ross, No Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden
Costs, Basic Books, New York, 2003

Reviewed by McKenzie Wark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


The bourgeois and the bohemian stand in a dialectical relation to
each other. The bohemian's revolt is purely relational. It appears
as revolt only because it upsets the bourgeois. The bourgeois, in
turn, measures proprietary in the mirror of the bohemian's
transgressions. This is an established historical pattern, governing
cultural life for most of the 20th century.

One new wrinkle, which appeared at the dawn of the 21st century,
was a shift in the location of this dialectic. In the 20th century, its
locus was the street, and its time was in the off hours. The
bohemian refusal of work, and dedication to everyday life,
confronted the bourgeois in the cafes and nightclubs. At the start
of the 21st century, the locus moved to the workplace, and into
the daylight hours. What was unusual about the version of the
bourgeois versus bohemian dialectic that longstanding Nettime
lurker Andrew Ross recounts is that it occurs within the very place
both sides would have once thought off limits.

No Collar, is about "the industrialization of bohemia." (10) It
investigates two versions of the new 'permissive' workplace --
Razorfish and 360hiphop -- in New York's so-called 'Silicon Alley'.
There are many books about the dotcom bubble, but this one is
unique in that its focus is on how the workers themselves thought
about their work. It is dotcom history 'from below'.

The idea of the permissive, playful workplace sat oddly at the turn
of the century with a quite different idea, the 'shareholder
revolution'. The former harked back, perhaps, to Thorstein
Veblen's dream of the revolt of the engineer against vested
business interests. The shareholder revolution, on the other hand,
subordinated everything about the corporate citizen to
maximizing returns to the shareholder. The idea of stock options
for everybody within the company was supposed to align every
subordinate interest with the interests of the majority stock
holders.

The wider context is amply covered in Thomas Carr Frank's book
One Market Under God. The stock market became the master
signifier in a system of moral values which saw market value as
equivalent to moral worth. The image of the entrepreneur's
business struggle against the big corporations was blended with
that of the bohemian's cultural struggle against bourgeois
inhibitions. In a remarkable feat of ideological engineering,
business became an agent of changing an social order based on,
well, on business.

Here the odd coupling of the permissive workplace and the
shareholder revolution starts to make sense. The association of the
entrepreneur with 'radical' change made the new digital
workplace the site where that change was to be affected. But to
make the workplace 'cool', it had to appear to embrace bohemian
values.

And so it did. A new labor aristocracy arose, which mixed some
modest technical knowledge with cultural capital. They entered a
seller's market, and took it out not so much in telephone-number
salaries as in control of the workplace. You could still be an artist,
and get paid, too.

The ideological short-circuit, by which business is the only radical
alternative to business, fostered the belief that some kind of social
change could be pursued inside the company. As one temporarily
wealth dotcommer says: "As a romantic soul with big aspirations
for what technology can do to change the world, I can realize
these aspirations much faster with 20 million in the bank, maybe
even 200 million." (129)

As Ross points out, what might appear as a radical kind of
workplace innovation could have quite unintended consequences:
"Features that appeared to be healthy advances in corporate
democracy could turn into trap doors that opened on to a
bottomless seventy-hour-plus work week. Employee self-
management could result in the abdication of accountability on the
part of real managers and an unfair shouldering of risk and
responsibilities on the part of real individuals." (18)

In a workplace where workers wear their everyday clothes, and
imagine themselves to be applying their creative identity to the
job, "perhaps the most insidious occupational hazard of no-collar
work is that it can enlist employees' freest thoughts and impulses
in the service of salaried time." (19)

But this was what Bruce Sterling calls the belle époque. The
ideology of radicalism as business and business as radicalism gave
rise not only to a host of start-ups, but put their 'enemies', the big
corporations on the defensive, looking for new technologies that
meshed with new images. To meet the demand, design companies
and technology companies merged, and recruited business
strategists and MBA types to present a full package of make-over
services.

The darling of this new marketplace was Razorfish, started in 95
by Jeff Dachis and Craig Kanarick. The Razorfish mantra w

We're going CC

[Mikael Pawlo]

In the shade of Eldred we decided to try something new. We're going CC!

More below.

What is the best license for open content - if you want your readers to
participate and more or less do anything with the content, as long as they
do not violate on other readers' rights? We (Gnuheter) tried a Creative
Commons approach, but it would be interesting to learn of other
initiatives and strategies.


Regards,

Mikael

Leading Swedish Free Software Forum chooses Creative Commons License

Gnuheter is - starting today - distributed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike-license.

Gnuheter is the leading Swedish open source and free software forum,
providing information, news, gossip and discussions in a Slashdot.org
style.

Systems engineer Patrik Wallstrom and lawyer Mikael Pawlo founded Gnuheter
in year 2000. Gnuheter was distributed "copyleft" from the start. Some
users complained that the license was ambiguous. Gnuheter's editors have
always wanted the content to be as open as possible and Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike-license helps Gnuheter maintain the balance between
openness and the Swedish copyright law's moral and distribution rights.

Gnuheter has some 64,000 visitors a month.


The key license terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike-license are:

1. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform
the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit. 

2. The licensor permits others to distribute derivative works under a
license identical to the one that governs the licensor's work.

Try:
http://www.gnuheter.com/
and
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0


_

  ICQ:35638414mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
  +46-70 421 58 25http://www.pawlo.com/


#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#   is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
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[The Hijacking of the WSF - by Naomi Klein > January 30 2003]

[Patrice Riemens]

>From our great INURA-list forwarding carousel & with the usual apologies...
greetz from deluged Bs As, p+D!


- Forwarded message from Lorenzo Tripodi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -

Date: Sat, 1 Feb 2003 11:49:35 +0100
Reply-To: International Network of Urban Research and Action
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:  FW: [Hub] The Hijacking of the WSF - by Naomi Klein > January 30
  2003


--
Da: "ArcoIris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Risposta: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Data: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 19:17:12 -0300



www.nologo.org 
 
The Hijacking of the WSF

by Naomi Klein > January 30 2003

The key word at this year's World Social Forum, which ended yesterday in
Porto Alegre, Brazil, was 'big.'

Big attendance: more than a hundred thousand delegates in all! Big speeches:
more than 15,000 crammed in to see Noam Chomsky! And most of all, big men.
Lula da Silva, the newly elected president of Brazil, came to the Forum and
addressed 75,000 adoring fans. Hugo Chavez, the controversial president of
Venezuela, paid a 'surprise' visit to announce that his embattled regime was
part of the same movement as the forum itself.

"The left in Latin America is being reborn," Mr. Chavez declared, as he
pledged to vanquish his opponents at any cost. As evidence of this rebirth,
he pointed to Lula's election in Brazil, Lucio Gutierrez's victory in
Ecuador and Fidel Castro's tenacity in Cuba.

But wait a minute: how on earth did a gathering that was supposed to be a
showcase for new grassroots movements become a celebration of men with a
penchant for three hour speeches about smashing the oligarchy?

Of course, the forum, in all its dizzying, global diversity, was not only
speeches, with huge crowds all facing the same direction. There were plenty
of circles, with small groups of people facing each other. There were
thousands of impromptu gatherings of activists from opposite ends of the
globe excitedly swapping facts, tactics, and analysis in their common
struggles. But the big certainly put its mark on the event.

Two years ago, at the first World Social Forum, the key word was not 'big'
but 'new': new ideas, new methods, new faces. Because if there was one thing
that most delegates agreed on (and there wasn't much) it was that the left's
traditional methods had failed, either because they were wrong-headed or
because they were simply ill-equipped to deal with the powerful forces of
corporate globalization.

This came from hard-won experience, experience that remains true even if
some left parties have been doing well in the polls recently. Many of the
delegates at that first forum had spent their lives building labour parties,
only to watch helplessly as those parties betrayed their roots once in
power, throwing up their hands and implementing the paint-by-numbers
policies dictated by global markets. Other delegates came with scarred
bodies and broken hearts after fighting their entire lives to free their
countries from dictatorship or racial Apartheid, only to see their liberated
land hand its sovereignty away to the International Monetary Fund in
exchange for a loan.

Still others who attended that first forum were refugees from doctrinaire
communist parties who had finally faced the fact that the socialist
'utopias' of Eastern Europe had turned into centralized, bureaucratic and
authoritarian nightmares. And outnumbering all of these veteran activists
was a new and energetic generation of young people who had never trusted
politicians, and were finding their own political voice on the streets of
Seattle, Prague and Sao Paulo.

When this global rabble came together under the slogan "Another World is
Possible", it was clear to all but the most rigidly nostalgic minority that
getting to this other world wouldn't be a matter of resuscitating the flawed
models of the past, but imagining new movements that drew on the best of
these experiences while vowing never to repeat their mistakes.

The World Social Forum didn't produce a political blueprint‹a good start‹but
there was a clear pattern to the alternatives that emerged. Politics had to
be less about trusting well-meaning leaders, and more about empowering
people to make their own decisions; democracy had to be LESS representative
and more participatory. The ideas flying around included neighbourhood
councils, participatory budgets, stronger city governments, land reform and
cooperative farming‹a vision of politicized communities that could be
networked internationally to resist further assaults from the IMF, the World
Bank and World Trade Organization. For a left that had tended to look to
centralized state solutions to solve almost every problem, this emphasis on
decentralization and direct participation was a breakthrough.

At the first World Social Forum, Lula was cheered too: not as a heroic
figure who vowed to take on the forces of the market and eradicate hunger,
but as an innovator whose party was at the forefront of developing tools for
i

Events [18x]

[Announcer]

Table of Contents:

   An Evening with Carey Young, MoMa, Monday January 27
 "geert lovink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

   jihui Digital Salon presents Perry Hoberman 
 z <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

   FILE 2003- electronic language international festival   
 "file 2003" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  

   Infrastructures of Digital Design - Graduate Conference - Immediate Release 
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]

=?iso-8859-1?Q?V2=5F/DEAF03:_=91Exhibition_=91Data_Knitting_?= - From  =?iso-88
 Marjolein Berger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  

   ART FILM  -- by Chris Murray
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]  

   V2/DEAF: Subject: WOSEMA - Workshops/Seminars/Masterclasses 
 Marjolein Berger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  

   Chicago: illegal art film and video festival
 "geert lovink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

   \international\media\art\award 2003 : call for submissions --   
 Petra Kaiser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

   ART, STORYTELLING, AND THE FIVE SENSES  
 Diane Ludin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   

   Video "=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Disobbedienti=22?=: upcoming presentations /  aktuelle Vor
 Oliver Ressler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   

   Rhizome.org Benefit February 25 
 From: nettime's_roving_reporter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

   BitParts Digital Art Festival   
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]   

   ART IN OUTPUT 2003: lost and found  
 "adriaaN" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  

   FreeNetworks Conference 2003
 "geert lovink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

   Press Release - MasterPlan  
 "Le Musee di-visioniste" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 

   BANQUETE =?ISO-8859-1?Q?=2D?= international traveling exhibition
 Oliver Ressler <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   

   BANQUETE - international traveling exhibition   
 "geert lovink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



--

Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2003 10:07:15 +1100
From: "geert lovink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: An Evening with Carey Young, MoMa, Monday January 27

From: "Intern3, Film" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, January 23, 2003 8:40 AM
Subject: MediaScope: An Evening with Carey Young -- Monday January 27


MoMA at The Gramercy Theatre presents MediaScope
Monday, January 27, 8:30
An Evening with Carey Young (Great Britain/USA)

The London-based artist Carey Young infiltrates the inner
workings of the multinational corporation, adopting its language, codes, and
tools in order to reflect on ideas of identity, strategy, and progress.
Young will discuss works made in a variety of physical and electronic
mediums, including her recent performance-based videos Everything You've
Heard Is Wrong (1999) and I Am a Revolutionary (2001). Program approx. 90
min.

Upcoming MediaScope Programs:

An Evening with Przemyslaw "Shemie" Reut (New York)
Monday, February 10, 8:15
An Evening with Miranda July (Portland, Oregon)
Monday, February 24, 8:15
An Evening with Piotr Wyrzyrowski (Gdansk/Kiev)
Monday, March 24, 8:15

MoMA at The Gramercy Theatre
127 East 23 Street at Lexington Avenue
For ticket information:


SUBWAY: 6 to 23 Street
BUSES: M23 to Lexington Avenue; M1 to Park Avenue and 23
Street; M101, M102, M103 to Third Avenue and 23 Street





--

Date: Fri, 24 Jan 2003 13:20:13 -0500
From: z <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: jihui Digital Salon presents Perry Hoberman

jihui Digital Salon
presents
Perry Hoberman

Friday, January 31, 2003 7 PM
@ Parsons Center for New Design
55 West 13th Street, 9th Fl.
New York, NY 10011
Live Webcast @  http://agent.netart-init.org starts 7pm EST.

Perry Hoberman will be discussing his current exhibition at Postmasters
Gallery. In this exhibition, Hoberman tackles one of our current dilemmas:
in a world of 

Events [20x]

[Announcer]

Table of Contents:

   Bad Emser Medienkunsttage  (31.5-1.6.2003) CALL FOR PAPER BIS 31.1.2003 
 "geert lovink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  

   Cultures of Journalism Conference at Goldsmiths College, UK 
 =?iso-8859-1?q?Bertha=20Chin?= <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

   V2_: Call for Participation master class + workshop 
 marije <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   

   SFcamerawork: 2 media arts shows/events 
 "geert lovink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

   the >wartime< project showing 15th Jan 2003 
 (atty) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 

   =?iso-8859-1?Q?V2=5F/DEAF03:_Symposium_Information_is_?= =?iso-8859-1?Q?Alive?= 
 Marjolein Berger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  

   | PLUG AND PLAY - SUNDAY 19/01/20003 6PM - London | 
 "pnp" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   

   ZEROGLAB NANOFESTIVAL v.01 - CALL FOR ON-LINE WORKS 
 "Karoly Toth" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   

   V2_/DEAF03: seminar + call for participation master class   
 marije <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   

   FW: DERRIDA OPENS IN SF, BERKELEY, LONDON, AND CANADA!  
 Aliette Guibert <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 

   BBA France 2002 
 Christine =?iso-8859-1?Q?Tr=E9guier?= <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  

   Infrastructures of Digital Design - Graduate Conference - Immediate Release 
 [EMAIL PROTECTED]

   free video program in SMART Cinema, A Close Watch (Undermining the Overview: Par
 "SMART Project Space" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  

   =?iso-8859-1?Q?Munich-Video_Festival:_ES_IST_SCHWER_DAS_REALE_ZU_BER=DCHR?= =?is
 "geert lovink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

   Sonntag 19. Januar  
 "Frau von Sydow" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  

   read_me 2.3 software art festival   
 olga goriunova <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   

   'post demo' open_digi event, Jan 17th, Brixton London UK
 (atty) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 

   Vienna: Geography and the Politics of Mobility (exhibition) 
 "geert lovink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

   TV, Live STReam, Playing Field  
 Station Rose <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>  

   ZKM/ResFest Digital Film Festival   
 Andrea Buddensieg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   



--

Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 09:01:31 +1100
From: "geert lovink" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Bad Emser Medienkunsttage  (31.5-1.6.2003) CALL FOR PAPER BIS 31.1.2003

From: "Perrier" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Kuenstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral is an institution of the Foundation for
Culture in Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany. It promotes international artists
through the allocation of residential fellowship. The Kuenstlerhaus also has
the objective of reaching the public through events such as lectures,
seminars, concerts and exhibitions.

>From May 30th to  June 1th 2003 Kuenstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, together
with the Institut fuer Kunstwissenschaften der Universitaet Koblenz -
Landau, Campus Koblenz is planning an international Media Arts Conference
called Bad Emser Medienkunsttage (BEM). Alongside to established scientists
younger scientist as well as media artists are welcome to express their
thoughts on the possible influence of new media in art and society and to
reflect if new technologies have brought new means of expression in
contemporary art. The conference is open to the public and
interdisciplinary. The speakers will be selected by a call for paper. We
would appreciate your proposal of young scientists from your institution to
take part in the Media Arts Conference Bad Ems, Germany. The speakers will
be selected by a jury, other interesting lectures will be published.

At the same time Kuenstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral shows the exhibition "art
bytes". Some of the art works in the exhibition gav

Empire and the multitude. A dialogue on the new order of globalisation (*) Antonio Negri, Danilo Zolo

[dr . woooo]

http://www.generation-online.org/t/empiremultitude.htm

Empire and the multitude. A dialogue on the new order of globalisation (*) 
Antonio Negri, Danilo Zolo 
1. A debate of exceptional scope.

D.Z. I confess that for a long time I've resisted the calls, coming from many sides, 
to publicly debate Empire, the book that you and Hardt have published in the US two 
years ago that promoted, on both sides of the Atlantic, a debate of exceptional scope 
and intensity. What stopped me was a sense of impotence before such a complex, 
ambitious and ample work.

Any attempt to a critical evaluation of this kind -you define it 'widely 
interdisciplinary'- entails sharing, somehow, the theoretical ambition that motivated 
you in writing it. I overcame my initial hesitations because I became convinced that 
after S11 it would be irresponsible not to take seriously a book such as Empire.

It is a book that, however assessed, invests a large quantity of intellectual 
resources in the attempt to offer a contribution to the understanding of the world we 
live in, that denounces the atrocities and risks of the present 'global order' and 
tries to point towards a direction to overcome it. If not for any other reason, Empire 
deserves, in my view, the international success it is enjoying.

T.N. Thank you for your substantially positive evaluation of the book and its 
international impact. The fact remains that now, alongside that surface of 'banality' 
that the book had from the start (it seems to me almost a film that describes Empire, 
rather than a book), there also is the fact that it is getting old with respect to the 
speed of events. The 'great narrative' that made the success of the book, that 
permitted its reception by the students of american campus around Seattle, and after 
that a bit all around the world and espectially in Germany, -this great narrative was 
required. After the 80's, after the defeat of struggles, after the triumph of 'weak 
thought', a shake was needed: empire provided it.

D.Z. Empire is a difficult book not only for its size and its thematic breadth, but 
also because its philosophical and politico-theoretical synthax is very original. It 
is a synthax that transfigures some fundamental marxist categories by intertwining 
them with elements taken from a great variety of western philosophical literature: 
classical, modern and contemporary. In this transfiguration a primary role is played 
by the post-structuralism of authors such as Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Deridda and 
especially Michel Foucault. My impression is that a careful and demanding reading of 
the pages of Empire, as the book surely deserves and stimulates to do, in any case 
leads to interpretative results that are inevitably controversial.

Despite its ofter prescriptive and assertive tone, it is a book that risks 
transmitting more theoretical uncertainties than certainties.

T.N. I think the indications you give, on the philosophical categories that sustain 
the book, are right. On the question of the fact that the book trasmits more 
uncertainties than theoretical certainties, I confess that I like that.

With Empire, Michael Hardt and I wanted in no way to reach conclusions: the process 
constituting Empire is still largely open. We were interested in underlining the need 
to change register: the political philosophy of modernity (and obviously the 
institutions with which it interacted) is over. The theory that goes from Marsilio to 
Hobbes and from Althusius to Schmitt is finished. Empire is a new theoretical 
threshold.

D. Z. Marx's and Foucault's philosophy -to say it in a very generic formula- are 
divergent theoretical vectors: Marxism preconises an organic society, solidal, 
egualitarian, disciplined, whilst Foucault is an acute and radical critic of 
disciplinary power in the name of an individualist and libertarian anthropology.

A.N. We have kept Foucault and Marx together. Or rather, as far as I'm concerned, I 
can say that I 'washed my clothes' in the Sein, making my operaista marxism hybrid 
with the French post-structuralist perspectives. I had already started to do this in 
the years of prison (between '79 and '83), whilst working on Spinoza, a perfect 
terrain of ontological encounter for this operation. With Hardt in Paris, then, we 
deepened this analysis and immersed ourselves in that common 'aura' that, however 
unknown, has since the end of the 60's linked operaismo with post'structuralism but 
also with many tendencies in the large field of subaltern studies and other 
post-colonial approaches. This has certainly been a central moment, for me at least, 
when I realised that Italian operaismo was all but a provincial phenomenon. By 
publishing a collection of subaltern studies, Spivak provided direct proof of this in 
the 80's; Deleuze and Guattari in Mille Plateaux already recognised this influence!
. !
In this framework we take as fundamental the reading Foucault makes of Marx, extending 
a genealogy 

Social Trust Networks (was: RE: Rhizome's revenge)

[Jim Carrico]

a couple of points...

it doesn't mean anything to say I "trust" someone unless I define in what
way I trust them - I may trust someone's taste in movies or restaurants,
but not trust them with the keys to my house.  And this is in fact the
reef that the 'advogato trust metric' seems to be foundering on: see
http://www.advogato.org/article/599.html (short version:  the original
certification scheme was based on members abilities and accomplishments as
developers of free software, but it appears that people have been
certifying one another using other criteria, like how much sense they make
in the discussion forum, which isn't "bad"  necessarily, it just
demonstrates that social/semantic processes are slippery and don't map
well onto neat mathematical models.)

similarly, security - of computers or anything else - depends on a threat
model: it doesn't make any sense to say a system is secure unless you
define what it is secure against - and it is also relative to the
'cost-benefit' calculations of both the target and the attacker.  eg. a
safe with a thousand dollars in it is "secure" if it would cost ten
thousand to crack it.  Nothing is ever perfectly secure, so it becomes a
matter of making judgements about the likelihood of various scenarios, and
the degree to which you are willing to accept various risks.  (see Bruce
Schneier's 'Secrets and Lies' for more on this.)

centralized trust systems are dubious because they present a very juicy
prize for an attacker - all eggs in one basket.

de-centralized trust systems are in their infancy, in one sense, and old
as the hills in another - individuals need to be at the center of their
own "trust graphs".  we do this in our day-to-day lives already - we just
have to establish standard ways of representing these real-world
assessments of one another.  admittedly, this is lot to expect.  it's very
much a chicken-and-egg problem - it can't be architected globally but must
be grown from the bottom up in an emergent manner.  for this to happen,
the small-scale, local behaviour must be of obvious and immediate benefit
. it's possible that an exchange network, whether designed for barter,
"gifts" or more conventional payments, may be a 'killer app', but only if
it's easier and cheaper than what we have now.

-JC



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'autonomous' colonizer program

[Ana Viseu]

[an interesting story about a new 'autonomous' program, a browser toolbar
add-on to Explorer, that is downloaded without user input and then
self-installs itself on the hard drive. It then changes the homepage,
prevents users from restoring the old browser settings and seems to cause
computer crashes. Best. Ana]


Sneaky Toolbar Hijacks Browsers

It's the most evil thing on the Internet, according to some of its victims. 
But it's not a virus, a scam or a raunchy porn site.

It's a browser toolbar that some swear is doing "drive-by downloads" -- 
installing itself without users' permission -- then taking over their 
systems and making it impossible to uninstall.

"When I find the bastards who programmed this thing I'd be happy to 
castrate them with a pair of dull pinking shears," fumed one of Xupiter's 
many unhappy victims in a newsgroup posting.

Xupiter is an Internet Explorer toolbar program. Once active in a system, 
it periodically changes users' designated homepages to xupiter.com, 
redirects all searches to Xupiter's site, and blocks any attempts to 
restore the original browser settings.

The program attempts to download updates each time an affected computer 
boots up, and has been blamed for causing system crashes. Several versions 
of Xupiter also appear to download other programs, such as gambling games, 
which later appear in pop-up windows.

Some said that Xupiter has taken over their browsers.

"Random words and characters now appear when I attempt to enter info on 
search sites or other forms. It's as if there's a ghost in my machine," New 
York resident Beth Vanesky said.

Xupiter.com is registered to a company called Tempo Internet, in Gyongyos, 
Hungary. Calls and e-mails to Tempo were not returned.

Xupiter offers an uninstall utility, but many said that it didn't work, and 
in some cases made things worse.

"I ran the Xupiter Uninstall, and now every time I try to launch Explorer I 
get error messages saying 'Xupiter is not installed properly, please 
reinstall,'" said Manny Abrams of Chicago.

Xupiter has spawned long message threads on some tech support sites, as 
users wrestle to reclaim their machines from the terrible toolbar.

"When Xupiter first appeared, we spent a week trying to figure it out," 
said Mike Healan, of SpywareInfo. "There's a monstrous thread with over 
26,000 page views where a couple dozen of us tested it until we figured 
what it did and how to deal with it."

But Healan said that every time people sort out what Xupiter is doing, 
Xupiter's programmers tweak its code. It also appears that Xupiter may be 
selling its "service" to other websites.

"About once every month or two this software starts hijacking people to a 
new site," Healan said. "And every time a new version comes out, it adds a 
different startup entry, uses a different method to change the search 
function and is basically a bigger pain to remove."

Xupiter's site claims the toolbar isn't installed without express 
permission, but many insisted that they had not agreed to install the program.

"Xupiter is the worst thing I've ever personally encountered on the 
Internet," said Ed Olexa. "You only realize that it has been installed when 
you start your browser and see that Xupiter's search page is now your 
homepage."

Olexa had to manually edit his system registry to remove Xupiter.

"Xupiter seems to have the ability to reinstall itself if each and every 
component is not removed," Olexa said. "Computer novices might never really 
get rid of it."

Healan recommended Spybot Search & Destroy to eradicate the program.

Healan said some installations probably occurred when people clicked "OK" 
in a pop-up box without really knowing what they had agreed to, or when 
they meant to close the pop-up window.

Xupiter is also being bundled along with at least one peer-to-peer 
file-sharing program. And the toolbar will install itself automatically 
when Internet Explorer's security settings aren't set to the highest level.

http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,57467,00.html?tw=wn_ascii
By Michelle Delio
Jan. 30, 2003






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Tudo vale a pena se a alma não é pequena.
http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~aviseu/index.html

http://privacy.openflows.org/index.html
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#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
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#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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