occam

flickr was so nice to provide the referrer data from the last years. So, i went over the list to see who is using some of the pictures from my stream.

Special dead link: http://single.de/mitglieder/TiLi83/dialog

Hoorrray for CC!

Dvorak’s No. 9, Chopin, Kraftwerk, Einstürzende Neubauten, Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, Carmina Burana. It is strange to realize, that i listened to the same music 20 years ago, as a kid, sitting in front of my sisters stereo, with exactly the same feeling as today. I still like all of them, for the very same “reasons”.

Helden der Stille

Wer ist nur auf diese Absurde Idee gekommen, es würde sich verbrauchen, es wäre begrenzt, geh sorgsam damit um, eines Tages ist nichts mehr davon da. Als ob man mit 90 nichts mehr Empfinden würde.

Und der Umstand des Aufhören, der Veränderung, ob es sich je beruhigen wird. Kann mich nicht ablenken. Es ist in mir, es ist im Nacht Bus von Sao Paulo nach Rio, schlaflos an hunderten Hotels vorbei. Es ist hier, in dieser Besetzung, in diesem Muster aus flicken, in diesem Raum, nur gestaltet, verändert, nach dem wenigen, nach dem minimalem, dem Wichtigen.

Es ist die Konsequenz, es ist alles nur die Konsequenz der Unaufhörlichkeit. Es bleibt in mir. Egal in welcher Form, in welcher Größe, in welchen Umfang und mit welchen Ausgang. Egal wie das hier und jetzt ist, wie die Gesichte gelaufen ist. Es bleibt. Und lass es hunderte sein.

Und was ich hier nicht ertragen kann, ist der Ausgang, diese Unmöglichkeit. Als ob ich aufhören würde zu Empfinden. Als ob es euch nicht mehr Betreffen würde.

Und du, du Unbekanntes. Setzt dich neben mich und lausch der Stille. Ein Jahr ohne ein Wort. Ohne ein gesprochenes Wort. Ohne einen Menschen der Verstehen würde. Ich kann euer Schweigen nicht mehr ertragen. Das Schweigen was ich ständig ernte. Ich kann mein Schweigen nicht mehr Ertragen. Mein Schweigen über mich. Die Helden der Still in ständiger Inkonsequenz.

Und ich überlege das Schweigen zu brechen. Überlege ob ich die schmerzen Ertrage. Den Ausgang etwas ändern, zumindest Wissen das es verstanden wird. Zumindest irgendwie die Unmöglichkeit etwas besser begreifen? Zumindest wissen wie es Euch geht, zumindest Wissen das Ihr liebt.

Mein Schweigen ist nur die Gewissheit das bisher niemand ähnlich Empfunden hat. Niemand hat an sich geglaubt, meist glaubten sie nur den anderen.

Wir sitzen in dem lieben Café und ich schweige. Und ich hätte Stunden erzählen können, am Ende hättet Ihr vielleicht Verstanden, hättet euch um eine Lösung bemüht. Vielleicht hätte ich auch Geheimnissen gelauscht, die ich schon ewig gespürt habe. Aber könnt Ihr meine Angst verstehen, wieder nur Schweigen zu ernten?

Ich erkläre, und man schweigt, ich frage, und man schweigt, ich bitte um Antwort, und man schweigt, ich schweige, und man hört nicht mal zu.

False perceptions

I was going through the presentation “code of our own” that talked about woman and code and different ways of learning programming. Under the pictures of slide 14 it says:

“Boys tend to be incompetent together and figure stuff out in the early teenage years without shame. Consider starting a band as an example. Girls are socially rewarded at that age for demonstrating competence, maturity, not looking stupid. We can work on that skill now, as adults, with respect.”

Beside the wide range of very different (social) issues mentioned here, (the major one being puberty?!), the named incompetence between teenage boys made me wonder about the perception.

So how did some nerdy boys from the 80’s learn all the fancy assembler skills, cracking game copy protections and writing code? Short answer: With a friend.

If i ask around in my male coder circles, the majority of people had the following introduction into the world of computers.

First encounter: Father got a computer, a class mate’s father had a computer etc…
Playing around with the machine, being interested in the machine itself and what it can do. Reading manuals and books, spending hours and hours in front of it.
Play around with the computer together with a good friend. This usually became a major peak in the learning curve and you often exchanged experiences, new features, functions and other findings.

After one or two years of programming in different languages, you gained enough basic knowledge about the computer, how it works and how everything builds upon each other. This became the base for every new learning process in the future.

These two years are usually filled with exchange. With, “can you try if this runs on your computer?”, “did you try this version?”, “did you notice this feature?”. Developing software always involved other people, even so the coding itself was something you did alone at night - the lack of distractions helps to concentrate.

The presentation also mentions the fear of exposing the “not knowing” to a larger group of people. This totally applies for all genders and might be the main reason for learning with a good friend - because you could ask the questions and exchange without any embarrassment.

I totally see that working in a small group is a very efficient way of learning. Writing an application together, to have a specific task that everyone can work on. I spent the last week at a wonderful hacker squat. The exchange is always astonishing, to inspire each other, to share and gain knowledge, to meet new people. It’s no surprise that hackerspaces become so successful.

However, in the context of the current discourse of woman in open source, i sincerely ask for more differentiations. I totally agree with the existence of all issues. But there are multiple questions to ask:

What are gender issues?
What are social issues?
What are group issues?
What are the specific issues with “male hackers” and their behaviors?

A clear separation is needed. I fear that in the process of getting more genders into the IT world, we might build up more walls between them. Please, let us tear them down instead.

ps: Yes, i am afraid i did not see the related actual talk of that presentation :(

Adrift and Air Doll

Let’s continue the little movie review from the Rotterdam Film Festival.

Today i saw Adrift and Air Doll, who both have love / sex in contrast to our society as topic. Even so both Asian, they come from totally different perspectives.

Air Doll by Hirokazu Koreeda from Japan, is all about the emptiness, the non-feeling, the heartless artificial surface and the lack of any emotional substance. The fear to feel, the possible calculated risk of getting hurt.

Koreeda also made the wonderful “Nobody Knows” and one of my all time favorites, “Maborosi”. It’s again a very solid good work and lets the audience think about common problems in the society. The air doll sex toy as metaphor for the empty human beings.

From the absolute opposite direction came Adrift (Choi voi, 2009), a viatnames movie by the rather new director Chuyên Bui Thac. It portraits a young married couple and their relationships to other men and woman. Their environments, desires, emotions and adventures.

It wasn’t really the intensity of the emotions, but rather the wide range of different situations, unique characters and authentic story telling, that made this movie so moving. A constant change, always development and even the small characters become a certain depth in this progress. The sensibility for the characters was astonishing and quite remarkable for the current times. A sensibility you only see in very few movies, like La Strada for example.

The director was available for Q&A and provided some background information. The topic of desires and sexuality is rather privat in the Vietnamese culture, and Adrift is intentionally hitting that nerve. Also, his portray of very strong female, and rather weak male characters divided the Vietnamese audience.

Last but not least, the soundtrack is a wonderful mixture of modern instruments with classic Vietnamese folk music. Something i have never heard before.

Trailer and more for Choi voi.

Visage (2009) »

Just saw Visage at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Tsai introduced the movie as his “Self-Portrait but not really a autobiography”. Overall it is less accessible then his earlier work and the three major “story lines” never really interact. However, Tsai is massively playing around with the possibilities of cinema, without any pressure for success or fear of failure. It’s just pure love for the movies. Watch it with a open heart.

I played allot of Lego and started to climb around trees. Kraftwerk’s 20min Autobahn was playing on my tape deck and water pistols made people dance on the love parade. Guys with water canons made people cry. Weizenbaum’s code would listen to my stories. A spaceship would slowly fly through a layer of fog. Lions and candles make me a men. The world does not end. Little messages get me on my own feet. Little messages burn me down. A channel full of kids moves me across borders. Contradictions break down the walls. The belief in words is lost.

Can i ask you something?

Anonymous

Sure, use tumblr or formspring.me

Privacy Wars

Kink on tap had an interesting podcast about the privacy wars. It showed the point of view from a group of people, that have to take care of their privacy. However, i feel that it was lacking some crucial aspects that came up since the development of social networking.

Real names

Using a real name on the internet is an interesting topic and highly depends on your background, and the initial goal for a certain platform.

Before the massive use of the word wide web, most of the public communication was happening over the usenet. Many newsgroups asked the subscribers to provide a real name as a matter of good manners.

With the information stored in the usenet and public mailing-list archives, you can create social networks of the participants. It often exposed key members of the network, core people who play a crucial role of keeping a community running.

Also developers for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution are asked to provide their real name, in progress of the integration into the community. The whole process comes from the need to manifest responsibilities for crucial elements of the operating system.

On of the first programs, that answered the need for a “web-of-trust”, is “pretty good privacy” aka PGP. However it was providing encrypted eMail communication, the key-signing feature also exposed the social network to the public. A long time before sites like Facebook. This problem was addressed by providing a local-only storage of that information. Later, GnuPG became a GPL equivalent of PGP.

The public pgp key of any Debian developer, would directly show how well established a person is in the community. The whole GnuPG based web-of-trust became the essential base of the Debian developer and maintainer network.

Anonymity

In the more radical and political movements, you would hardly find anyone without a nickname of sorts, unless they have to represent a NGO or other official organizations. Massive repression from the state and police or threads from right wing groups make it almost impossible to be known under the real name. Many people even used a separate nickname for this community only.

Facing stalkers and employers is an aspect of the users privacy on the internet. Facing the repression of the state and police brings up a couple more crucial questions that still matter for everyone, whether you fight against the state or not.

Who has access to the data? Where is the data stored? Who owns the data? And how willing is a company or group to share the information with third parties, state and police? The very recent anonymous release of the “compliance guide for law enforcement” of some social network providers, stress the importance of these questions.

The outer edge of this discussion are projects like Wikileaks, Indymedia, Tor and other networks and services that intentionally stand up for freedom of speech and anonymous publishing of any material. Networks that work on the technical and social infrastructure to guarantee as much anonymity as possible. The refusal of indymedia.us to give out the users IP-Address logs show that web services could protect their users privacy.

Your data

There is no question that sharing and the “social net” are the key applications on the internet today. There will most likely be a point when the western world will no longer be able to live without it. Just avoiding social networks will not solve the problem.

The simple answer to many of these problems are that the user needs direct control over their data, at best, stored on their own computers.

With that we come back to the very basic horizontal ideas of the internet, that every node, every computer can provide services and share data. Opera Unite for example, is trying to make this fundamental feature of the internet accessible to the average user.

Also projects like open-id, foaf-ssl and the semantic web in general, work on technical solutions, for a more diverse and decentralized social network, that allows the user to have more direct control over their data.

What is needed are services and desktop applications that combine the features of decentralized social networks, the web-of-trust and encrypted communications.

But it’s not only the technical aspects, it’s about the consequences of horizontal and direct communication in times when people move away from one-way mediums like the television.

Back in 2001, Wau Holland said, that we more and more “need to learn to filter”.

We are no longer just consumers, where other people make the choices for us. The social networks we are exposed to is one of our filters and it is what we want to see in this world.

In 2007 Andreas Pfitzmann held a little speech at the German Federal Constitutional Court, that stresses the need for direct control over our data.

He points us to the possibility that computers are no longer just going to be desktops or laptops separated from us, they will become part of our body. They become a extension of ourselves, provide us with additional memory and give us unique and extended access to these memories, to our data.

The very interesting documentary The Cyborg Revolution from 2007 shows what the current developments are. From artificial vision for blind people to the digital replication of the neurological brain structure of the rat.

It’s only a question of how fast the interface between humans and computer will develop. Augmented reality today, is a little application on your mobile phone. In 10 years it might sit on your nose as part of your glasses, in 20 years it is part of your eye.

Independence

Many social networks like Facebook work with the commercial strategy of binding the customer to their service, to create a dependency, up to the point where they make the choices for you.

This is contrary to the idea of a horizontal communication, to the old idea of “power to the people”, contrary to diversity and independence. Make sure the choice is yours.

occam, 2009-12-27

Occam | formspring.me »

Ask me anything

drop3 »

more jam... »

…sessions with the audio tool

Playing around with ToneMatrix @hobnox.com »

photo by inga jug

DE Wenn man Sie so beobachtet, sucht man nach dem passenden Film - etwas was Ihre Geschichte erzählt. Man denkt in Schwarz / Weiß, Frankreich, 60er, New Wave, man denkt an das Buch von Duras an Chopin und die Ferne. Man denkt an Nina Menkes und Zohara.

Aber all diese Geschichten sind alt, es ist nicht Ihre Geschichte, es ist nicht unsere Zeit. Und was hier und jetzt über die Leinwand flimmert will Ihre Geschichte nicht mal erhören.

Da liegt dein Buch, du sollst es schreiben, aber jede Seite ist bedruckt. Nichts ist weiß. Fahre langsam mit dem Bleistift jeden Buchstaben nach, damit du auch alle Regeln genau kennst.

EN If you observes her as such, one looks for the suitable film - something telling her story. One thinks of 60’s, new wave in black/white, france. One thinks of the book from Duras of Chopin and traveling afar. One thinks of Nina Menkes and Zohara.

But all the stories are old, it is not her story, it is not our time. And what flickers here and now over the canvas, does not want to answer, reflect her story.

There your book, you shall write it, but each page is already printed. Nothing is white. Re-draw slowly with the pencil each printed letter, so that you exactly know all the rules.