A LIVE MAIL ART PIECE
TRACKING A PARCEL FROM JULIAN ASSANGE TO NABEEL RAJAB

London.
Monday, October 28 2013

«Delivery for Mr. Rajab» is a live mail art piece and the continuation
of «Delivery for Mr. Assange». In January 2013, !Mediengruppe Bitnik
sent Wikileaks-founder Julian Assange a parcel containing a hidden
camera. Through a hole in the parcel, the camera documented and
live-tweeted its journey through the postal system, letting anyone
online follow the parcels status in real-time. After 32 hours and a
tantalizing and intense journey, sharing over 9000 images of postal
bags, vans and delivery centers, the camera arrived and Julian Assange
performed for the several thousand people watching.

Together with Julian Assange, we have decided to send the parcel on a
second journey. The next recipient is Nabeel Rajab, a Bahraini human
rights activist, opposition leader and protest leader. He was arrested
several times in 2011 and 2012 during the ongoing national uprising in
Bahrain. Currently, he is serving a two year prison sentence for
protest-related charges and has been jailed at Jaw Prison in the
Southern Governorate of Bahrain since August 2012.

The images from the parcel are transferred to our website & twitter,
where the status of the parcel can be followed in realtime.

http://rajab.bitnik.org/
http://www.twitter.com/bitnk/

The parcel was picked up at the Ecuadorian embassy by the postman at
16:12 GMT on Monday, 28 October 2013.

The parcel is due to arrive at its destination within 48 hours. Should
the first parcel fail to reach Nabeel Rajab, a second
and third attempt will be made within the next few days.

We want to see where the parcel's journey will end.
Which route it takes and whether it reaches Nabeel.

!Mediengruppe Bitnik
http://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org/

During the Crypto workshop at Mozfest Matthew Fuller announced some details of the upcoming Cryptofestival at Goldsmiths, University of London. This version of the Cryptofestival will focus on the ‘post-‘ Snowden area we have been catapulted into since June.

The official call states: “Freaked out by spiralling revelations of NSA surveillance? Worried that the spooks have subverted the internet at every level to make it a vast, multi-layered panopticon? Or simply creeped out by the way services like Facebook & Gmail track everything you do so they can profile you for advertising?

Whatever your paranoia, now is not the time to give up on the internet. It’s time for a CryptoFestival! On November 30th we’re coming together to build on the success of the CryptoParty movement and to reclaim our right to communicate and experiment on the internet.”

We visited the “Hit the Road Map: A Human Timeline of the Open Education Space”, a pre-event to the MozFest, organized by P2PU & CC School of Open & Flossmanuals, as announced back in September.

We started with a Spectrogram a prompt reflection/discussion on the changing meaning of open over time, discussing  the idea of open education as a new development, through statements such as: “Open education will replace formal education. / The web will replace teachers and institutions. We’ve lost sight of the original meaning of ‘open’, for example when it was first used to describe the open source software movement. The meaning of open has changed since software became open and we’ve lost sight of that original meaning.  Openness is the most revolutionary development in education since the invention of the printing press”, if we agree or disagree with those statements, or are somewhere  in between on the Spectogram line..

Then we went on to draw the Open Education Timeline, referring to the Timeline of the Open Access Movement, and the UK Open Government Data timeline, the Timeline of US Copyright law, by stating first when and where we had the first encounter with “open”, or some might argue “free”.

Marieke thn explained OKFN’s Open Ed Handbook and how this timeline will fit into it. How it will be digitized it and put up for further iteration on the web, time mapper software.

Creative Commons blog entryHelp us Build on our timeline

Dorkbot #84 took place last thursday.  Henry Cooke: “Faces in the Cloud is an automated experiment in machine pareidolia by Henry Cooke. Henry will be talking about how he ended up making it, the processes it uses and what edge-cases of computer perception can teach us about their and our perceptive systems.” The Git repository.

Reminding us of Julien Priest’s project The Weight of Information.

Dave Green presented CheapSynth: “An opendork about my Arduino MIDI ‘fully programmable open hardware 8-bit keyboard… for less than £30’ with new
features since London Maker Faire etc ” The Git repository for the CheapSynth project..

Of course James took one of the cheap synths with him, expect some noise coming out of dek!

Last weekend we went to visit the anarchist bookfair and met Christoph Fringeli from Datacide (and Praxis) where they presented their thirteenth issue. Datacide used Backspace back in the nineties when running DataRadio programme, of which one can still download. Those sessions are also linked in from the WalkerArt Mediatheque.

Last Sunday datacide hosted a launch event at Vynil in Deptford. Christoph Fringeli gave an overview of Datacide, David Cecil spoke about ‘Confessions of an Accidental Activist’, and Neil Transpontine presented ‘Revolt of the Ravers – the movement against the Criminal Justice Act in Britain’. 20 years since the UK Government announced new laws targeting gatherings with music ‘characterised by repetitive beats’. DJ Controlled Weirdness finished the evening.

Neil took part in some of the Deptford.TV events, such as What will New Cross be?, back in 2008 when The People Speak hosted at Talkaoke event, the documentation of the Urban Free Festival, and the Mindsweeper events, of which much is documented in the Deptford.TV diaries ‘strategies of sharing‘ & ‘pirate strategies‘…

Datacide, international ‘magazine for noise and politics’, has its origins in the underground techno/speedcore/noise scene in 1990s London. Its founder, Christoph Fringeli, also initiated Praxis records and the legendary Dead by Dawn nights at the 121 Centre in Brixton (for a while Praxis had a record stall in New Cross Road in what is now Prangsta). Today it is published in Berlin, but with contributors spread around the globe. As well record reviews and other music news, it features in depth articles and interviews on the related cultural politics, anti-fascism, and much more.

In a return to its South London origins, was a launch event for the new issue 13…

We have decided to use OwnCloud instead of continuing with Bittorrent Sync despite its breakthrough functionality, it’s rooted in preparatory IP rather than a commitment to open source software. It almost seemed to good to be true and other data exchange solutions with similar promise are available on better terms.

On the GitHub pages for the Debian package it states: “The source archive of this package contains nothing, since the original btsync binaries will be retrieved directly either from BitTorrent Inc. or alternatively from the maintainers site during package generation. The source archive of this package can be generated from scratch by executing make -f debian/rules get-orig-source. The original btsync binaries will be retrieved directly either from BitTorrent Inc. or alternatively from the maintainers site.  See the get-orig-source target in the rules file”

On the Bittorrent Sync forums (here & here) a discussion around this issue took place over the last months, and a staff member stated that they still consider the option. In the meantime the Free Software Foundation has announced a free source Bittorrent Sync clone as a priority. Check out the wiki on SyncReplacement. In the forum the good old debate of free as in free beer vs. free as in  freedom  came up, referring to the Free Software Definition and the FOSDEM 2013 conference.

In the forum one user states that there “is a gaping security hole in BitTorrent Sync, and it appears the company has ignored the most prominent security threat that faces most of its potential users. One of the many lessons from the NSA scandal is that the successful way to beat encryption is through social engineering. Instead of hacking computers by brute force, the NSA and other spy agencies apply legal and fiscal pressure to obtain what they need. The international spy game is fiercely competitive, and it would be naive to suspect that the NSA has no interest in having direct access to the computer files of every American, since undoubtedly every foreign spy agency will want this information as soon as it is technologically and financially feasible. If we are unfortunate enough to experience a terrorist attack by an individual who used BitTorrent Sync for security, chances are very good that in the aftermath BT will be heavily pressured by the government into having btsync phone home with the secrets. This is independent of whether BT has already decided they’d like to have access to those secrets. Security against this attack vector cannot be guaranteed unless users can see the source code. It’s also worth mentioning that the primary concern *isn’t* necessarily that BT Sync users will be targeted by the government for unnecessary privacy violations. Edward Snowden has admitted to taking a job at Booz Allen Hamilton with the express purposes of making goverment secrets public. Thus we have clear evidence that — even if the NSA is just and secure — private security firms can be infiltrated by individuals with motivations that run counter to the motivation of the NSA. It seems likely that there have been other infiltrations of these security firms by more nefarious organizations. So even if we are entirely trusting of our government’s noble principles, the fact remains that the ability of BT Sync to transmit secrets home is a potential security hole that affects all of its users. Finally, we’ve seen some judges attempt to force defendents to decrypt their harddrives so that these drives may be searched. As of now, this legal point hasn’t been settled, and individuals might still have the ability to take the 5th amendment and refuse to decrypt their hard drives. What *has* been settled is that neither the 4th nor 5th amendment applies to information held for you by a third party. Thus if BT Sync for any reason has copies of your secrets, and you are being investigated for a crime (wrongly or otherwise) you have effectively no security from BT Sync. We need to know that BT Sync does not currently transmit secrets anywhere, and will never do so in the future. The only way we can really know these things for sure is to look at the source code.”

IS4CWN was held in Berlin 2nd to 4th October at cBase  home of Freifunk celbrating a decade of wireless freenetworking. James Stevens travelled there with Alexei Blinov and was reunited with long term Consume collaborator Julian Priest (nz) currently living in Pisa Italy.

Juergen Neuman ( freifunk ) arranged for us all to stay in the old pig sty at K9 a housing commune/bar. Then, 3 days of workshops, Wednesday 2nd, Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th during which time we listened, questioned and exchanged information with the many international community wireless network groups represented.

The first day we spent visiting the three presentation rooms as well as enjoying the hospitality at cBase. In the afternoon Julian Priest presented the picosat project ‘weight of information‘ and we met with Luka Mustafa from Ljubljana who has spent three years in London at uni and returned to europe with a  3D printed prototype of gigabit optical networking solution inspired by Ronja. Met with Rodger of Guifi.net (topnotch) Attended a range of sessions… see timetable. lots of drinking all day then diner with Juergen, Alexei and Julian.

After a morning spent recovering from the night before and a lovely walk along the river, met with Richard from Austin wireless and talked about Borgfest his latest project, also talked with Sam of Occupy London and Hacklab London who showed a fantastic video playback project (link lost). Spent short periods in a selection of sessions till Freifunkers celebrated ten years meshness. Thursday evening keynote from Amelia Anderstrotter of German Pirate Party . Diner with Juergen and gf Julian, Alexei and joined by Ramon Rocco (guifi.net) and Axel Nuemann (Batman)

Met with Robert Horvitz from Open Spectrum Alliance he invited us to attend his exhibition in London at glasshouse trust gallery (weird link) attended many session including one of the last  on Friday explaining progress on libre-mesh.org a very recent collaboration of AlterMesh (from AlterMundi, Argentina), qMp (from guifi.net, Catalunya), eigenNet (from eigenLab, Ninux, Italia). This was the most inspiring and fascinating moments of the summit.. pure technical insight and progressive utilisation of BATMAN eXtended (layer2), BMX (layer3)  to hugely extend the scope and scale of future networks.. brilliant.

Finished off talking with Sven-Ola architect of much freifunk advanced work as we plan to offer VLAN exchange with SPC in London and complete the 11 year round trip of BerLon!