Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

Patrick Hickey, head of the European Olympic Committee, is quoted on Wikipedia as to have said, “Under no circumstance will we support the boycott. We are 100 percent unanimous. Not one government leader has called for a boycott. A boycott is only a punishment of the athletes.”

First off, I’d like to nitpickingly chastise him for being redundant: If a decision has any less than 100% support from those making it, it is not unanimous.

More importantly, he seems to be under the impression that a boycott is only valid if it is called for by government leaders. However, the fact that the athletes themselves should choose this course of action, which they haven’t officially done yet (but allegedly many were considering it), tells us that our government leaders are too weak, indifferent or corrupt to make the same kind of stance as the athletes and the many thousands of people who have been protesting over the last couple of weeks.

Weakness in this case would be an unwillingness to take a stand which the Chinese government may choose to use as cause to break trade relations

Indifference would be an inability to see the global context of the Tibetan struggle for independence - echoing the indifference these same leaders have shown towards a multitude of issues over the last years.

And corruption in this case would be, on the one hand, the choice of leaders not to act, lest they inadvertently fuel further separatist movements, such as the separatist movements in Basque, Catalonia, Quebec, California, etc, etc, which these same people would deem not to be in their own personal best interest, since power to the people implies less power to the ruling class. And on the other hand, corruption in this case would be the decision of the leaders not to act on the basis that China is a powerful country and that keeping them at peace is more important than any ethical or liberal considerations. This mode of corruption has been seen before, for example in the United States’ Coalition of the Willing.

The European Union - another ethically weak organization - has said that sports should not be linked to politics. I agree. But they are, and have ever been. The Olympic games, called for and reestablished by Baron Pierre de Coubertin around 1894 and famously modernized by Adolf Hitler in 1936, have been since Hitler a symbol of strength for the nation hosting the games, with numerous cities competing for the right to host them each round. As a symbol of strength, it is a strongly political symbol, and as such it is only fitting that opponents of the hosting country attempt, as they can, to undermine that symbol.

Consider it civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is generally not a protest about the establishment of a nation - although that does sometimes occur - but rather, it is a protest about a certain facet of the establishment that has gone awry for any number of reasons, that civilians are simultaneously powerless to change and deeply dissatisfied with. Civil disobedience is the editorial process for society.

As a result I deeply hope that as many athletes as possible very openly and visibly boycott the Olympic games. To make a suggestion: Go to Beijing, attend the games, but just stand there in the stadium and refuse to participate in the games until Tibet has been granted independence. That would be a strong statement.

Skrílslæti, n. Orð sem lýsir hegðun sem brýtur í bága við þá ímynd sem valdhafar og stuðningsmenn þeirra hafa skapað sér um það hvað telst sæmilegt athæfi. Orðið er einnig notað í háðsskyni meðal þeirra sem grípa til téðra skrílsláta til þess að lýsa hverri þeirri aðgerð sem þeir gera sem gæti sært blygðunarkennd valdhafa eða stuðningsmanna þeirra.

It turns out that what was one of the most promising open source mesh wifi projects of its day has been overrun by profiteering bastards who have closed up the source, possibly illegally, and have instated a governing policy for the hardware they sell that is reminiscent of Microsoft’s XBox 360 tactics and, well, most commercial out-of-the-box hardware being developed these days.

In this great article the story is told of a Vancouver based free wifi activist group who got repeatedly ass-fucked by Meraki and their fluctuating policy. This story underlines but one thing: the demand for open source hardware is increasing, in part due to the fact that the OEM producers are becoming increasingly totalitarian with their hardware.

Through a month’s worth of discussion about Open Hardware licenses on a small backwater mailing list (consisting of many of the smarter people in the field of open licensing) I’ve come to realize that the need is augmented by the thresholds created by hardware manufacturers - with electronics fabrication techniques becoming increasingly complex, the ability of Joe Public to fabricate such revolutionary open hardware such as Sun Microsystems’ OpenSPARC II is severely limited, even to the degree that I’ve given some thought to how hard it would be to get a small chip fab into the Fab Labs.

As I said previously in an article that appeared on the Peer-2-Peer Foundation’s blog: The problem with Open Source licenses on physical objects is that even though they might do the trick in a legal context, it isn’t what they’re designed to do, so the wording is all wrong. It’s like selling vodka as a disinfectant. It’ll do the job marvelously, but a lot of people will remain skeptic.

Conversely I think doing an “Open Hardware License” would be missing the point to a certain degree - the boundaries between hardware and software are bound to grow increasingly fuzzy as we draw closer to digital fabrication (let alone molecular assembly), and even if we lump those two together we’d be neglecting all the other kinds of “intellectual property”, such as ideas, etc.

This holds. With the sheer number of projects attempting to create blanket mesh wifi for urban areas, such as Vancouver’s FreeTheNet and related software/hardware projects such as Peernet and B.A.T.M.A.N, it’s only a matter of time before the Genie gets let out of the bottle.

The community must prepare for this.

As Cory Doctorow showed in his fantastic novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, besides the huge technological barriers to achieving free mesh Wifi are the “capitalistic” barriers of the phone companies not really wanting people to do that kind of thing and being very bent on stopping them.

Point in case: My ISP, Hive, leases out wireless routers to their customers and does not allow their customers to use other endpoint equipment than their own. The equipment is locked and password protected, so they can access it from their headquarters over some telnet route but I cannot log in to it myself. As a result, the ESSID and the wep key cannot be changed by me. I could not blank out the wep key and open up my network even if I wanted to. Or, let’s say I could: then I would be in violation of my service agreement with them. Actually, even telling my friends the wep key when they visit so we can play a game of OpenTTD over the wireless is in violation of the service agreement. Not that that’s going to stop me.

As much as I understand Hive’s policy in not letting the lemmings tamper with the settings on the router, which would cost them endless hassle in incompatibility, repair service and lengthy telephone arguments with know-it-all PFY’s who’ve just botched their GPIO settings and can’t connect, I’m afraid their policy is more suited towards blocking uses that would be legitimate if the ISP’s were selling uplink access as opposed to personalized tyranny.

Because that’s what ISP’s are: They’re service providers, and their service is uplink. As soon as they step outside that box they’re well on their way towards blocking legitimate uses. It would be as if a grocery store were to ban customers from opening tin cans bought at their store, lest they cut themselves on the lid; or worse, would forbid customers to share bananas bought at the store with their friends, lest the friends figure out a way to stage a bank robbery using the bananas.

A friend of mine is renting an apartment in down town Reykjavík, and the landlady has provided wireless Internet to her tenants. Allegedly. The truth is the signal is extremely flaky and only perceivable in one room in the apartment. However, due to the virtue of the immensely thick carpet of wifi in the city center, there’s more wireless access points in her vicinity than is strictly possible to shake a stick at. During our frustrating moment the other day when the granted wireless connection was failing to impress, we stopped for a moment to consider breaking into some of the AP’s and using them.

Ethically, I’m not opposed: Anybody who locks their wifi is blocking a resource that others could use on egalitarian grounds, given just a hint of altruism. To wit, I think anybody who willingly blocks their wifi is behaving criminally towards their fellow humans. Legally, I can’t see any objection: There are no laws, to my knowledge, banning people from connecting to uplinks when available, and WEP keys are not really locks so much as just a simple obfuscation technique to prevent discourage eavesdropping.

In the end the only reason we didn’t do it is I didn’t have any software to crack the WEP keys. Since then I’ve been thinking, perhaps I should have just gone door to door in the neighborhood asking people to submit their ESS ID’s, WEP keys, addresses and WGS84 coordinates to a public pool.

But even if we did do that, the telco’s are not altruistic. They are not fond of egalitarianism. Their interest in liberty, and equality is none. We need open hardware, and we need a battle plan.

“Once you can understand something in a way that you can shove it into a computer, you have cracked its code, transcended any particularity it might have at a given time.” - Jaron Lanier

From a great article in Edge.

White, Kopanski and Lipson wrote of Stochastic Self-Reconfigurable Cellular Robotics, but in their paper they used several slave automata and one master automaton that provided both power and logic to the swarm, coordinating the effort to self-reconfigure into a given shape. I’ve been thinking about this a bit and would like to repeat their experiment, but with completely autonomous asynchronous automata, each controlling or ceding control to others according to the results of some sensible system.

The problem is formulated like so:

When several autonomous asynchronous entities interact they frequently need to share knowledge in order to solve problems. Consider a group of square automata attempting to organize themselves into a predetermined pattern, where each individual automaton only has information about whether or not another automaton is connected to it on each of its four sides. As each only has very limited information about the global state they will, in order to complete their task, have to exchange information. The question is what information and how much of it?

The simplest (and most simplistic) solution is for all the automata to promiscuously share all information it has with all of it’s neighbors. The downside of this is that for n automata the space complexity of this is n²: if each automata is addressed by a 1 byte identifier then for 100 automata each has to have 10000 bytes of memory (~ 10 KB) at its disposal. For larger numbers of automata with larger addressing schemes (as 1 byte will only uniquely address up to 256 automata) this quickly becomes infeasable.

A more logical approach would be to consider the space as a bitfield and disregard any infomation about which automata are connected. This narrows the space complexity down to the size of the “playing field” (with 1 bit per location), but forces us to have a clearly defined playing field that each automaton can sense it’s location relative to the origin of, so that location information does not overlap or cause conflicts.

Is there another, simple scheme, which has very little space complexity (time complexity is of less interest), preferably being constant, and does not rely on the size or dimensions of the playing field?

Taken into analogy: At a dance each individual only has limited information about his position on the dancefloor, and in fact he does not care so much where he is as he cares whether or not he is about to bump into somebody else. Between him and his dancing partner they share, at any moment, a fairly detailed map of the global environment (i.e., the dance floor), but it would be cause prohibative for them to constantly inform each other of the location of every other individual (or wall) on the dancefloor. Rather, they take the more subtle approach of giving each other only information that the other unit needs to behave appropriately.

As a lot of people know, I’ve been writing a novel for quite some time. I just sent off the first test copy to Lulu for printing (actually only the first two parts, the third and final part is still a few months from completion) and after a discussion with Gummi I decided to check on the import regulations, so I sent off an e-mail to the customs office.

It turns out that the Icelandic government is going to charge me 7% of the price + postage (valued at about $15, that’s about 73 kronas) for my book. 73 kronas isn’t a lot, but I think it’s odd to pay sales tax off something I’m essentially selling to myself.

What’s worse though is that they are going to charge me 450 kronas for “customs inspection”, which means they’re going to open the package when it arrives and verify that it is, indeed, a book. So that they know how much to tax me. So I’m going to have to pay 523 kronas for something that… well.

Actually, they did say that I could apply for the right to do my own customs inspection, which would cost me something to get but afterwards they wouldn’t charge me the 450 kronas per package received. Oh, jee, thanks.

I really dislike the idea of taxes and manditory official fees. And customs.

I realized yesterday as I had a conversation with my television that one of my childhood dreams had been fulfilled.

Watching television has never been of much interest to me; it just sat there pushing information in my direction and I never got to push anything back. When the anchorman on the news said something stupid I couldn’t correct him or mock him, except to the others in the room. When the animation on the cartoons was shabby I couldn’t have fixed it.

So yesterday I was teleconferencing - on my television - with people in Norway, the Netherlands, and Massachusetts, and I was talking back… and it was great.

I recommend that everybody get a two way television (or a videoconferencing device), and that somebody develop a distributed alternative to the MCU. Heck, webcam support in Linux would be good enough - the new Skype beta does that, but not very well.

Good link btw.

A rant of mine on the issues of open hardware licenses just popped up on the P2P foundation’s blog:

The problem with Open Source licenses on physical objects is that even though they might do the trick in a legal context, it isn’t what they’re designed to do, so the wording is all wrong. It’s like selling vodka as a disinfectant. It’ll do the job marvelously, but a lot of people will remain skeptic.

Conversely I think doing an “Open Hardware License” would be missing the point to a certain degree - the boundaries between hardware and software are bound to grow increasingly fuzzy as we draw closer to digital fabrication (let alone molecular assembly), and even if we lump those two together we’d be neglecting all the other kinds of “intellectual property”, such as ideas, etc.

…

Link

My new article on anarchism.is is “Uppræting skorts með forritun efnisheimsins”, which explains some of the basics of of digital fabrication and the economic implications.

Eftir tuttugu ár munu allir kannski geta farið á netið og downloadað sér samloku með kjúklingaáleggi og borðað hana. […]

[…] En rétt er að íhuga hvað gerist fyrir samfélagið þegar að menn geta farið að downloada sér nýjustu Ferrari bílunum, nýjustu tískuvörunum - svo ekki sé talað um að geta heimsótt vefsíðu McDonalds og borgað fyrir góðborgara eða bara fengið hann í gegnum BitTorrent af Pirate Bay.

Link.

I was also interviewed on the same subject for the next issue of Verðandi.

My Internet presence has dropped to zero in the last couple of weeks. Hereby rectified. Rather than give you a long and thrilling tale about how I barely escaped with my life, I’m going to give you a list of keywords in no particular order and you can make up your own version of the events:

• New York
• One Laptop Per Child
• Sustainable South Bronx
• Boston
• MIT Media Lab
• Random Yoga Teachers
• Samuel Adams
• Union City, New Jersey
• Drugs, guns, and money
• Swing dancing
• Cellular automata
• Plasma torch
• Violin players
• Couches in famous buildings
• A highway McDonalds in Connecticut
• Economics
• Web development
• A Big Bad Voodoo Band
• World Trade Center
• Stochastic buildings
• Spanish physicists
• The ising model
• Chinatown
• Cockroaches
• Vestmannaeyjar
• Shoveling snow
• Fung wah busses
• Budgeting

Yeah. That should get you started.

I’ll be in Vestmannaeyjar for this weekend and then I’m back on “regular” schedule for about two weeks before all hell breaks loose again. There’s a lot that’s happened, a lot that needs to be said, and perhaps I’ll have a chance to dump a couple of posts here soon. Until then, hold on tight, and btw, I am not the Antichrist.