Author: Charles Céleste Hutchins

Supercolliding since 2003

LambdaIstanbul

this group was declared immoral yesterday. It’s an LGBT Solidarity Association founded in 1993. And a cultural center since 2000. Grassroots, non-hierarchical, volunteer based. They are anti-military.
They have commissions within the org. Trans, Women’s Group, Pride, Performance, Family, Human Rights Violations Reporting. Alas, the police have a lot more power recently and raid groups, including this one. The government insists that human rights are not violated. They work a lot with trans people including sex workers, trans women in feminism, etc. They do also legal aid for trans women harassed by the police.

April 7, 2008, 15 big police guys searched everything. They saw a trans woman coming in, so therefore they must be running a prostitution ring. (Because it’s really great for women to make prostitution illegal.) the government of Istanbul said the group violated public morality.
And then I had to g chase after my dog. Now the speaker is showing pictures from the pride parade. Apparently, this was an illegal protest? Last year, there were over 1000 people. Nobody is allowed to protest on the biggest street. But they were so small in the past, they were ignored. The police followed them last year, because of the size. It’s not a big party, it’s a protest march with chanting.
There was participation from some political figures, including a guy running for parliament and an italian politician.
she’s showing up a movie of another march which was stopped by the police and football hooligans. Turkey is not a great place to be queer.
and holy fuck. they were attacked by a giant mob, helped by the police and had to sit on the floor of a bus while people tried to break the windows while they escaped. mobs of men sang “die trannies die”

Queer festival action in slovenia

This speaker is talking about a festival they’ve been doing for 10 years. It was a DIY thing in a squat. It was a women’s festival.  Culture and art for women. They wanted to increase visibility of their own work. Local women could meet and talk about feminism and stuff.  It grew over time.  This is in around Slovenia now.

The festival grew to include more of the balkans and then farther outwards.

IT’s now a feminist festival and not just a women festival to be less essentialist. There was a lot of resistance to this change. alas. The latest version is feminist and queer.  I see this as a good thing.

Eventually participants were cool, but the media would just skip the word queer.

Theyve had themes around sex work.  A documentary was made. 

Last year they wanted to think about how to make it have a more lasting impact in the town. They decided to do a lot of workshops.

They did an action where they renamed the streets in responce to the revision of history going on in responce to the system change.  They changed names to be names of women instead of men.  They change “master” street to “servant” street.  The city didn’t take down the changes for a while.

Drupal video server.


Generatech, the post porn folks, use drupal video server.

Their content is queer, performances and post porn.  These go up on their website. It is politically decentralized actions made visible and empowering.

They ARE code. Code and surface creates agents. Code is central in defining technology, subjectives and culture. The digital divide is an issue of access to code. There isa gebder gap and an ethnic gap in access.

Capitalism restricts code access through software patents.

Access to code is cultural power. The net creates culture and represents culture. Media corporations want to control and sell culture.  They represent women poorly. They sell western culture to everyone.

There are economic issues in regards to access and also knowledge issues. I can’t afford it. I don’t know how.

We need to write our own code and make our own culture. Free software lets us protect our interests. We can make sure out interface is non-sexist.  Queer theory lets us rewritew the gender/sex code.

They use inkspace as a tool. And cineralla.  Their work is copylefted.

Their plan of action: is to increase access to tech by increasing knowledge of foss tools.

They want to specifically promote these tools among people who tend to have less access.

Video.ningunlugar.org is to share documentation of their acts of “gender terrorism.”  They did a festival with an image of jesus with boobs and a penis crown (instead of thorns). The police came to the house of the graphic designer.

Post pron is non-normative. It seems theyre trying to tweak social conservatives. They want to re-sexualize the body and change social definitions of sexiness.

“Gender hackers” can be whatever they want and rewrite the gender code. YAy.

They are trying to fight censorship.  One of the speaker’s friends got banned from youtube. ANother from myspace. ANother from blogger. Her POETRY was banned?

In summary: we are code. COde is being privatised. We have to rewrite all our codes for social transofmration.

They want to combine all progressive causes in a larger millieu.

They really beleive in online video, free software and progressive causes. Yay.

Voxfeminae

Voxfeminae

Feminist festival in Croatia. The first one in the country.  The organizer started. Itś about art and music and stuff.

Cultural events used to be very male dominated. So she started something for women. The festival is annual and for all kinds of arts. ITś an NGO funded by the ministry of culture. They decided to not take commercial sponsorship.  It was for 3 days in the student center. It had international participation.

Donna gave a workshop, but nobody came.  This festival is more about art and music and not about tech. Maybe they shouldnt have tried to give a tech workshop.

The speaker is asking how we organize these kinds of festivals in other countries. How to make it more visible?  How to communicate its specialness? How to avoid corporate sponsorship? Nobody seems tohave answers.

Another speaker is talking about a lesbian band she started called Burabend. They play covers (alas). The members are all on a football team in croatia. During the half time, they decided to start a pop band.  Its all very political. Plus they thought it would help them get girls. Apparently, itś the only dyke band in croatia.

They are political and an art project as much as a musical project.  Www.burabend.net

they hope to play gay weddings. Just as soon as it gets legal in croatia.

They mostly play at festivals. At pride. Also at the only gay club in crotia. (there is only one?)

Alas, their website has no mp3es. They will play anywhere, they say. In fact, they want to branch out to more straight venues.  Their band is not making money, alas.

As an asde, they speaker is really cute.

The next vox feminae will be in october. I wonder if i can play at it?

Security and .Net Programming

.NET is a Java competitor from M$. It is also cross-platform, compiles to virtual machine code. During run-time is Just In Time compilation. So the source code compiles most of the way and goes the rest of the way when you run the program.

Security

Security aspects: secret data must be kept secret. Data I want to protect is confidential. Some data can be readable by many, but not writable. I want to protect the integrity of that data. Sometimes I don’t want to leave a paper trail for the feds. That’s non-repudiation. Data must also be accessible to me when I need it.
so to ensure all of that, I have authentication and logging. The Authorization and authentication protects confidentiality and integrity. Hashing also helps protect integrity. Encryption. logging for non-repudiation (have i got ths term backwards?). And redundancy keeps stuff available.
Now we’re talking about why we should care. Firewalls are no substitute for proper design, etc. I can’t even believe that people would think they didn’t need to worry about this if they were writing network applications.
.Net has it’s own sandbox concept called CAS: code access security. It is really similar. Code gets permissions based on origin and you can say how much you trust it, etc.
How about security for the developer? You need to figure out which permissions that your code will need. Communicate your permission requirements. Make the documentation machine readable. (Is this built-on/for free?)
What about for the admin? What permissions should the code get? What’s the source of this code? How much do i trust the source? Check the hash and the signature (x 509 or strong name (I don’t know what that means, but ok))
there are some pre-defined permissions. They can let you at some resources.
This talk is really intense for this group. I wonder if anybody in this room is a .net programmer.
ok, so you might want to access the printer or to skip verifying stuff. Full trust allows everything. Be careful. Did she just say that Microsoft must have full trust at all times? Isn’t that a huge issue?
So one spot to attack is input validation: Cross-scripting (XXS), SQL Injection, buffer overflows, canonization attacks. Double check everything!
Validate input against XXS:Cross Site Scripting. Lookout for javascript in image tags and weird html tags. Look out for .. in urls. Blackhats might be trying to get into forbidden directories.
The speaker is now warning us not to try this on other people’s websites, lest we become blackhats.
She is further warning us to make sure things are escaped and sanitized. And now the whiteboard has suddenly collapsed on my dog. Who seems ok. Um, so make sure html doesn’t get executed. And check your SQL. Is this actually a string? Is this way too long? Ironically, she’s going on great length about buffer overflow. Great, great length.
Now it’s canonicalization attacks, which is the thing where you need to use a full path or else somebody might be evil.
Ok, in summary: check all your input. know what you expect. check fr it. check for weird input. She’s asking somebody to describe what a regular expression is. I don’t know how to define this. She’s giving us an example. I don’t know if the point is to look out for regular expressions lurking in input or telling us to be smart with our regex. Ok, it’s the latter. Be precise.
Um, yeah obviously do all of this on the server side.

Session management

http is stateless. so fake states with cokies (um, be careful with that), encrypt the authentication cookie with SSL. There must be timeout.
Um, I’m going to skip out before everybody else eats all the food.

Gig Report: ETC (Hangover editition)

I started yesterday by sleeping in a long time. Then I went to get a haircut. There’s a great haircutter here in Amsterdam. So I got a haircut. On the way out, my bike tipped over, alas, which is a common enough occurrence. I got to the venue early in the afternoon and proceeded to drink like 10 cups of coffee and eat a lot of sugar.
Then I went to set up and my synthesizer wouldn’t plug in. The power transformer plug got bent when my bike tipped over. Oh No! Oh no! So I used my pocket knife to bend it back, but, um, yeah, it would have probably been smarter to unplug it first.
My synth wouldn’t turn on. After some experimentation with a volt meter, we determined that the transformer is dead. And just try finding something that puts out +15V, -15V and ground. I’m not 100% certain that the problem is actually the transformer, but I really hope it is because trying to fix the synthesizer itself is beyond me. It’s an evenfall minimodular, so if I broke it, bah, they’re not being made anymore.
I wet and bought some Jenever, a type of Dutch gin. Then I tried to figure out what the hell to play. 40 minutes of live sampling was down the toilet with nothing to sample. I quickly assembled a program and put together a very alpha version of of my crotch-mounted joystick piece – with the wrong game controller, so the visual element was lost. I got it finished just in time for my sound check.
The right speaker connection was janky, so the person running the sound check, was all “we’ll have to tell the engineer to jiggle this if it drops out.” The next person trying to sound check just could not get her system working at all. So finally, about an hour late, I was on. Nobody from The Hague came, but I didn’t exactly give them advance notice and anyway, I wasn’t even playing my program so whatever.
I started playing the silly phone sounds piece that I wrote for brumcon. And I hit the button on my joystick. And nothing happened. I knew it had loaded the drivers correctly. Jesus, the batteries must have died. I wasn’t on a stage, I was back by the sound booth, which was lucky, but nobody had batteries. I ran up out of the performance area and found bag, overturned it, grabbed my spare batteries. The moral of the story is that spares must be kept with me. The cool thing was that as soon as I got the batteries in, I could start controlling the piece, even from outside, so I was able to make it kind of play ok while I was coming back.
That piece sounds great in a bedroom, playing out of genolec monitors. It sounds like crap on any other equipment with any other acoustics. Sine waves are unforgiving. And the acoustics at Plantage Dok are crap. Yeah, so great start.
Then I went to play my little movie about getting an injection. (I know, a few days ago, I’m all weird about shooting T and two days later, I’m performing a video of it. Whatever.) The right speaker dropped out completely. And then proceeded to allow bursts of sound in only on the really loud parts. all of the nice, sustained bass sounds are on the right. I turned to the sound engineer, “the right speaker is out!” She had no idea about the janky connection. Somebody sitting next to the speaker, said, “no, it’s fine! I hear sound!” It was not fine. It’s kind of suboptimal explaining a technical issue to a sound perform during a set while an audience member insists that it’s all working fine. This whole situation can’t have lasted more than a minute, but it seemed a bit longer. And then the sound was back. on the right.
I don’t even remember what else I played. Finally I did the piece with the joystick and the moaning porn women and it worked really really really well. Which was amazing because I had done less than a full run through of it ever. It was the maiden voyage. so to speak.
I decided to quit while I was ahead. I think everything must have been less than 20 minutes, but I actually have no idea at all. But to summarize: we have a dead synth, a dead joystick, a dead audio channel, a sudden exit, and playing pieces about male-embodied masculinity and sounds of porn to a feminist, women audience. It went over really, really well. This is one of the friendliest audiences ever.
I think also the performance aspect was working very well. I was projecting my screen contents so that I could show my video, but it also showed them the source code for my pieces, which was not cleaned up at all. My phone sound piece is still full of cuss words. The piece with the porn sounds has “naughty_piece” for it’s file name. They could see all the weirdness, which created a connection. And also, running out and upstairs and madly throwing cables everywhere, digging for batteries is dramatic. People like drama. I want everything to be really clean and professional and together, but folks seem to connect more when it’s more obvious how precarious things are. I mean, I always test my music a bunch of times before I play it. (well, almost always), but I never make it perfect. some of my pieces dance on the verge of completely crashing and print out tons of error messages. People like that.
So I didn’t do any live coding, but I think I see the mechanism that attracts people to it. They don’t just want to see somebody play violin, they want to see them do it on a highwire without a net.
Anyway, after I was off, I opened the bottle of jenever and proceeded to drink a lot of it. It’s really good! Tasty. Not harsh. Really fucking strong.
And today, I want to barf.
Just randomly, about a year ago, I went to a show at this same venue. Somebody was making sounds with a wireless joystick exactly like the one I have now. The show ran into major technical problems and wasn’t really going. They had thrown something together at the last moment, but it sounded cool at least.
Ugh, I fee like sick.

Ningun lugar

Ningun lugar works wioth gender, sexuality and technology.

Their project is called generatech. In barcelona.

We’ve been shown a video with women having sex and some text that may have mentioned debian, but i don’t know because there was sex.

They’re doing an event in july in barcelona about gender and foss.

Last year the only performance was ‘post porn’ and sm. Their events have workshops and performancces. They do debian stuff. Also there was sex. Now there are more videos. Maybe with sex.

I can’t post these notes, because it’s too about the sex.

Um.. So this video had a faux queen hrassed by guy who stabbed him in the gut and then fucked the  wound. Meat products were involved in the production.er. Wow.

I don’t understand the difference between porn and post porn. Also, apparenrly there was feminist text along with images of women fucking. Which might as well be a secret message, alas.

Etc: female icons

De Geuzen

A collaborative group since 1997. 1996, actually in Mastericht.  They started by having a space doing workshops, etc. The street was named for Geuzen, which is a derrogative term in Dutch.  Apparently, itś abad name for women.

They have an alphabetical dictionary of slang terms for women. And they put the words on t-shirts. Secondhand. Each t-shirt is unique. They were exhibited and then sold.

The group went on to collect further lists. So now theyŕe doing female icons. These are iconic images of famous women. So they started putting images of icons on plates.  Like Cher.

Then they started an impersonation thing where people hold pictures of famous women in front of their faces and a photo is taken. They have a flickr group. Tag your photo melikeher.

All the icons have tags. Thereś a tag cloud. Beauty¨is atag, for example.

This group is really, really into lists.

Www.geuzen.orgDe

I’m at the ETC

Gender

That’s the Eclectic Tech Carnival a fun mishmash of technology, feminism and social activism. I’m playing a show tomorrow night. And yesterday, I taught a workshop on Audacity and podcasting (some text from that will be available shortly).
The con is for “women and gender minorities.” Which means I’m the only guy in the room. Back in the old days, I was often the only woman in the room, which, at a tech event, really bothered me. Actually, when I go into a public meeting on tech or music, I always do a headcount of men vs. women and wonder what can be done if the ratios are not good. This is entirely different, of course and ok as long as I don’t think about it too hard.
I’m not the only transmasculine person here. I might not even be the only transsexual here. But I’m definitely the only male-identified person. “Women and gender minorities” gets shortened a lot to “women.” I wonder how I will feel about this in the future? On the one hand, I probably won’t ever be in this community again and that’s a loss. On the other hand, right now I’m not overly confident in regards to gender and so when I see things get shortened to “women” I feel anxiety. Everyone is really accepting and accommodating. Alas, I think it is my fate in life to always be asking for exceptions. I ask for fewer now, at least. Nobody asks for me to wear a dress or leave the appropriate loo. So on the one hand, it’s fine. But on the other hand, I can’t think about it too hard.
This avoidance comes out in weird ways. People keep asking if Xena, my dog is a male or female and I find myself getting irrationally defensive around the question. She’s a dog! She doesn’t have a gender identity as far as I know! Who are you to say if she’s a vrowje or a manje based on her genitalia!?! Ok, I know this is crazy, but better to be irrational about my dog than other things.
Until last night, I was staying with Vivian in Delft, which meant a lot of time in transit. I got back to Vivan’s flat last night at 2:30 am and had to feed the dog and give myself a shot of T.
Ok, so I don’t feel like my feminism is incompatible with being trans. The name of the sponsoring org for this thing is Gender Changers. It’s all ok. I still feel weird coming home from being surrounded by all these great women and then shooting up T. But if I were to put off the shot, it would make me feel sluggish and unhappy, and anyway. It’s ok to be trans or it isn’t. The timing of the shot shouldn’t have any bearing on that. And this is part of what I mean about not being confident.
So I was sitting on the floor of Vivian’s guest room, naked, right before sleep, trying to flick stubborn bubbles from the needle. I’m still not good at this. It’s messy. The way the British ampoules work is that first I draw all the T (in castor oil) up into the needle and then turn it around and try to get the bubbles out without spilling too much. Then, of course, I stab myself. Lately, I’ve been pushing the needle in slowly, which is a bad idea, but doesn’t cause physical harm, so whatever. Push needle, tense muscle, relax, push slightly further, tense again . . . ok, it does cause physical harm, but so does people biting their nails.
I pulled out the needle and there was blood. Not a little spot of blood, but a coin-sized pool of blood coming from my leg. Aieeee! Blood! Aiiieeee! 3:00 AM stark naked at my friend’s house and a pool of blood! I saw the antiseptic wipe I had used early and pressed it down to stop the bleeding. Oh my god! Oh my god! oh my god! I started to shake uncontrollably.
I saw this thing where you’re supposed to try pulling back on the plunger to see if you draw up blood. If you did, you hit a vein or something and need to re-try injecting. That didn’t happen. So where did the blood come from? Ok, weight lifters take more in a day than I just took, so it doesn’t matter if it went straight in my blood. Well, 0.8mL of castor oil in my veins in probably not good, but it’s not like I could do anything about it. If I can’t do anything about t and it won’t kill me, then there’s nothing to do but shake a lot and try to sleep.
(Castor oil is secreted by beavers, according to the dictionary on my mac. Um.)

Location

This is my first time back in the Netherlands since moving away. It’s even nicer than I remember. I love the bikes. I love the urban planning. I love the train system. I love Dutch people. Delft is south of Den Haag, so taking the train into Amsterdam, I could see the train station and the church tower next to where I lived. I felt such an unexpected wave of attachment for the Grote Kerk tower. That’s my home. That’s where I have friends. That’s where I walked my dog. That’s where I biked. I love Holland. I love California. I love France. I left my heart in San Francisco. I left my stomach in Paris. I left my mind in Amsterdam. So now I’m heartless and mindless.
Good Dutch food: the beer. The coffee. The little sweet things you eat with coffee. Vla. Pancakes. Appeltart.
I have to find a way to move back here.