Tag: live blog

This was the interview project. They interviewed many of us, including myself.
The results of this will shortly be posted on the website. The presenter is suggesting we eat
Anybody who was here can still be interviewed later.

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.

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

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?

.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.

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.

Donna is speaking about the history of rubbish collection. This has to do with how electronics get recycled or not. Good Electronics is an organization that looks into this. MakeITfair is linked to the Clean Clothes initiative.
The makeITfair guys are now talking about the story of stuff: where do things come from? This is an awareness raising campaign working with NGOs through the world. Raw materials, production, distribution: what’s the story?
They’re giving us a quiz, with a prize! (ooh) But first a movie. Maybe.

Extraction

Things start with “extraction.” Raw materials. Aka, exploiting the environment and killing the planet. People who live in the way of extraction are screwed.
Every phone has 65 different elements. 25% of a phone it metals. The IT industry uses a lot of metals. They come from mines, of course. Largely mines in the third world.
MakeITfair did research about three kind of metal: platinum group – used in hard disks, motherboards and screes, cobalts and tin. Oh, and is it bad. Forests cut down. Nasty pollution. Weirdly colored snow. Child labor in the Congo. 50k kids working in cobalt mines there. The workers are sub-contracted. Migrants. Untrained. Uninsured.
The Congo is not the happiest place on earth politically. Mine revenues end up in the hands of armed groups: rebels and military, both of whom use it for weapons. The local communities get screwed and shot at. “Social Disruption”
makeITfair asked electronic companies about this. They said, “oh, it’s untraceable. we can’t find out where things come from.” and “We hardly use any of this stuff. Nobody cares what we say about it.” MakeITfair countered that they could trace stuff and the companies do buy a lot of stuff. The companies changed their tune. “Oh, maybe we should do something. huh. But what? talk to us for a long long time in many many talks.”
NGOs care about these issues. Investors also care. The ones that are accountable to anybody. Investors are sometimes now setting criteria and conditions.

Production

Toxic chemicals! We use it in products, it ends up in the environment. It ends up in us. Breast milk has super high levels of toxins. Factory works get doused in it. New urban arrivals live in slum and get to work in toxic factories. Toxins also end up in waste, aside from products.
Donna won the quiz!
Phones and computers are not made by the brand, obviously. They’re made by huge western multinationals with factories in the developing world. Seagate. Up to 80% of factories workers are young women from rural areas but now in urban ones. Low wages! Factory workers get fined often which lowers their wage further. They have long hours and non-voluntary unpaid overtime. And they get to work with toxic materials with no protective gear. And they don’t get to unionize. Unions are illegal in many places, including China.
Brand companies say they can only they can only talk to their direct suppliers. makeITfair says, the whole chain is your problem. In China, it’s hard for NGOs. There’s one national union which is not very effective. NGOs that exist are based offshore and underground.

Distribution and Consumption

Selling as fast as possible. Low prices. Costs are externalized. Who pays for stuff then? Workers. By not getting benefits. Only 1% of stuff we buy in the US lasts longer than 6 months. (Including food?)
European consumers (age 16 – 30) say they’re willing to pay 10% more for fair trade electronics.
What can we do? Recycle. Longer functional part of life cycle. Complain to brand companies.

if the etc con sounds like fun, you can follow along at home.

live stream: http://giss.tv:8000/genderchangers.org

upstage: http://upstage.org.nz:8084/stages/etc

chat: irc.indymedia.org channel #etc