Great Read for Kids and Others: "Little Brother"

You can download it for free here (you can also buy it already printed; per amazon, it's 384 pp.). I'm really enjoying it; and it's gotten lots of awards.

The author, Cory Doctorow, is inviting everyone to download and modify the book any way they like, subject only to a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.

More info from Doctorow:

Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away . . . .

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

* * * * *
This book is meant to be something you do, not just something you read. The technology in this book is either real or nearly real. You can build a lot of it. . . . [and y]ou can use the ideas . . . . to defeat censorship and get onto the free Internet, even if your government, employer or school doesn't want you to.

Making stuff: The folks at Instructables have put up some killer HOWTOs for building the technology in this book [, here]. [Also, t]he afterword for this book has lots of resources for increasing your online freedom, blocking the snoops and evading the censorware blocks. . . .

Additional details here.

E.g., early in the book, Marcus shares his hack for connecting to his school's wireless internet without being tracked. Sure sounds like it might work:

I turned to my SchoolBook and hit the keyboard. The web-browser we used was supplied with the machine. It was a locked-down spyware version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of 40 used voluntarily.

I had a copy of Firefox on the USB drive built into my watch, but that wasn't enough -- the SchoolBook ran Windows Vista4Schools, an antique operating system designed to give school administrators the illusion that they controlled the programs their students could run.

But Vista4Schools is its own worst enemy. There are a lot of programs that Vista4Schools doesn't want you to be able to shut down -- keyloggers, censorware -- and these programs run in a special mode that makes them invisible to the system. You can't quit them because you can't even see they're there.

Any program whose name starts with $SYS$ is invisible to the operating system. it doesn't show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in the process monitor. So my copy of Firefox was called $SYS$Firefox -- and as I launched it, it became invisible to Windows, and so invisible to the network's snoopware.

Now I had an indie browser running, I needed an indie network connection. The school's network logged every click in and out of the system, which was bad news if you were planning on surfing over to the Harajuku Fun Madness site for some extra-curricular fun.

The answer is something ingenious called TOR -- The Onion Router. An onion router is an Internet site that takes requests for web-pages and passes them onto other onion routers, and on to other onion routers, until one of them finally decides to fetch the page and pass it back through the layers of the onion until it reaches you. The traffic to the onion-routers is encrypted, which means that the school can't see what you're asking for, and the layers of the onion don't know who they're working for. There are millions of nodes -- the program was set up by the US Office of Naval Research to help their people get around the censorware in countries like Syria and China, which means that it's perfectly designed for operating in the confines of an average American high school.

TOR works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty addresses we aren't allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes change all the time -- no way could the school keep track of them all. Firefox and TOR together made me into the invisible man, impervious to Board of Ed snooping, free to check out the Harajuku FM site and see what was up.

You can order Little Brother in hardcover here; no paperback available yet.

(Thanks, Ben!)

Upcoming at CentralTrak

Charissa T. and Mary B. have been working hard. Here are a few (tho' by no means all of the) upcoming events (selected purely based on my own interests):

Now thru Jan. 20: Vicious Pink, curated by Mary Benedicto. Image left: Kirsten Macy's A Girl Named Ham & the Sportsman Royal (2008; courtesy Barry Whistler Gallery).

1-8-09: Artist's Talk on Dreamyourtopia, by Daniel Rozenberg, at the DMA. See below.

1-10-09, 5-9PM: Checkpoint Dreamyourtopia. As I understand, you'll have to pass through border control to get to the bar and band.

I'm fascinated with immigration.

First, I believe freedom of travel is a fundamental human right, and suspect nationalism and national borders to be feudal figments perpetuated by oligarchs who would prefer that power over the migration of jobs and us serfs be retained by themselves rather than us. Second, it should be obvious to any sane observer that, because of the demographically gigantic population of boomer oldsters and the relatively tiny cohorts coming up behind them, we desperately need immigrant worker/taxpayer/consumers to help keep the U.S. economy afloat during the next several decades. Third, in what must be one of our times' supreme ironies, border control has nonetheless become the subject of intense focus by right-minded xenophobes and security/control freaks in general. Fourth, I think most students of cultural history will confirm that the intermingling of cultures has often resulted in humanity's most notable flourishings in arts, sciences, etc. Fifth, surveillance, border and boundary control, balances of knowledge about who's up to what -- whether among citizens, furriners, or those who purport to serve us in gummint or their private contractors -- the need for moderation between openness and closedness, in order for any organism, species, or other system to survive -- I think these are all incredibly interesting and important issues (I've made work on and written about these here and elsewhere). Sixth, I'm curious about the seeming conflation of brains and guts. If I recall correctly, there's a biological basis: our brains/nervous systems are closely related to our skins, as are our guts: these are the membranes through which we process what's outside us.

I've suggested a related contest, but not sure whether it will/shd happen, but let me know if you want it to: who can get through checkpoint Dreamyourtopia quickest while carrying (or constituting) the most subversive contraband that's not actually illegal. I'd personally offer the winner a prize having no discernible worth, plus equally negligible fanfare, probably on this very blog.

1-24-09, 6-8PM: Midnight Special, a cooperative event with and/or gallery and House of Dang.

1-29-09, 6PM: Artist's Talk by Kevin Bewersdorf. Kevin had a show at and/or and was in the movie LOL shown at the Dallas Video Festival 2007, etc.



1-31-09, 6-8PM: Openings of exhibitions, Highest Fidelity: I am a Sound Technician, by Frank Dufour, and Commute Portraits by Florencia Levy.

2-7-09: Open-Forum Discussion: New Music-Electronica Scene, DFW/Denton, with Paul Slocum, CJ Davis, and Robert Howell.

2-14-09: Plush Crush, a collaborative event with Plush Gallery.

2-25-09: Lecture: "What Time Is It? Episodic Time in the Road Movie" by Charissa Terranova.

3-7-09: Symposium: Woman Body Image: Half Lives of the Cyborg Manifesto 25 Years After, with Kristin Lucas, Juliet MacCannell, Orit Halpern, and Irina Aristarkhova. Lucas had a great show at and/or earlier this year.

3-21-09: Carnivale.

See CentralTrak's Calendar for more details.

The Great Depression

Not far off.

Shoes, Anyone?

In Baghdad:



MORE shoes here, here, and here.

Per the BBC, meanwhile, the original perpetrator has, since the shoe-shooting, "allegedly suffered a broken arm, broken ribs and internal bleeding" and faces up to two years in jail . . . AND, "offers to buy the shoes he threw are being made around the Arab world," one reportedly for as high as $10 million.

To paraphrase John Donne, "Ask not for whom the shoe-thrower throws; he throws for thee."

[No Title.]

Weirdness Compounded

"Do you feel like getting together with a bunch of like-minded people to plot the counterrevolution? . . . You can join me, my wife, Elizabeth, senior staff writer Jerome Corsi, Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein, managing editor David Kupelian and some old friends and new friends Jan. 4-11, 2009, as we conspire to fight back the threats to our freedom posed by incoming President Barack Obama (oh, how I hate to type that name with that title before it!)

"But this won't be a meeting held in some fleabag hotel somewhere. We will be plotting in style – aboard the Holland America line's ms Veendam luxury cruise ship, as we explore Western Caribbean destinations for seven days.

"It will be good to get away for a while. You need it. I need it. It gives you perspective, stimulates the brain, increases creativity.

"And, brother, do we ever need to be at our sharpest now!"

(More here.)

Couldn't Resist.

Used BlackBerrys Sold by McCain-Palin Campaign; Private Data Included

Per engadget, last week Fox 5 associates in Washington, D.C. picked up some Blackberrys for $20 apiece at the campaign's yard sale. When they fired the devices up, one still contained "50 contacts for 'campaign leaders, politicians, lobbyists and journalists' as well as hundreds of emails. A campaign spokesperson commented, 'procedures are being put in place to ensure all information is secure,' [and] followed minutes later [with] a blank email cc'd to his entire address book with the subject line 'We're so screwed.'"

(Thanks, Ben!)