Re: nettime Hacked Team [getting off-topic...]
dear dv, I guess is entirely my fault calling such an OT by divagating... apologies for my sort-of-ranty way of being somehow wrong, passionate and definitely thinking like an old-fart about the present and future of net.art in the age of google-artists. On Mon, 20 Jul 2015, dvyng wrote: Agree with the above - all of these get-tech-quick schemes for kiddie coders are missing the vital ingredient of self-reflexivity, particularly the willingness to even begin to explore the politics/ethics of software/hardware development (similarly often with digital/net/computer/etc art). nailed, both you and mp. I was indeed cross-referring the other thread and thinking of this Internet Art definition, how terrible that sounds to my ears. Really the best that could happen to all this was almost over 10 years ago and is best told by Josephine Bosma starting from gracious way of calling it net.art, perhaps she'll manage to add some of the present evolution of it now, but then it will be in relation to real art currents and not just media channels. There was a time in which a sort of artistic movement inherited critical elements from surrealism and situationism and brought them to this new condition of hyper-connectivity by exploring it with a critical eye: then bugs were aestethicized, a sort of arte povera aesthetic of bits and bytes was emerging and identity runners were formulating premotitions for the current state of social networking politics we face. Amazing. But what started to come after was either a repetition of all this, either tapestry and entertainment, with some exceptions, pranks and new art currents that deserve a better name, like glitch art. Now I think that if we are to look at some Internet Art we can use other classifications that really reflect on the art current and sensitivity and aesthetics rather than use industry standards to name an artistic period that does not really exists. Most Internet Artists today are incapable to start from the sort of telematic condition in which already at the very beginning Roy Ascott was able to see much more than any hacker can do now. Perhaps because this dimension now exists *too much* and all around us? or because it is too much of a business already - and much more, politics, warfare even. Perhaps we should all try to describe what we are doing with digital media without thinking about the specific medium being the message, but just a footnote about materials used. Or better, to quote Flusser, formulate the narrative before the production of technoimages, as it was even before photography, and so also analyse what art production really means, beyond its condition of reproduction and the changes in its market economy. Also I think nowadays (and again with a few exceptions) there is barely a collective dimension to what used to be an artist international as the surrealist, even the consciousness of it is missing. If we go on like this, Internet Art will just sounds like Google Art to me (and believe me Google is going around with initiatives for Google Artists now) something put together by marketing analysts on the shelves of a consumer-grade supermarket of special effects. In these regards I really appreciate what the Critical Engineering Manifesto tries to do, pity it is not managing to scale. Bad sign. This fantasy of code being the benchmark for 21st child literacy is nonsense when it exists in a space devoid of any context beyond a purely info-capitalist economic one, where younger kid superstar coders frantically develop yet more apps for $$$s, photocall posing with grinning politicians, and thus becoming postergirls boys demonstrating how young people can be important/efficient contributors to the national economy. Like Victorian Workhouses, but now in The Cloud.* It comes to me in mind an excerpt of an essay by Jonathan Alex Gold written already more than 10 years ago, probably by the time GOOG was come to existance, this little pink fart floating in the sky of the Silicon Valley for a moment. Good read. Here all along I thought I was a scientist. I thought I was a philosopher. I thought I was a mathematician, studying algorithms and their proofs in the grand tradition of Euclid and Gauss and, of course, al Khwarizimi. I could have sworn that this is what I do. And yet, from what I can gather from the reports, and from what people tell me about myself, that's not it at all. It turns out that I'm a dot-com engineer. I was dumbfounded to learn this. Contrary to what I thought I was doing, I've actually been busyat workbuildingsomething likethenew e-cyber-inter-web-world of tomorrow's technology of the present of the future. If you're unnerved by the fact that this phrase makes no sense to you, I can sympathize. After all, I'm apparently the one building it, and I don't even know what it is. In addition to this, it seems that, when I'm not
Re: nettime Hacked Team
On Sun, 19 Jul 2015, morlockel...@yahoo.com wrote: The shift I mentioned is the shift from being managed/herded by a relatively large number of humans, to being managed/herded by a large number of machines controlled by a small number of humans, and the power pyramid becoming a very steep needle. I see. Very good point. How do you classify builders of these power-multiplication machines? Trans-humanists? Perhaps better: trans-humanists funded by the sort of white-trash accellerators like the Thiel fellowship or Italian yuppie-tech-morons and gov-lackeys. In case of HT the 'power-multiplicators', the ministries of the pyramids are the VCs and again I believe that the financial world has nothing in place to fix such net-of-trust problems. What a pity, all that literature about trust written for nothing. Cryptography can help not being seen (consult How Not To Be Seen), but it hardly changes the power equation. On the contrary, it enforces the centralization paradigm: the number of people that benevolently design cryptographic machines is miniscule. 10? 100? 500 (I doubt)? It is trivial and cheap to subvert that whole ecosystem. not so miniscule anymore, believe me. While, of course, everyone should be free to study, it just doesn't happen, and the asymmetry grows. see above. Code is getting everywhere, even the art world is flooded by code related themes and technicians nowadays. I stopped doing internet-art or computer-art or net.art already since 10 years, this is not interesting anymore really. The world in 10 years from now will be full of coders and I'm not just talking about the western world. Code is thought in schools, there are festivals about code, teenagers go to codemotion sort of events like they'd be going to a justin bieber concert... and I leave you imagine the consequences of this, they go far beyond our topic. Everyone just wants to download. it may be a generational gap talking, yet I'm sure digital natives are pretty comfortable with being seen shallow by their teachers, who are anyway completely unable to talk their language. But have a look at what's happening in places like github sometimes. How many can understand and deploy the real Voight-Kampff test (but designed for humans, and works faster: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.04441.pdf )? But I agree, blaming the worker bees is futile, and the Luddites end up badly. Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? I'm not sure the politics of fear, the privacy rethoric, the middle-class facebook protests, the crypto-angst will last so so long. These are all obsessions and fears for the 1%, the rockstars of our times: the hackers. Meanwhile we do live in interesting times, while many things are going wrong (and people on this list can well claim having predicted that) once we accept that in life things do go wrong, the changes ahead will appear too engaging to go introspective and live in fear. We did that already with nature and we are still in the process of understanding it is not only an enemy, nor just a subject for laboratory examinations What I mean to say at last is that there is no purity, I believe this to be the core post-humanist mantra, as Antonio Caronia once said http://www.disruptionlab.org/cyborg And none of the digital-natives out there are busy with purity, contrary to what most of the previous generations are. This may turn out to be a good antidote to centralization paradigm you mention... ciao -- Denis Jaromil Roio, Dyne.org Think ( Do) Tank We are free to share code and we code to share freedom Web: https://j.dyne.org Contact: https://j.dyne.org/c.vcf GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10 Confidential communications: https://keybase.io/jaromil # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hacked Team
On 20/07/15 11:02, Jaromil wrote: On Sun, 19 Jul 2015, morlockel...@yahoo.com wrote: The shift I mentioned is the shift from being managed/herded by a relatively large number of humans, to being managed/herded by a large number of machines controlled by a small number of humans, and the power pyramid becoming a very steep needle. I see. Very good point. How do you classify builders of these power-multiplication machines? Trans-humanists? That's a nice definition of transhumanism. The singularity they're looking for is less of an elevation of machine intelligence to the human level, and more of a simplification (i.e. reduction, delimitation) of human intelligence as a consequence of getting souped up in the machine in the process of making it smarter (i.e. dumbing ourselves down). Stuck in a memory theatre. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hacked Team [getting off-topic...]
List, see above. Code is getting everywhere, even the art world is flooded by code related themes and technicians nowadays. I stopped doing internet-art or computer-art or net.art already since 10 years, this is not interesting anymore really. Why not interesting anymore? Seems like maybe it's at least as important now as it was a decade ago to have more people working with code-related themes, especially if they're willing to properly engage with the underlying murky politics of the sort that gets discussed on lists such as this one. The world in 10 years from now will be full of coders and I'm not just talking about the western world. Code is thought in schools, there are festivals about code, teenagers go to codemotion sort of events like they'd be going to a justin bieber concert... and I leave you imagine the consequences of this, they go far beyond our topic. Agree with the above - all of these get-tech-quick schemes for kiddie coders are missing the vital ingredient of self-reflexivity, particularly the willingness to even begin to explore the politics/ethics of software/hardware development (similarly often with digital/net/computer/etc art). This fantasy of code being the benchmark for 21st child literacy is nonsense when it exists in a space devoid of any context beyond a purely info-capitalist economic one, where younger kid superstar coders frantically develop yet more apps for $$$s, photocall posing with grinning politicians, and thus becoming postergirls boys demonstrating how young people can be important/efficient contributors to the national economy. Like Victorian Workhouses, but now in The Cloud.* dv *too far? ;P # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hacked Team [getting off-topic...]
No, this is spot on I think. On both counts, art labour! Thanks a lot for this, seb Sent from my toaster On Jul 20, 2015, at 7:02 PM, dvyng dv...@riseup.net wrote: List, # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hacked Team
On Fri, 17 Jul 2015, morlockel...@yahoo.com wrote: The cause of confusion may be that this (the last few decades) is probably the first time that power apparatus' enforcement model is making a big shift from thugs with guns to thugs with compilers. These are two completely different demographics, and while societies had thousands years to learn about and deal with thugs with guns [...] it is hard to project the same notion at the bright middle-class kids that get stock options and catered food. It will take some time. I disagree on two points here, the first indirect (just to make sure) and the second more specific to your approach. 1) cryptography is not a weapon I dare to say this at the cost of causing dismay among Schneider's followers and anyone else who finds it so sexy to think they are dealing with Death by clicking on a keyboard. Cryptography is to software what solid walls are to architecture. The raise of its use in consumer-grade software products can be compared to that of cement in the building industry. Of course cement is also used in illegal ways, but mostly when the industry adopting it scales up to insane levels and sells the production means to the wrong people. 2) it is *not only* up to individual responsibility I do not believe bright kids are the only ones to blame for their choices in life. There will always be bright kids making unethical choices, so this won't solve anything really. But yes, good luck keeping an eye on those and thanks btw, we feel much safer now. The systemic problem is the military-industrial complex and the way it creates such jobs. It is the way the cyber-crime big-bucks rethoric is unfolding, void of any critical thinking and basically in the hands of sociopats, politicians and venture capitals who are good at surfing multi-billion waves of funding without even thinking which shore they are going to land on. They are the ones loading the boat with bright kids and telling them the fun stories about their future. They are the ones who have the real power to make things happen on a large scale (as HT was) and they are the rotten node in the network of trust. A network which won't change in Italy, believe me, not even after this scandal. Now the HT case is very specific and deals not just with crypto software, but with actual intrusion tools for targeted breach. I don't believe we can exonerate the researchers who participated in deploying such tools, but I do believe that the money that fueled and scaled up this sort of cyber-sadist practices is the real systemic problem. It is not the guns, nor the gun makers, but the gun industry. This was the sort of message Cody Wilson tried to vehicle with his 3dprinting gun project. And security research is not even about making guns or mines, it is about studying how walls work and I believe everyone should be free to study, develop and try, even the back orifice and such. If activists will surf this blame-wave keeping their focus on individual researchers they will hit a dangerous shore, where there is no more freedom of independent research and where, paradoxically, the only ones who will be able to learn or peer-review the tools will be embedded in the mil/ind complex. Perhaps just a US certified one, as it seems Italy is ruled out by now, let's see who is next. ciao -- Denis Jaromil Roio, Dyne.org Think ( Do) Tank We are free to share code and we code to share freedom Web: https://j.dyne.org Contact: https://j.dyne.org/c.vcf GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10 Confidential communications: https://keybase.io/jaromil # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hacked Team
[For some, the previous version of the email. was unreadeable. Here it is again, with appologies. Mods.] dear Morlock, On Fri, 10 Jul 2015, morlockel...@yahoo.com wrote: Exonerating makers of malicious tools because they did it only for the irresistible appeal of money (as opposed to being inherently evil and wanted to screw activists) is ridiculous. this is not exactly what I intend to say with my message. In fact I do believe that scientists and researchers in general should be responsible and ethical in what they do. Let this argument just rest for a moment as I don't really want to dig into this discussion, which is somehow too complex for this medium. Just consider the history of science and freedom issues connected to it, for instance with regards to anatomical dissection, atomic bomb research and such... rest assured I have a fairly conservative approach to that myself, yet not a religious one. My point is about keeping balance and the intended audience of my message is mostly the activists reading, whose vast majority I perceive to be infuriated against some mercenary hackers, without really perceiving the big picture. And yes I have acquaintance to one of the HT developers, which basically makes me sad about the whole story, but I'm not a judge nor a lawyer and I'm really not seeking exemption for any of them here. They knew exactly what they were doing. Just following orders is not a valid defense, for some time now. Right. I'm just asking about those venture capitals, some of which seem to be even using public funds, to boost espionage activities of the military-industrial complex I tried to describe and in clearly illegal directions (as in supporting western allies adverse regimes). Actually, following Brett's last mail, one can quickly notice that 360capitalpartners has even received funding from the EU commission, now I'm wondering what is their ethical charter on the many other projects they support, covering fields that may also be very sensitive. I'm very interested in how does that sounds in the ears of activists and how do we plan to react to the bigger picture, in case we like to organize a response after having burned the witches that need to be burned, pardon me if I still find that as smelling disgusting, yet I'm not willing to exonerate them from being spooky and evil at times. Not sure about you in fact, but I'm so perverse I do find interesting to get to know people that present themselves as spooky and evil at times, while the rethoric of white-hats today is rather boring to my ears especially when it does not takes into account the bigger picture. Perhaps this narrow mindedness of white-hats is a signal that even the hacker movement of today is mostly driven by personalizing individualist positions and a sort of turf war on the shores of what we consider ethical. Meanwhile we all seem to agree that bugging an activist laptop is oh-my-god very bad, without contemplating the fact there are more neo-fascist activists in Europe than anything else. Eventually, it will come to those just following orders, programmers and engineers, enabling efficient population control, and doing it just for $100K+ salaries and stock options. It always does. You are right and yes, it already does. Actually the Silicon Valley salaries are now up to $350K/y in the best cases. I'm just wondering about how we will distribute the responsibility for... illegal usage of algorithms: will it trickle up to the funds helping to scale their deployement in mass-production and even disregarding exportation laws, or will it hit the freedom of research, eventually leading to some sort of authorization or license to access, develop and publish certain algorithms? I ask this because when I read the reaction of most activists being driven mostly again the researchers, the latter is the scenario I predict to take place. Hoping this clarifies my concerns, ciao -- Denis Jaromil Roio, Dyne.org Think ( Do) Tank We are free to share code and we code to share freedom Web: https://j.dyne.org Contact: https://j.dyne.org/c.vcf GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10 Confidential communications: https://keybase.io/jaromil --qcHopEYAB45HaUaB Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name=signature.asc Content-Description: Digital signature -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1 iQQcBAEBCAAGBQJVqMIoAAoJEHOzXaVKy30Q7ZIgAIWC//zjmBzz56a+CTfwvRlr vN0I72lWSxCod/OiJD7Rzj3cPiLUC2+DyIN7GNuI5hsYMD+gZb69TwKixLtGrw8J IUUa0fWcv/7ax8TOyA6P4aTTTYd+3BGja1frrDfHaMytCd7IeLN7m11t/gNWc7Dp xkfKqFhTxME7XaABc67QKZiFhOpNoKzYES+pJnz1Bm8GYvH3lI9oKXkReXxppPqn 4GiS9xiUYeR7o/1amydciyAMk0qd9ZSgol3D+Go4CKjVpzoO9/o9VIt5R+iwjfOC Gxwv3KtrtSO1JnwTfI933W8bSpwxyU9DmSI9aRHMjxqFYhTmxLyYa6LcKa8U3/Ha NmebWad7dbdLkKXS/vprKim9rgcaDUO4+Ovl1OUuJ/Kdtac0Vi+yHpmfSIgB7BrW Fb4/GCEXpEfrp+bzCsGnZwCc8fj5gz+iDLjWtp8bt5zt12yU4XXKz69sFtszjt/b 19f9jWbczsmlmsbF3ltDrzOChtfs1GKof/vDRM/QwcJi5mdpqzi1kRXyOdb6kIvj
Re: nettime Hacked Team
dear Morlock, On Fri, 10 Jul 2015, morlockel...@yahoo.com wrote: Exonerating makers of malicious tools because they did it only for the irresistible appeal of money (as opposed to being inherently evil and wanted to screw activists) is ridiculous. this is not exactly what I intend to say with my message. In fact I do believe that scientists and researchers in general should be responsible and ethical in what they do. Let this argument just rest for a moment as I don't really want to dig into this discussion, which is somehow too complex for this medium. Just consider the history of science and freedom issues connected to it, for instance with regards to anatomical dissection, atomic bomb research and such... rest assured I have a fairly conservative approach to that myself, yet not a religious one. My point is about keeping balance and the intended audience of my message is mostly the activists reading, whose vast majority I perceive to be infuriated against some mercenary hackers, without really perceiving the big picture. And yes I have acquaintance to one of the HT developers, which basically makes me sad about the whole story, but I'm not a judge nor a lawyer and I'm really not seeking exemption for any of them here. They knew exactly what they were doing. Just following orders is not a valid defense, for some time now. Right. I'm just asking about those venture capitals, some of which seem to be even using public funds, to boost espionage activities of the military-industrial complex I tried to describe and in clearly illegal directions (as in supporting western allies adverse regimes). Actually, following Brett's last mail, one can quickly notice that 360capitalpartners has even received funding from the EU commission, now I'm wondering what is their ethical charter on the many other projects they support, covering fields that may also be very sensitive. I'm very interested in how does that sounds in the ears of activists and how do we plan to react to the bigger picture, in case we like to organize a response after having burned the witches that need to be burned, pardon me if I still find that as smelling disgusting, yet I'm not willing to exonerate them from being spooky and evil at times. Not sure about you in fact, but I'm so perverse I do find interesting to get to know people that present themselves as spooky and evil at times, while the rethoric of white-hats today is rather boring to my ears especially when it does not takes into account the bigger picture. Perhaps this narrow mindedness of white-hats is a signal that even the hacker movement of today is mostly driven by personalizing individualist positions and a sort of turf war on the shores of what we consider ethical. Meanwhile we all seem to agree that bugging an activist laptop is oh-my-god very bad, without contemplating the fact there are more neo-fascist activists in Europe than anything else. Eventually, it will come to those just following orders, programmers and engineers, enabling efficient population control, and doing it just for $100K+ salaries and stock options. It always does. You are right and yes, it already does. Actually the Silicon Valley salaries are now up to $350K/y in the best cases. I'm just wondering about how we will distribute the responsibility for... illegal usage of algorithms: will it trickle up to the funds helping to scale their deployement in mass-production and even disregarding exportation laws, or will it hit the freedom of research, eventually leading to some sort of authorization or license to access, develop and publish certain algorithms? I ask this because when I read the reaction of most activists being driven mostly again the researchers, the latter is the scenario I predict to take place. Hoping this clarifies my concerns, ciao -- Denis Jaromil Roio, Dyne.org Think ( Do) Tank We are free to share code and we code to share freedom Web: https://j.dyne.org Contact: https://j.dyne.org/c.vcf GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10 Confidential communications: https://keybase.io/jaromil --qcHopEYAB45HaUaB Content-Type: application/pgp-signature; name=signature.asc Content-Description: Digital signature -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1 iQQcBAEBCAAGBQJVqMIoAAoJEHOzXaVKy30Q7ZIgAIWC//zjmBzz56a+CTfwvRlr vN0I72lWSxCod/OiJD7Rzj3cPiLUC2+DyIN7GNuI5hsYMD+gZb69TwKixLtGrw8J IUUa0fWcv/7ax8TOyA6P4aTTTYd+3BGja1frrDfHaMytCd7IeLN7m11t/gNWc7Dp xkfKqFhTxME7XaABc67QKZiFhOpNoKzYES+pJnz1Bm8GYvH3lI9oKXkReXxppPqn 4GiS9xiUYeR7o/1amydciyAMk0qd9ZSgol3D+Go4CKjVpzoO9/o9VIt5R+iwjfOC Gxwv3KtrtSO1JnwTfI933W8bSpwxyU9DmSI9aRHMjxqFYhTmxLyYa6LcKa8U3/Ha NmebWad7dbdLkKXS/vprKim9rgcaDUO4+Ovl1OUuJ/Kdtac0Vi+yHpmfSIgB7BrW Fb4/GCEXpEfrp+bzCsGnZwCc8fj5gz+iDLjWtp8bt5zt12yU4XXKz69sFtszjt/b 19f9jWbczsmlmsbF3ltDrzOChtfs1GKof/vDRM/QwcJi5mdpqzi1kRXyOdb6kIvj AUDPQ6bFmlCvDy7nrYFZGbOOPHLbhhhi8j1lcXHIb68aMb3IYoPezREdkiPOpF/E FZtCQn+GFgkJ780guz098VkolrKCWxW0Pnb4p76pXDe8vEExMSO5Wm3HMx25w4vj
Re: nettime Hacked Team
Yes. Actually, this email is a good place to start to uncover VCs https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/emailid/158747 1) Finlombarda 2) Innogest - they even list it on their site http://www.innogest.it/the-fund/portfolio-companies/ 3) 360 Capital Partners (they do not list it on their portfolio http://360capitalpartners.com/portfolio-2/). Here is the list of emails with 360 Capital Partners https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails?q=360capitalpartners.commfrom=mto=title=notitle=date=nofrom=noto=count=50sort=0#searchres ult 360 also backed Vupen http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/21/meet-the-hackers-who-sell-spies-the-tools-to-crack-your-pc-and-get-paid-six-figure-fees/ Cheers, Brett @suitpossum Brett Scott / @suitpossum / LinkedIn / Blog / Book 0044 (0)79 8243 7769 -- Original Message -- From: mazzetta mazzett...@gmail.com To: nettim...@kein.org Sent: 10/07/2015 15:33:31 Subject: Re: nettime Hacked Team but still omits the venture capitals in the list. IÂ can solve the mistery, the main financing comes from a venture capital set by Regione Lombardia (Milan's region), Finlombarda Gestioni SGR, sided by a couple of of smaller from Turin area. More important, if not intelinked, seems the political support they've enjoyed, particularly among officers of the many Italian police corps and secret services, who apparently loved their products here's a searchable cache of their emails from Wikileaks, enkoy https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/emailid/304208 mazzetta 2015-07-10 14:45 GMT+02:00 Jaromil jaro...@dyne.org: dear nettimers, most of you may have heard of the Hacking Team scandal http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hacking-team-shows-world-not-stockpile-exploits/ which is now even among the wikileaks hall-of-fame. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Hacked Team
dear nettimers, most of you may have heard of the Hacking Team scandal http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hacking-team-shows-world-not-stockpile-exploits/ which is now even among the wikileaks hall-of-fame. https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails I feel like sharing some thoughts on this. But first a disclaimer: I am a bit of an Italian, just like HT, the sort of Italian that will never really get in business without someone that knows how to make business, I mean big moneyz. It is since 2014 now that HT is bashed by human rights and cyber rights activists because of their conduct, allegedly exporting for rather big bucks military-grade espionage software tools to places that are under UN embargo like Sudan or helping Saudi Arabia's conservative thugs to beat up activists http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-10-10/spyware-leaves-trail-to-beaten-activist-through-microsoft-flaw This is quite outrageous and I believe activists are right in complaining that this happens, but I believe they are not right when they focus the blame on the HT small software development company. I say this because I believe that HT would have never become what it was and would have never sold to the regimes it sold to without the partnership of *very big* business players, whom I believe are the main responsible for the crimes committed, since they clearly knew what was happening. These big partners were driven by profit much more than those HT hackers were driven by passion for security research and they were crucial in helping such a young startup to scale and outreach well beyond kosherness. Today an article gives a glimpes on the scope of this racket http://motherboard.vice.com/read/meet-the-companies-that-helped-hacking-team-sell-tools-to-repressive-governments but still omits the venture capitals in the list. My point is that we should be now really careful before going berserk and blaming a rather small team of software developers for all this. Because their business would have never had such a big success without the profit-driven capital that really made it happen and shop around. This affair is really about the military-industrial complex showing itself in the cyber-war era: this is how the monster that Eisenhower spotted back acts today on software matters. I must also say that all this time I was really surprised that, while some activists have been quickly rushing for the large picture when there was to blame a state's public sector (as in NSA espionage etc.) now are not well capable (or interested?) to look at the large picture for this enormous private sector f*ckup. Perhaps they still need these VCs to be around in Silicon Valley? BTW if you do not yet believe how enormous that is, wait and see what this BGP routing story leads to in a short while http://blog.bofh.it/id_456 ciao -- Denis Jaromil Roio, Dyne.org Think ( Do) Tank We are free to share code and we code to share freedom Web: https://j.dyne.org Contact: https://j.dyne.org/c.vcf GPG: 6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10 Confidential communications: https://keybase.io/jaromil # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Hacked Team
but still omits the venture capitals in the list. I can solve the mistery, the main financing comes from a venture capital set by Regione Lombardia (Milan's region), Finlombarda Gestioni SGR, sided by a couple of of smaller from Turin area. More important, if not intelinked, seems the political support they've enjoyed, particularly among officers of the many Italian police corps and secret services, who apparently loved their products here's a searchable cache of their emails from Wikileaks, enkoy https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/emailid/304208 mazzetta 2015-07-10 14:45 GMT+02:00 Jaromil jaro...@dyne.org: dear nettimers, most of you may have heard of the Hacking Team scandal http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hacking-team-shows-world-not-stockpile-exploits/ which is now even among the wikileaks hall-of-fame. https://wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails I feel like sharing some thoughts on this. But first a disclaimer: ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
