Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of Silicon Valley, there was an age undreamed of…
Movies were sold on big reels of tape, wound up inside little plastic boxes.
And played on machines called VCRs.
And if you wanted to create a copy of a movie, you could hook two of these machines together and do it with no problem. In fact, it was ruled in a court of law that it was a fair use of someone elses copyrighted movie to make yourself an archival copy, so that if your tape broke, or the machine ‘ate it’ you wouldn’t have to buy another one.
Hollywood didn’t care for this.
So, when the digital age dawned, someone came up with the bright idea of selling movies on DVDs. And one of the big selling points, so far as Hollywood was concerned, was that you could encrypt the data of the movie on the disc, and put hardware to decrypt it in the DVD player, in such a way that it wouldn’t play if two DVD players were hooked together, and so that someone who put a DVD into a computer couldn’t copy it.
Techies and hackers didn’t care for this.
So, they started trying to figure out how to cryptanalyze the DVDs, which were encrypted with a tech called CSS, for Content Scrambling System. And they didn’t have much luck, because crypto is hard, and breaking it is harder. And then one day they caught a lucky break.
Some manufacturers of DVD players, from Taiwan iirc, put out a new product, one of which was bought by a hacker somewhere, who tinkered with it and realized that the makers had made a mistake. They hadn’t properly protected the chips that contained the CSS decryption key, which allowed this guy to get access to it and copy it. He then created a program called DeCSS, which would allow you to put a DVD in a computer and then ‘rip’ the data to your hard drive, then write it to another DVD. He posted it online, and within hours the news, and copies of the key and code, had spread all over the world.
Hollywood flipped their shit over this.
They brought the legal hammer down on this guy, and it ended up in court. He said he had a right, as per the previous Fair Use ruling, regarding VHS tapes, to copy DVDs as well. When people had previously complained that encryption was stripping them of their rights, Hollywood had argued that there was nothing in the law that said they had to make copying easy, and basically challenged them to figure out how to break it. In the court case, Hollywood argued that under a new law that had passed, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it was illegal to circumvent an DRM, or Digital Rights Management system. The plaintiffs counter-argued that they hadn’t really reversed engineered anything, that the dumb machines had been built wrong, that they had a right to tinker with it and see how it worked.
So, sitting between these parties was a judge who… to put it kindly, was probably in over his head. Probably some old guy, the kind of guy who still owned a VCR with the clocking blinking 12:00 PM because he didn’t know how to adjust the time. An old grandpa sorta guy. Maybe not a bad guy, just clueless about how tech works. So, when Hollywood argued that there should be some sort of injunction against the spread of the DeCSS software online, that it should be illegal for people to host it, or for others to download it, or to tell people how it worked, or even to link to it, gramps said, “Sure, why not? Here you go, here’s an order that says it’s illegal to possess this software.”
Well, the tech people freaked out about this, because it contradicted a number of already established precedents. Like Phil Zimmermann publishing the source code of PGP and shipping the books containing it to Europe, despite the fact that the encryption tech it contained had been ruled a munition that couldn’t be sold overseas. The precedent, that code was speech, and therefore subject to first amendment protections, seemed to be being thwarted in the DeCSS case. And the tech/hacker community wanted to make it clear that they weren’t going to stand for that.
So, some bright person somewhere, went out and got himself a shirt made, that had the source code of DeCSS printed on it, along with some quote from the order basically saying that it was illegal to buy or own this shirt, then started selling them on his website. This clever idea opened a floodgate of people coming up with unique ways to spread the source code of DeCSS, in a way that was tempting the court to try to stop them, on the grounds that the ruling would then go to a higher court and be turned over on first amendment grounds.
“Take t5’s low byte (AND t5 with two hundred fifty five) to put it
in the ith byte of the vector called k. Now shift t5 right eight bits;
store the result in t5 again. Now that’s the last step in the loop.
No sooner have we finished that loop than we’ll start another; no rest
for the wicked nor those innocents whom lawyers serve with paperwork.”
One of these people, Phil Carmody, raised an interesting argument. He said that software is just numbers. In fact, every piece of software is a single number, that is also a infinite number of numbers (or practically so) as there are nearly an infinite number of mathematical conversions or encodings you can perform on a number. So he wrote a little script version of DeCSS, then converted it to a number, then started to look to see if this number was the same as another somewhere. Was it hidden somewhere in pi? Or the Golden Ratio? What if you doubled it? or added 1 to it?
And after some searching, he found a list of the largest known prime numbers, wherein the 19th largest prime that had been found by that time, was the same as his code for DeCSS. So he posted this info online, and said, “If you go to this website, take this prime number, and save it in a file, then compile it, the output is this piece of software that is illegal to possess, transmit, or share information about.” Here it is, by the way:
Carmody argued, if the ruling that it’s illegal to do these things with the DeCSS software
holds up, then it’s also illegal to possess, transmit, or share
information about this prime number. It will become an illegal number. It would have to be redacted from websites, and whatever books it might appear in. People searching for new primes, or any other number, will have to worry about sharing them online, that they are on some list of illegal numbers somewhere. The lists will grow exponentially, as the precedent that this software is forbidden to possess or share, will lead others to demand that software, and numbers, they don’t care for be made illegal as well.
And then… I forget the rest. Whether it was finally ruled in the favor of common sense, or if the case simply petered out and nothing more was ever heard about it. I do know that no one was ever brought up on charges for possessing a number, and DeCSS has been widely available ever since the day it was first posted online (if you’ve ever used a movie ripping software like ffmpeg, you’ve used DeCSS or it’s descendents.)
Wednesday’s dramatic protest on the House floor over gun control was a powerful reminder of how dramatically the cable network’s role as the official chronicler of Congress has changed since its early years — and how technology has suddenly made C-SPAN less beholden to the congressional leaders who control its video feed inside the chambers.
It all unfolded quickly: When the sit-in began Wednesday morning, Republican leaders ordered the House into recess. And since only they, and not C-SPAN, oversee the camera, C-SPAN’s feed was cut off, as dictated by the chamber’s rules.
i know that people being on their phones has become like a symbol of apathy and uncaring but so many people i know use social media to share love. like yesterday i got to watch a wedding livestreamed to everyone who couldn’t make it. i’ve seen my friend slowly learn how to cope with being a teen mom because of a massive outpouring of “mumblr” support + tips. i’ve seen my friends come out as gay, learn to cook, discover the flaws in their feminism, work for social change, make good life choices, go to amazing places, develop passions, form educated opinions, learn to love themselves. i’ve seen people post the bravest recovery posts and shy political posts and everything in between.
and i don’t honestly care how edgy you think your art is. what you’re telling me when you draw grey people looking at a white screen is that you don’t care what happens to the other people in your life.
but i do. i care about the boy i’m in a long distance relationship with, but i also care about people i’ve never met. i’ve been following some people for three years and genuinely care about their experiences. i’m glad you’re still in touch with the people you love, even if you’re not paying attention directly to me! i get happy when you finally dump him! i’m sad when your cat gets sick! i give a shit.
i don’t think technology is taking empathy away from us. i think it’s changing it.
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
All in all, the residents of the Taylor property have been treated like criminals for a decade. And until I called them this week, they had no idea why.
As any geography nerd knows, the precise center of the United States is in northern Kansas, near the Nebraska border. Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39°50′N 98°35′W. In digital maps, that number is an ugly one: 39.8333333,-98.585522. So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the default point on its digital map for the center of the U.S., it decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and longitude: 38°N 97°W or 38.0000,-97.0000.
As a result, for the last 14 years, every time MaxMind’s database has been queried about the location of an IP address in the United States it can’t identify, it has spit out the default location of a spot two hours away from the geographic center of the country. This happens a lot: 5,000 companies rely on MaxMind’s IP mapping information, and in all, there are now over 600 million IP addresses associated with that default coordinate. If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind’s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000.
Which happens to be in the front yard of Joyce Taylor’s house.
An Iraqi/German pair of artists
just pulled off what might be one of the most digitally-enhanced art
heists in recent time. They covertly scanned the Nefertiti bust (with an Xbox 360 Kinect sensor, no less) and released the 3D printing plans online. They did so as an act of defiance, as the bust was actually looted from an Egyptian site by German archaeologists.[x]
Last October, two artists entered the Neues Museum in Berlin, where they
clandestinely scanned the bust of Queen Nefertiti, the state museum’s
prized gem. Three months later, they released the collected 3D dataset
online as a torrent, providing completely free access under public
domain to the one object in the museum’s collection off-limits to
photographers. Anyone may download
and remix the information now; the artists themselves used it to create
a 3D-printed, one-to-one polymer resin model they claim is the most
precise replica of the bust ever made, with just micrometer variations.
That bust now resides permanently in the American University of Cairo as
a stand-in for the original, 3,300-year-old work that was removed from
its country of origin shortly after its discovery in 1912 by German
archaeologists in Amarna.
Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles with the 3D bust in Cairo
The project, called “The Other Nefertiti,” is the work of German-Iraqi artist Nora Al-Badri and German artist Jan Nikolai Nelles,
who consider their actions an artistic intervention to make cultural
objects publicly available to all. For years, Germany and Egypt have
hotly disputed
the rightful location of the stucco-coated, limestone Queen, with
Egyptian officials claiming that she left the country illegally and demanding
the Neues Museum return her. With this controversy of ownership in
mind, Al-Badri and Nelles also want, more broadly, for museums to
reassess their collections with a critical eye and consider how they
present the narratives of objects from other cultures they own as a
result of colonial histories.
The Neues Museum, which the artists believe knows about their project
but has chosen not to respond, is particularly guarded towards
accessibility to data concerning its collections. According to the pair,
although the museum has scanned Nefertiti’s bust, it will not make the
information public — a choice that increasingly seems backwards as more
and more museums around the world are encouraging the public to access
their collections, often through digitization projects. Notably, the
British Museum has hosted
a “scanathon” where visitors scanned objects on display with their
smartphones to crowdsource the creation of a digital archive — an event
that contrasts starkly with Al-Badri and Nelles’s covert deed.
3D rendering of the bust of Nefertiti
“We appeal to [the Neues Museum] and those in charge behind it to
rethink their attitude,” Al-Badri told Hyperallergic. “It is very simple
to achieve a great outreach by opening their archives to the public
domain, where cultural heritage is really accessible for everybody and
can’t be possessed.”
In a gesture of clear defiance to institutional order, Al-Badri and Nelles leaked
the information at Europe’s largest hacker conference, the annual Chaos
Communication Congress. Within 24 hours, at least 1,000 people had
already downloaded the torrent from the original seed, and many of them
became seeders as well. Since then, the pair has also received requests
from Egyptian universities asking to use the information for academic
purposes and even businesses wondering if they may use it to create
souvenirs. Nefertiti’s bust is one of the most copied works from Ancient
Egypt — aside from those with illicit intents, others have used photogrammetry
to reconstruct it — and its allure and high-profile presence make it a
particularly charged work to engage with in discussions of ownership and
institutional representations of artifacts.
“The head of Nefertiti represents all
the other millions of stolen and looted artifacts all over the world
currently happening, for example, in Syria, Iraq, and in Egypt,”
Al-Badri said. “Archaeological artifacts as a cultural memory originate
for the most part from the Global South; however, a vast number of
important objects can be found in Western museums and private
collections. We should face the fact that the colonial structures
continue to exist today and still produce their inherent symbolic
struggles.”
Al-Badri and Nelles take issue, for instance, with the Neues Museum’s
method of displaying the bust, which apparently does not provide
viewers with any context of how it arrived at the museum — thus
transforming it and creating a new history tantamount to fiction, they
believe. Over the years, the bust has become a symbol of German identity,
a status cemented by the fact that the museum is state-run, and many
Egyptians have long condemned this shaping of identity with an object
from their cultural heritage.
Ultimately, the artists hope their actions will place pressure on not
only the Neues Museum but on all museums to repatriate objects to the
communities and nations from which they came.
Rather than viewing such
an idea as radical, they see it as pragmatic, as a logical update to
cultural institutions in the digital era: especially given the
technological possibilities of today, the pair believes museums who
repatriate artifacts could then show copies or digital representatives
of them. Many people have already createdtheirown Nefertitis from
the released data; the 3D statue in the American University in Cairo
stands as such an example of Al-Badri and Nelles’s ideals for the future
of museums, in addition to being one immediate solution that may arise
from individual action.
“Luckily there are ways where we
don’t even need any topdown effort from institutions or museums,”
Al-Badri said, “but where the people can reclaim the museums as their
public space through alternative virtual realities, fiction, or
captivating the objects like we did.”
