Doodles – Page 9 – Monocultured

Behold, for I am node

Internet of Things (IoT) has been all the rage the last couple of years, and I really don’t understand it. Let’s summarize some objections:

connectivity

Any 1 added feature to a network [n] increases the risks to it exponentially: n+(n+1)

If you add one IoT lightbulb to your home, giving it access through your own network, any mistake on the part of the manufacturer or nefarious activity targeting your lightbulbs services, exposes the rest of your network for potential attacks. Your lightbulb becomes the vector, and suddenly the rest of your IoT household and network can be attacked in ways which circumvents whatever gateway security you’ve setup at ISP or router level. And should your lightbulb get patched, that new firmware you download for your microwave oven is corrupted because someone got to their repository and now your oven is compromising your own network. The complexity of policing all these IoT services also increases exponentially.

One current example is the massive DDOS attack which squashed Twitter which used an IoT botnet.

The above example uses corrupted IoT devices to orchestrate an attack outward, but that usage is arbitrary from a security point – your hoover is no longer your friend.

ratta

The connectivity is the feature and any security measures decrease connectivity so is at odds with it’s main purpose, which becomes inherent security problem when there’s a plethora of new products and services which compete to be first to market.

The same market forces which govern regular product development, marketing, distribution and the inevitable ambition for hegemony, act on the development of IoT, but since the turnover and innovation cycle is getting ever shorter, and the main feature of IoT devices is their connectivity and user friendliness, security is not a priority and will always be lacking. Especially in the knockoff devices which try to compete with the bigger actors by lowering prices. Look no further than cheap USB chargers that keep catching on fire as an analogy — it’s not that the factories and engineers who crank out these crap chargers are incompetent, it’s just that their priorities don’t include “safety.”

IoT turns our behaviours into data which can be mined without our own interests at heart.

IoT allows for those who would like to leverage a deeper knowledge of us to further their own ends. The data that private and state actors mine to better track our habits and wants becomes more granular and nigh impossible to escape. Even if you live in a faraday cage, most of your friends probably don’t, nor will you be able to escape your own buspass or the facetracking software your store is using.

The brouhaha over surveillance fifteen years ago, when we had demonstrations against Echelon and city-wide video surveillance, seems like ancient history, but the same arguments still apply. Personal sovereignty is an important principle, and abuses which we historically have fought tooth and nail to curb are being implemented as features.

staycalmandserve

IoT further pushes the idea of a “citizen” as a “consumer” into a “consumer as product”

Today when you’re taking the train you are not a passenger but a customer. You are not a patient at a hospital but a consumer of health services. With the increased focus on identity politics in the social sphere we are not political actors but cheerleaders for our brand of conspicuous political consumption.

Going forward, you are the facilitator of a commercial transaction. You have become the programmed agent, being acted upon by machines with little loving grace but plenty of data points on how best to serve you –using their own definition of “serve” of course. You are become a node through which resources flow.

Of course you are still human, and you can choose to act outside the boundries of IoT and the network, but it takes increasing amount of work to do and as soon as these models are being used for our everyday infrastructure you’re being affected with or without your approval.

A free service is never free. The most apparent cost of “free services” is your attention for advertisements. But the way to think of these ads is not that this is what you put up with in order to use a free app — you as a user are the product that the software company is providing their real customers. (This isn’t new, this is how the newspaper industry has operated for more than a century). The difference with IoT is that the service that you are providing to the IoT company is an inherent feature of their products, and you are not even required to actively participate in providing work for them; you are a node, you are the “thing” in the term “Internet of Things”.

And I can’t for the life of me understand how this is a good thing.

Project week 4: Glue, bugs everywhere!

bladlus

I didn’t get the drone promo video done yet, but I did glue another 20 packages, so if you’re feeling to order a whole bunch of drone pins I’m ready for you! Apart from that, it’s time to get seedling started for the growing season, and while Sara was looking over the tomatoes which are poking out through the dirt she also found some aphids among our other plants and went on to exterminate them. But before doing that, she thought to identify the species and so we set the microscope up and had a peek. We’re no closer to identifying it than we were before, but we saw that it had wings and to Saras horror they didn’t die quickly in the acetone we used to wet mount them, but rather squirmed and wiggled their poor little legs pityingly.

So Monday evening ends with a fascination for how complex and diverse life is all around us, and a silent prayer of thanks that we most likely won’t be killed by acetone poisoning. As always, remember that it can always get worse.

2015: Ideas and ambitions

I’ve been working at KKV GBG for a couple of months now, and have enough spare time that I feasibly could get stuff done on the side. Last years attempt to post one thing a week went well for the first couple of months, but then sunk into the mire of pretexts and excuses. I still think it was a Good Thing™ as I actually got stuff done and some new ideas, but seeing as I abandoned it half-way through, I’ll modify it a bit. Starting in March I’ll reinstate the “one thing per week” thing, but will allow myself to work on larger projects as well.

I’ve been bouncing around a couple largeish ideas around for a while, so I’m going to divide them up into discreet parts – actionable things, in GTD parlance – and use the blog to log the progress. This would also allow the work to take new paths, and not make me procrastinate because I’ve grown tired of the original plans.

how_cliffs_are_made

The first thing I’ll do is finish glueing the drone packaging and do a marketing video for them – I still have a bunch of the pins left (you can buy them here: drönainteminkompis.se) but haven’t completed the packaging. Each little box takes up to half an hour to finish, and I’ve been putting it off until I’ve had a backlog of orders, but if I’m to let this project go I have to finish it properly, so that will be my task for this weekend, with a deadline of 8th of March. Go me.

On having ambitions; or not, whatever

A bit over one year ago I got a part-time temp job as a technician at my old school, which is now renamed Akademin Valand. Initially intended as a two month stint, it was extended every so often, and in the end I stayed on up until last of June. That was one week ago, and boy I’ve not kept up the routine of getting up in the morning. So far, I’ve been treating this as a vacation, but starting tomorrow I ought to be back on something resembling a “track.” In addition to trying making sure I have money for rent, I’m setting my sights on getting a realistic todo-list to adhere to.

A renewed commitment to this blog will be on there, but also a priority of all the small projects which have once again ballooned into bloated monstrosities. The drone project will end up high on that list – I now have 300 pins sitting on my sill just waiting for some clever packaging and a webshop. By the way, the latest version of the pins looks awesome.

This weeks thing will have to be the four-wall shelving I and Sara finally put up. I write “finally” because I think we started sketching the idea not long after we moved in. I bought the wood six months ago after which I left it to season, allowing the tree sprites within to come to terms of the gestalt I wanted to assume. Once we actually set about doing it, it took less than two days. Bloody long buildup for a very humble project, and even though it turned out “OK” (as in “it won’t fall on our heads,” not “it’s totally not crooked”) I despair over how slow I am to do stuff these days. I need to read less and practice more, and very definitely not play Hearthstone more than twice a week, that stuff is ambition-killing crack.

I’ve been poking the newly arrived Ultimaker 2 with an STL stick for a bit, and I’m hoping to have it well enough calibrated to place it in a grade school environment without them having me there to supervise it all the time. (It’s the tail end of the Frispel project for which I got the grant beginning of last year) Since it’s vacation time and schools out, I’m using the time to get the Doodle 3D to work. It’s a wifi enabled server connected to the printer, which serves up a web interface in which to draw – doodle even – and then have the it print the results. The available tools are extremely basic, but in a school setting it might just be enough. Design software is still the Achilles heel of the 3D printing ecology, so it’s nice when someone tries to simplify the process.

This post is written in bed using a tablet, so if the formatting is a bit wonky I’m blaming the Android app. I left the iOS world for a Sony tablet a while back, the idea being that I’ve become too complacent in my computer use and ought to at least try to keep some mental agility. I’ve mostly used the tablet for reading ebooks, as a laptop is so much more versatile, but since I left my laptop behind along with my employment I’m going to see how much milage I can get out of this arrangement. It’s waterproof should I want to write poetry in the rain. Also, it has FM radio (retro!) which helps drowning out the drunken neighborly fights; That shit’s depressing.

The hipbone connects to the wristwatch.

This weeks thing is a practical example of how distraction works: I get home early in order to sit down with an animation I’ve been mulling over for a couple of weeks. Before starting up Photoshop and getting to it, I check my emails. Huh looks like I ought to send some work invoices out, so let’s just get that out of the way first.

— Oh, hang on, the formatting of the invoicing hasn’t been updated with my latest info, I better just go into the template and fix that. Well, I be danged, the template function of Billings is utter complete shit, so if I’m going to wade through the documentation just to do the update I might as well just redesign the whole thing — how hard could that be?

— Let’s see, where did I put that logo I made a while back, that could go on there… A little bit to the right… Maybe left? Now to select typeface. Oh, and the logo has a burned umbra colour, wouldn’t that look dandy on the invoice headers? Hang on, my email is too long compared to the rest of my address; I know, why not register a new domain! Ooh, nice, my surname is still available, I’ll just go ahead and register that and set it up. (Might as well ask my brother if he wants to be setup with a forwarding address as well)

— Ok, now we’re rolling, but how the hell does Billings handle calculating the numbers and fixing the tables and totals and such? “Randomly and like a idiot leper, shitting itself” you say? Where was that documentation? There’s none except a few flaky videos, only visible if you search the Marketplace support page source code? Well that’s rather off-putting! Ok, but perhaps I can just copy-paste from a working template? No? Ok, I feel a headache coming on, let me get something for that.

I’ve just spent six hours trying to create a new template for my invoice software — a software which I use very sparingly now that I’m employed – and failing miserably. I’m now looking to spend more on another software which isn’t such a hideous bloated corpse of a thing, just so that I’ll be able to have my own design. This is not effective use of time, and this Sunday has been wasted, and no project will be posted today. Goddammit!

On poverty, grants, value of juice

In 2010 I received a grant from Konstnärsnämnden. It was more money than I’d imagined ever having access to, and one of the habits I developed was buying the Brämhults brand juice which epitomizes middle class luxury. Before finally tossing the empty bottles, I documented them as proof of an attribute I had at least temporarily acquired thanks to the grant. The images are now edited and up on the main homepage: Tack Konstnärsnämnden! The images will also be published as a soft-cover booklet shortly, hopefully as next weeks project.

Related, as far as “poverty as identity” can be related to juice, is this old post from John Scalzi: being poor.

And I know I let two weeks pass without publishing something new. Bad artist, bad! Won’t happen again, promise. Pinky swear.

a conundrum; trapped, or pinned even.

Photo on 4-13-14 at 7.20 PM

I got the pin samples the other day, and they look awesome. I’ve been asking around to see how I ought to price these, and the answers have ranged from 10 to 150 kronor. Since I’m considering numbering and packaging them, I’m inclined to move to the higher end of the scale, but it’s difficult. I’ve written about price and value previously but in the end it comes down to how you position yourself in relationship to others. Who are you, who does your supporter want to be; whose conspicuous consumption are you?

In addition to deciding on a price, I also would have to find a cause to support — my project is so small that I wouldn’t register with MSF or Red Cross, but perhaps there is a small charity dealing with civilian causulties of drone strikes or surveillance which could use the money? Suggestions gladly appreciated.

My choice of topic is very timely though, so I ought to get the thing off the ground as soon as possible, before H&M starts selling t-shirts with drone motifs, which can’t be that far off. I see ironic plush drones for sale Christmas 2014.

Ordering stuff from China is also a personal experiment for me. When the anti-globalisation movement was in full swing some fifteen years ago we were protesting the EPZ’s of China and Mexico, exactly for the reasons that they increase the race to the bottom of global capitalism; externalising environmental and human costs with little or no consequence.

Given that unions aren’t allowed in China and the country is an oligarchical dictatorship, it’s difficult on the face of it to defend using it for production. Not that I’m going defend it — I do messed up stuff all of the time — but perhaps I could use this as an opportunity to learn more about the issues. There are labour, human rights and environmental organisation active in China, and by dealing with a manufacturer directly I at least have a name, an owner and an address, as opposed to if I’d ordered the stuff through a middle-man.

A pox on your thieving hands!

Yesterday we had a “kräftskiva” at out garden cottage, and much merriment was had by all. I spent much of the evening taking smoking pictures of people smoking, and some of those turned out quite well. I’d show them here if we hadn’t had the house burgled while asleep and the laptop disappearing. Sneaky bloody thieves — they walked just outside our bedroom door, and neither of us recall hearing a thing. Took us a while to realize that anything was gone as we spent most of the morning pickup up exoskeletons and beer bottles.

Losing the laptop, the cellphones and whatever else we find once we go through it all, is one very annoying thing and financially sucky. Worst is that now I keep eying everyone I don’t recognize, wondering if they’re scouting for opportunities or just passing by. Everyone looks like a theif. That’s the real toll of something like this (well, unless you lose something really important) and I don’t enjoy having violent fantasies of defenestrating the jerks. Goddam fucking asshole fuck-shits — I hope the cellphones give you contact allergies!

Recurring up/down motions.

Last fall my knee was giving me grief whenever I went for a run, and when I asked my doctor about it he pressed, pushed and prodded my leg into different angles, suggesting that I muscle up a bit to alleviate the grinding kneecap. So I started the way anyone sets about doing things today, by checking what imaginary people on the Internet recommended. Metafilter has recurring threads on excercise and browsing through them one finds some regimes popping up more often than others. One of those is Starting Strength, a program devised by Mark Rippletoe.

The allure of the program is it’s simplicity — you do five barbell exercises over and over, and if you managed to lift the weights last time you increase them this time. It’s a beginners program, keeping the number of repetitions on heavy weights high so that you’re less likely to injure yourself. Also, it’s a comfort for me to give up the “ambition” part of excercising to a spreadsheet: You lift some stuff in a particular order and check the corresponding box if you succeed of fail, and you repeat this three times a week.

I’ve become such a cautious person lately that in addition to reading the book and lurking on forums, I wanted to start working out somewhere where people might stop me if I’m doing something horribly wrong. I found a club called Göteborgs Kraftssportsklubb (GKK) nearby and after a visit I started showing up at their prearranged hours; getting the hang of how not to cripple myself; difference is between barbells; this end toward enemy.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but GKK is a powerlifting club and I’m an odd duck out as a member cause the SS program is a mongrel of techniques — it’s not geared towards any particular sport but intended to make weak people less weak. So while most others in the club are focusing on powerlifting — squat, bench, deadlift — I’m doing powercleans and presses half the time. This hasn’t helped my assimilation into the group, but looking over my track record of “fitting in,” I’m doing OK.

As always, some people are convivial and welcoming while others seem annoyed at the intrusion, greeting me only by mistake. Mind, I’m not the only one, and there’s plenty of mute male bonding going on — adhesion by way of sweat and spotting each other — and I guess it takes a year or so before one’s enough of a fixture in the gym to hang anything worthwhile on.

One side-effect of training with GKK is that I’m no longer self-conscious about making noises; Sara has a video of me grunting unceremoniously, and I bark and wheeze at the slightest pretext. The main effect though, is that I can lift slightly heavier things than before. And I’m also more injured than previously, with pulled muscles and a busted rotary cuff and other such annoyances keeping me company. Judging from everyone else injury is part of the process and not something one can completely avoid, so best treat it as the occasional speedbump and adhere to rehab exercises.

Last weekend I tagged along to the Swedish championships in powerlifting as a photographer. 30 or so sports organized their championships during one week in Halmstad; there were gymnastics, badminton, and apparently castling is a sport now. Three days and as many thousand photos later I’m back home; it was fun but exhausting — except ten minutes of roller derby I only saw powerlifting. We had three lifters participating from GKK, one of which set a Swedish record and won her weight-class, which was exciting all round. I still need to do a final selection, but there’s a bunch of images up on Facebook if you follow these links: Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Every sport has it’s idiosyncrasies which get cemented over time; In the case of powerlifting it’s a compulsion for playing loud metal between lifts; MegaDeth, Manowar, whatshisface and angry druid. They keep having to turn the music down for the judges instructions, but most of the time it’s grinding guitars and someone shouting about war or hate or killing demons. I get that in a sport that is about lifting heavy things for a very short time there’s a proclivity for using powerful imagery, but after three days it gets a bit old.

Also, in a different setting you’d be forgiven to confuse some of the participants and trainers for rightwing bruisers, but without knowing anything about anyone I’ll give people the benefit of a doubt and guess that the Norse motifs are there to inspire strength rather than viking-based patriotism. The participants were predominantly whitish, but there were prominent exceptions and I didn’t hear any slurs regarding them — so perhaps I’m reacting preemptively and as a photographer judge people by their skin and projection.

At the moment, I’ve been to Slottskogsvallen 45 times, and gone from deadlifting zilch to 3×120kg, and feel that I’m getting the hang on the exercises — although I’m nowhere near techinical proficiency in any of them. I’ll give it a while longer before I start changing the program around too much, but will try to keep to something simple with checkboxes. Things only exists if you’re able to tick them off a todo-list, after all. For example, this here post being the “confess to grunting in public” post I’ve been meaning to write for a while. Check.

The trauma, the betrayal, the realisation

I remember a trip our family took to Kraków when I was a young teenager: I sat for a portrait that turned out really poor, not looking the least like I but still being kept by my mom in a rolled up bunch somewhere, along with all other precious 2D-artwork any parent amasses. I also remember that I wanted one of those okarinas which were warbling so magically all over the place, and I got to pick whom to buy from.

I picked a seller pretty much on random — I valued warbling over personality — but still remember that the one I’d picked looked a bit on the natty side once I got close. My parents, lord bless their polite ambition to be non-judgemental, bought the bird-shaped ocarina from the young man with the bad teeth, red eyes and yesterdays cracking clown makeup, but even before I had the chance to pour some water into it and make noise — which probably would have been awesome, since I’d gotten the same okarina that the man had used — my mom took it away from me, making vague comments about perhaps buying one from someone else, which she did, discretely tossing the first one into a bin. I thought my parents were silly and stuck up, but as both instruments looked alike I didn’t care much.

But the event stuck with me, and I was reminded of it again this evening when we were sitting at one of the less reputable pubs in Majorna with Tura, and one of the barflies took a shine to her and wanted to join our table. Being generally tired, and weary of having to cushion the ramblings of a boisterous drunk in the company of a seven-year old, we declined the offer and she shambled away.

Unless the other party has been extremely annoying or otherwise deserving of your scorn, you tend to feel bourgeois and uptight at such moments, or at least I tend do, but Tura became upset because the situation was confusing, and we’d just been impolite to a stranger who wanted to sit down with us and was talkative.

Of course, Tura would entertain the company of Satan if she thought he’d give her attention (kids being lazy megalomaniacs) but even so our rejection of the very noisy but enthusiastic woman must have sent mixed signals about how to deal with people. Some people whom we interact with, and who interact with us, can’t help but to be assholes, confusing or inconsiderate, and we teach kids tolerance, understanding, acceptance and the importance of giving the benefit of a doubt. Others are just annoying — and we don’t think about that we’ll have to explain our dismissive as well as our tolerant behaviour, least we cause confusion.