hacking
Social media, the Internet and new possibilities for social change
The brand new Academy of the Impossible nestles (huddles, coils?) in a low-rise strip of commercial real estate in Toronto's west end among other small, well-meaning enterprises. The space is bare, the acoustics are problematic, but it's already well-wired for Internet activity: social media, gaming etc. It plans to take a step beyond hacktivism toward the integration of online agitation with direct action in the streets, that the Occupy movements have embodied.
The threat to democracy posed by Rupert Murdoch's media empire
"People say that Australia has given two people to the world," Julian Assange told me in London recently, "Rupert Murdoch and me." Assange, the founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, was humbly dismissing my introduction of him, to a crowd of 1,800 at East London's Troxy theater, in which I suggested he had published perhaps more than anyone in the world. He said Murdoch took that publishing prize.
Two days later, the Milly Dowler phone hacking story exploded, and Murdoch would close one of the largest newspapers in the world, his News of the World, within a week.
We're all hackers now
It's a wet Saturday afternoon at a hacker convention in an industrial section of Hamilton, Ontario. Treven Watson's Lucite badge is flashing: blue, green and red. The LED lights are controlled by a circuit in the laser-etched ID. That little bundle of electronics is about to be probed and reprogrammed by Watson and the three dozen other coders, anxious to make it do anything but alternate primary colours.
"There's a tradition in hacker conventions of making badges that can be expanded, can be hacked to do other things," said Watson.
Watson is a member of the Hamilton hacker space think|haus. Attendees at the convention each got their own badge and spent hours seeing who could hack it best.
Hacktivism
Hacktivism, or 'Political Hacking', is a form of eletronic civil disobedience and direct action that came to prominence in the 1990's. Hacktivists use both legal and legally dubious electronic tools to accomplish political ends. Hactivism may be considered a form of Internet Activism.One of the more well known entirely legal forms of hactivism is the 'electronic sit-in'.
History