Shows
Hacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 1 (2024) Charles Berret: Metis and the hackerIn this episode we hear Charles Berret from Linköping University characterize the cunning and craftiness via a concept from ancient Greek.The concept of 'metis' offers an especially effective means of characterizing the intelligence and technical practice of hackers. Metis, for the ancient Greeks, denoted the improvisational craftiness of a figure like Odysseus, whose intuitive understanding of the regularities in a particular system or situation facilitates acts of subversive cleverness. After all, it was Odysseus who devised the Trojan Horse, perhaps the first hack recorded in Western literature, and later the namesake of an actual variety o...2024-12-1819 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 2 (2024) Janis Lena Meißner: From “makers-in-the-making” to “empowering hacks”Janis Lena Meißner from The Vienna University of Technology shares stories and insights from practical work with people who are usually not included in the Maker movement.Despite its promises of technology democratization, the Maker Movement still lacks diversity. To address this disparity, we might deliberately turn to „unexpected users“ of maker tools and reimagine core hacker values for subversive practices together with them. This episode is about hacking the ways in which Making is usually imagined to be performed. It offers reflections on the “Empowering Hacks” project, my long-term collaboration with two men with disab...2024-12-1822 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 3 (2024) Sylvain Besençon: Information security and the care of open cryptography technologyWe are happy to hear back from Sylvain Besençon from University of Fribourg, who wraps up research we learned about in 2020 about caring for open source cryptography.This paper suggests a shift from information security as a matter of war to security as matter of care. Based on my 6-year long PhD research among a community of open source hackers and developers maintaining a crypto protocol, this paper deconstructs what I call the “warlike crypto imaginary” that often represents cryptography as a fascinating totem pole in the form of a blue lock. This paper tackles the rheto...2024-12-1822 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 4 (2024) Victoria Neumann and Ana Custura: What does it mean to be part of a network? From silent contributor to engaged activist: the volunteer relay operators behind the Tor ProjectWho is operating the Tor network, and why? Victoria Neumann from Lancaster University tells us.Tor (acronym for The Onion Router) is one of the most famous projects focusing on online privacy and anonymity. Using the Tor Browser, one can access clear net websites without being tracked or traced or so-called "onion services (formerly hidden services)," which can only be accessed via the Tor network. Nowadays widely known for darknet marketplaces, it is also used by journalists, human rights and digital activists, spies, hackers, and ordinary people to circumvent state surveillance, internet blockades and to stay anonymous. 2024-12-1819 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastExtra episode (2024) Paula, Andreas and Mace talk about the podcastYour hosts Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala look back on three seasons of this podcast panel format. How did this get started, how does it work, and what has been fun so far?This episode is a live recording from Hacker Cultures! The Podcast Panel Season 3 panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology and Society for Social Studies of Science EASST/4S 2024 conference in Amsterdam on 2024-07-16. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats...2024-12-1831 min
Hacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 7 (2022) Ola Michalec - Engineer-as-a-service. What is the future of engineering professionals in the digital world?We have the pleasure to chat with Ola Michalec, a Senior Research Associate at University of Bristol. Don't miss on our discussion with Ola in 2020.For decades, nuclear plants, power stations, or wastewater facilities were safe from the hype of digital innovations. These industries have traditionally been operated by industrial control systems fairly simple computers using binary logics to enable the movement and sensing of engineering machinery. Such technologies were disconnected from the internet and operated on-site by manual workers. With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schilin, 2020) engineering processes are about to gain sophisticated computing...2022-10-0413 min
Hacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 6 (2022) Annika Richterich - Chaos reigns. Hacktivism as health data activismWe speak with Annika Richterich from Maastricht University where she works as an Assistant Professor in Digital Cultures at the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. Annika was with us earlier in 2020, check out that episode too.This paper discusses how the Chaos Computer Club, a German hacker association, engaged in health data activism during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021).[1] Hackers technopolitical activism tends to be neglected in public debate, partly since hacking is often equated with cybercrime. Yet, civic hacking communities have shown a longstanding dedication to activism relevant to public interests and...2022-10-0416 min
Hacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 5 (2022) Maja Urbanczyk - Hacking decision-makingThis episode brings us Maja Urbanczyk who is a PhD Candidate at Norwegian University of Science and Technology.On more and more occasions, political decision-makers decide over software that is to be used by the public. In these situations, decision-makers rely on expert knowledge and risk assessment, in order to make informed decisions. For software decisions, the needed expertise comes from IT and IT-security experts and software developers also known as: hackers. The degree of trust that IT expertise receives from political decision makers is highly dependent on the contextual framing of the people holding the expertise...2022-10-0415 min
Hacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 4 (2022) Jan Schmutzler and Estrid Sørensen - Playing with fire. Re-identification hacks and organisational micro-politicsWe hear from research by PhD Candidate Jan Schmutzler and Professor Estrid Sørensen, both from Ruhr University Bochum.Data anonymisation has long been the central measure for social scientist to protect the privacy of the subjects from whom they collect data. Recent years computational methods have made it increasingly easy to combine data sets, which also makes it easier to re-identify individuals in anonymised datasets (Rocher et al, 2019). No standard procedure exists for testing if anonymised datasets are sufficiently protected against re-identification (Emam et al, 2015). In practice the method is re-identification attacks.We report f...2022-10-0417 min
Hacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 3 (2022) Tim Cowlishaw - Tiny tools and little loops. Software art as care-ful software practiceWe speak with Tim Cowlishaw, BAU, Doctoral Candidate at College of Arts & Design Barcelona.Whether as part of giant technology corporations or open-source software projects, software developers are increasingly responsible for defining, building, and maintaining the infrastructure of our social world, and much critical and anthropological attention has been paid to the ways in which the cultures and practices of software development influence the materiality and embedded politics of these infrastructures. However, less critical attention has been paid to software development deployed to less instrumental ends, in particular, creative and artistic practices that use software as a...2022-10-0419 min
Hacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 2 (2022) Cansu Güner - Hack the house! Reconfiguring domesticity in co-living spacesThis episode is with Doctoral Candidate Cansu Güner from School of Social Sciences and Technology at Technical University of Münich.This podcast is about hacking houses. Entrepreneurs with engineering backgrounds who live in co-living spaces tend to hack their houses either as part of a hackathon or via self-initiated hacking practices. Drawing from a one-year-long ethnography on hacking practices in co-living spaces in the Bay Area and Munich, I aim to answer the following questions: what would happen if the subjects of domestic work would also be equipped with the technological know-how and expertise that wo...2022-10-0419 min
Hacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 1 (2022) Maja-Lee Voigt - CTRL + F_eminist futures_. Hacking algorithmic architectures of cities to comeIn this episode we are joined by Maja-Lee Voigt, a Research Associate at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University of Lüneburg.To this day it remains a question of power who is granted the right to visibly take up and claim urban space; both physically and virtually. A societal and literal Room of One's Own" (Woolf 1929) is still not a given for people who define as women and/or queer. Rather, it is not only floor plans and cityscapes in which gendered bodies hardly find unconfined spaces or representation; discursive and online realms often t...2022-10-0417 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 1 (2020): Morgan G. Ames - Throwback Culture: The Role of Nostalgia in Hacker Worlds This session's guest is Morgan G. Ames, who joins us from UC Berkely. There she is an assistant adjunct professor in the School of Information and interim associate director of research for the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine and Society. The maintenance of ‘hacker’ identities often involves the discussion of one’s origin story—the nostalgic rendering of the path that one took into programming and technical tinkering, involving the technologies and media of hackers’ childhoods. In her paper she explores the ways in which these memories are mobilized to do cultural work in contemporary technology worlds, especially among...2020-09-0318 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 2 (2020): Minna Saariketo & Mareike Glöss - In the grey zone of hacking? Two cases in the political economy of software and the Right to RepairMinna Saariketo is a postdoc at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University. Mareike Glöss is a lecturer Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University. In their research, they address the ‘grey zone of hacking’: end users subverting software and hardware controls imposed by manufacturers. We discuss one empirical case in particular: farmers claiming the ‘right to repair’ of agricultural equipment. The ‘Right to Repair’ movement has brought together user...2020-09-0222 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 3 (2020): Annika Richterich - Forget about the learning: On (digital) creativity and expertise in hacker-/makerspacesAnnika Richterich is an assistant professor in Digital Culture at Maastricht University (NL). Her research focuses on practices of collaboration, learning and innovation in hacking communities.Annika explains that hackers and makers are curious people. They tinker, try, and team up − driven by tech-political motives, entrepreneurial interests, or just for the fun of it. Their curiosity about digital technology and crafts makes them self-driven learners in these domains. To share their enthusiasm as well as required machines, hackers and makers worldwide have formed communities called hack-/hackerspaces and makerspaces. These are physical places where members engage in cr...2020-09-0220 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 4 (2020): Alex Dean Cybulski - Hacker Culture Is Everything You Don't Get Paid For In the Information Security IndustryAlex Dean Cybulski is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Information. Presently, he is writing a dissertation on capture the flag competitions, play and games in hacker culture and the information security industry.In this session he will talk about the field he is studying – specifically Capture the flag (CTF). It is a competitive game in which players mimic the experience of discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities in information systems, hacking into simulated software and/or networks to retrieve data known as a ‘flag.’ CTF participants, often drawn from the information security and IT indust...2020-09-0219 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 6 (2020): Stéphane Couture - Hacker Culture and Practices in the Development of Internet ProtocolsStéphane Couture is a Professor at the Faculté des arts et des sciences - Département de communication at the University of Montreal. Referring to previous work done on hacker culture and free and open source software, Stéphane's presentation will look at the cultures, practices, and power dynamics of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its sister and peripheral organization, the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF). IETF is the main organization building Internet protocols, namely the formal specifications and standards that specify the rules and forms of computer communication on the Internet. He propos...2020-09-0219 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 5 (2020): Jérémy Grosman - Algorithmic Objects, Algorithmic PracticesJérémy is a PhD student at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Namur in Belgium His work sits between computer science on the one hand and philosophy on the other. Jeremy’s talk today takes a deep dive into the daily practices of engineers (practices like implementations, experiments, publications). He says that these practices force engineers to complicate the separation between algorithms, on one side, and problems, on the other. His work focuses on a character named Robin, an engineer working on recommender systems, who he ethnographically observed in his research project. In t...2020-09-0220 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 7 (2020): Ola Michalec - Hacking infrastructures: understanding capabilities of Operational Technology (OT) security workersOla is a research associate at the University of Bristol and is interested in the 'making of' technology, science and policy, specifically about the Cybersecurity of Critical National InfrastructuresFacilities like power plants, water pipes and railway stations underpin contemporary living standards across the world. For decades, they have been operated by Operational Technologies (OT), basic (yet sturdy!) computers without Internet access. People working in OT facilities are traditionally manual workers or engineers with training in safety.In this session, Ola presents the results of a qualitative study conducted between November 2019-January 2020, where her and...2020-09-0219 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 8 (2020): Sylvain Besençon - Securing by hacking: maintenance regimes around an end-to-end encryption standardIn this session, we interview Sylvain Besençon a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Fribourg. In his presentation, he talks about internet standards, which are elementary and powerful bricks of the Internet infrastructure: they define how the Internet should work and help developers to code their pieces of software accordingly. However, regularly, there are some voices or hacks that destabilize them and open the door to radical uncertainties about the reliability of the software we use, especially when crucial information is at stake. Based on digital ethnography as well as interviews and observations at in...2020-09-0218 minHacker Cultures: The Conference PodcastEpisode 9 (2020): R. Stuart Geiger & Dorothy Howard - “I didn’t sign up for this”: The Invisible Work of Maintaining Free/Open-Source Software CommunitiesR. Stuart Geiger calls himself an Ethnographer of computation and computational ethnographer, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Communication and the Haligiolu Data science Institute.Dorothy Howard is a Ph.D. student in Communication at UC San Diego, and her interests broadly span across the psychosocial and material effects of sociotechnical systems on society, and on worker's lives and subjectivities.In this session, Stuart and Dorothy will present findings about the work of maintaining community-based free and/or open-source software (F/OSS) projects, focusing on...2020-09-0220 min
Programmers, Hackers and Hacks: the people and practices behind our machinesEpisode 9: Bonus Interview about Maintenance with Mace OjalaMace Ojala is a part-time lecturer at the IT University in Copenhagen and teaches tech-y courses around computing and networked infrastructures. I called him up to get him talking about computer maintenance, a topic that is largely forgotten. Mace's reading list for this episode: Jérôme Denis, David Pontille. Why do maintenance and repair matter?. Anders Blok, Ignacio Farías & Celia Roberts (eds.). The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory, p. 283-293, 2019, 978-1-138-08472-8.Marisa Leavitt Cohn: Convivial Decay: Entangled Lifetimes in a Geriatric Infrastructure. CSCW '16: Proceedings of the 19th ACM...2020-03-2321 min