Taking issue with the argument that, after decentralisation, control is embodied within the protocols of networks, Harry Halpin gives a historical account of the all-too-human actors vying for power over the net. Not technical standards but immaterial aristocrats rule cyberspace and their seats of power are vulnerable to revolutionary attack

This year’s Transmediale festival in Berlin was themed around the conceptual term ‘Conspire’. Here, Marina Vishmidt reviews its multiple presentations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ collaborative truth production, and queries some suspicious absences

                               Free Software
                         Toni Prug, toni@irational.org
                                August 13, 2007
Contents                                                              1 Introduction                                                          2
2 Hackers and the Protestant ethics                        2
2.1 Talk is cheap, show me the code (sola code) .    5
2.2 Against memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . .   7
3 Free Software, politics and ideology . .. . . . . . . .  8
3.1 PeerToPeer and Free Drugs democracy . . . .    11
4 Revolutionary justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
5 Hacking the regime of equal rights . . . . . . . . . .  17
6 Free Software and academia . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  18
7Conclusions                                                       20

I had heard this week that an RFID card being developed for trial on Rotterdam's public transport system had been hacked, producing qualms about the security of all systems using RFID. However, according to the comment to the article below, the news turns out to be even more portentious for those in London, where an extremely unpopular Oyster card has existed for some time based on exactly the same Phillips manufactured 'MiFare' chip  

Agnese Trocchi looks at the history of pirate television in Italy and sees the rise of a new organisation in the TeleStreet network

In The Art of War Sun Tzu explains that ‘all warfare is based on deception’. He states that psychological tactics minimise the need for military involvement, and it seems that hacker Kevin Mitnick agrees with him.

In his The Art of Deception, Mitnick draws upon his experience as a hacker and social engineer. The term ‘social engineering’ is widely used within the computer security community to describe the techniques employed to persuade people to part with information, or carry out actions on the attacker’s behalf. As they focus their attention on information security, corporations deploy firewalls and other security measures to keep hackers out. Mitnick argues that while they’re busy configuring these high tech solutions, little or no attention is paid to the weakest link of corporate security – the users.

In a moment of total madness, this issue Head to Head decided to handle the ticking parcel bomb that is hacking. After the demise of the old school ‘hacker ethic’ with the rise of off-the-peg hacking tools, who can say what hacking is these days? Equally, since it is possible to find some hackers bending the ear of government and courting big business, while others fall foul of the global crackdown on ‘cybercrime’, it is also unclear who hackers are. In an attempt to completely overload this misfiring signifier, we decided to ask Boris Gröndahl and Pit Schultz to what extent this dark art could be called political. Here’s what they said

Peek-A-Booty, new code courtesy of the Cult of the Dead Cow, neutralises national firewalls. JJ King examines yet another border offensive