July 2018 - cypherpunks-legacy

<nettime> Enter the Swarm: Anonymous and the global protest movements.
by Felix Stalder 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

dear nettimers, here's my take on the endlessly fascinating Anonymous story. Written for LeMondeDiplo, where it appears in the current issue in a slightly edited version and under a different title. All the best. Felix Enter the Swarm: Anonymous and the global protest movements http://mondediplo.com/2012/02/13anonymous In the course of just one year, using the identity b Anonymousb highly efficient digital attacks have been carried out against global corporations and national governments. All in the name of freedom of speech and social justice. The media coverage has done little to clarify the events, rather, contradictory characterizations of Anonymous have been espoused, ranging from an elite hacker conspiracy, to a loose network of ignorant teenagers, from a major cyber-terrorist threat to a mere nuisance driven by sophomoric humor. None of these characterizations is entirely incorrect, because each captures some fragments of the phenomenon, but they all miss the central element of Anonymous, namely that it is not one, but many, and that it is not a group or a network, but a swarm, or to be correct, multiple swarms that feed off each other. Anonymous might be an extreme case, but in important ways it is typical for the wider protest movements spreading across the crisis regions of the Middle East, Europe and the US. It is in the contrasting organizational forms that the chasm between these movements and their political systems is most manifest. One the one side are hierarchical organizations based on the principle of representation, where leaders are formally legitimized through procedures of delegation, usually based on voting, to speak and act on behalf of their constituencies. Corruption, favoritism and institutional capture, however, have weakened this legitimacy. On the other side are self-consciously leaderless organizations which reject the principle of representation in favor of direct participation in concrete projects. Their diversity enables decision-making through rough, ad-hoc consensus, rather than through formal majorities. From the point of view of established political institutions, these new forms of organizations are nearly unintelligible, hence the often voiced astonishment that the protest movements do not articulate any concrete demands that those in power could engage with. Social swarms A social swarm consists of independent individuals who are using simple tools and rules to coordinate themselves horizontally into a collective effort. As Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, points out b the complexity comes with the meritocracy that makes up how the Swarm operates and decides on courses of action as an organism. As all the people in the Swarm are volunteers b they are there because they think the Swarm can be a vehicle for change in an area they care about b the only way to lead is by inspiring others through action.b1 Thus, the strength of the swarm comes from the number of people who join it and the focus it brings to their distributed, independent efforts. A swarm always starts in the same way. A call for action and the availability of some resources to start acting right away. Social media pundit Clay Shirky identified three main requirements that must come together for such loosely organized cooperation to emerge: promise, tool, and bargain.2 The promise is the call for action. It needs not only to be relevant to a critical number of people but also credibly attainable. The tools are the resources and strategies available to work towards the promise. Today, tools to coordinate the efforts of volunteers are readily available online and different tools, such as online forums, wikis, or chats, are capable of sustaining different social dynamics on all scales. The bargain points to conditions one has to accept when entering the collective space of action. Only when the three dimensions match for a large number of people b the promise being attractive, the tools available, and the bargain not too onerous b cooperation gets underway. Over time, each of the three dimensions can change, and the swarm can grow, change direction, or fall apart. For such swarms not to be random and short-lived affairs, there needs to a fourth elements, a common horizon, which, as cultural critic Brian Holmes explains, b allows the scattered members of a network to recognize each other as existing within a shared referential and imaginary universe.b3 Anonymous is a series of swarms, each organized around a particular call for action, focusing individual efforts towards that common goal. Each swarm is independent of the others in the sense that each must attract its own contributors based on its individual combination of promise, tool, and bargain. But they are united in the sense that they feed off each other by operating under the same open identity, consisting of a few relatively generic slogans, graphic elements and cultural reference points. Anyone can wear this identity like a mask, but it only make sense to be Anonymous if it resonates with the particular culture of twisted humor, anti-authoritarianism and free speech accumulated through its history. The dark corners of the Internet Despite all efforts to b civilize the internetb, most recently re-affirmed by Nicolas Sarkozy during the eG8 meeting in Paris last May, dark corners where anythings goes have continued to exist. Of particular relevance to Anonymous is a site called 4chan.org, a technologically simple, but massively popular web forum, founded in 2003, where people can post images and texts without registration, thus appearing as b anonymousb online. The site not only encourages anonymous postings, but its most active section, the forum /b/-Random, explicitly has no rules as to what can be posted. The site also has no memory, that is, all postings that do not generate responses will automatically move down the queue and eventually be deleted. This usually happens within a few minutes. No records are kept.4 The only memory is in the minds of the users, thus, everything that is not easily remembered and repeated vanishes. To avoid quick disappearance, hundreds of posts per day are framed as calls for action, such as a proposal to vandalize an article on Wikipedia with, say, the 67th suggested article being chosen. If that entices enough people, a small swarm descends on the article. Just for the fun of it. Because of the need to keep things alive through repetition and involvement, over time, a collective culture emerged that was stripped of individuality and origins and was reduced to a few easily available elements that can be assembled and transformed by anyone with basic internet skills. Around such calls, or operations, a culture emerged of b ultra-coordinated motherfuckaryb, as one participant told Biella Coleman, an anthropologist of geek culture.5 Over the course of half a decade, anonymous turned into Anonymous, a simple technical placeholder into a collective identity. Because of the anonymity-induced culture of outrageousness the common horizon of this identity grew from a strong, even extreme commitment to free speech and a deep distrust against any kind of authority that tries to regulate speech based on what are perceived hypocritical lies. Into the limelight It is not a coincidence, then, that in winter 2008, some people began to use this identity to start a campaign against the Church of Scientology. There has been decade old battle between hackers and Scientology. The hackers would facilitate the leaking of damaging insider information exposing fraud and manipulation and the church would ruthlessly use its considerable means to suppress such information and destroy the personal reputation of its critics. Anonymous got involved after the church tried to suppress the circulation of a motivational video in which the actor Tom Cruise, a high-ranking church member, comes across as particularly unhinged. As a response to the usual threads of legal action, a semi-serious video was released in which Anonymous announced the destruction of the church. After a period heated debated inside various chat channels b an important part of the infrastructure of spontaneous, real-time coordination b a particular combination of promise, tool and bargain was hashed out and a common horizon established. Not only were online actions against the website coordinated, but also a global day of action was planned and executed. On February 18, 2008 protests in more than 90 cities in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand were held. Many of the participants were wearing the now famous Guy Fawkes masks to protect themselves against the likely revenge of the church. Their sheer presence and irreverence made up for the lack of political demands, as they pierced an important myth that the church could crush anyone who dared to criticize it. For the first time, some swarms of Anonymous had congregated outside the Internet and had coordinated themselves with more established political activists. The fun turned serious. These protests continued to be the main political focus of Anonymous over the next two years. In September 2010, another Anonymous swarm emerged around the Operation Payback, which began as an attack against Aiplex Software, an Indian Company hired to disrupt file sharing sites such as The Pirate Bay.6 It quickly spread to attacks on the website of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and many other pro-copyright organizations. The operation's rallying cry resonated strongly within its larger environment: b They call it piracy, we call it freedom.b In the course of these actions, the political identity and technological / tactical sophistication of Anonymous as a set of politically oriented swarms expanded. In December 2010, after WikiLeaks was cut off from receiving donations Operation Payback refocused once again and disrupted the websites of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and Bank of America. In January 2011, Anonymous refocused again, attacking the websites of the Tunisian government. This provided the bloggers in Tunisia with some sense of global solidarity and, thanks to media attention Anonymous was focusing, also helped to turn the international spotlight onto the beginnings of the Arab uprisings.7 Throughout 2011, the Anonymous swarms multiplied and innumerable calls for action have been issued, some of them by attention seekers and others hoping to profit from media frenzy. But this has not stopped other swarms to attract people. On August 23, 2011 Anonymous released a video calling for the occupation of Wall Street, taking up an idea that the Canadian Adbusters Foundation had been promoting for a couple of weeks.8 The involvement of Anonymous considerably raised the profile of this idea and helped to move the dynamics towards the tipping point where numerous independent initiative coalesced around the proposed action, starting an open-ended occupation of Wall Street on September 17, 2011. Reaching the limits? The outrageousness and flamboyance of Anonymous enables it us issue slogans that are common sense to many -- like the aforementioned equation of media piracy with freedom -- yet too radical anyone who tries to be regarded as serious by the dominant powers, particularly well-funded NGOs. This radicality galvanizes very significant, yet latent energies where more measured b and b reasonableb b statements would receive lukewarm responses at best. This is contributing to expanding again the scope of what can be debated in public, after decades in which mainstream political discourse has narrowed to such a degree that to even mention social inequality was viewed as in equal measures old fashioned and outrageous. Yet, for all the power of large scale, spontaneity this form of organization cannot engage with the institutional world in any other than destructive ways. At the moment, it cannot, and does not aim at, building alternative institutions. It is, however, contributing to the forging of a common, oppositional horizon that could make it easier to coordinate further action. It has already hacked cracks into many seemingly solid walls. To turn these cracks into something constructive will be the tasks of others. But for now, Anonymous has succeeded to expanded the space of the possible. Notes. [1] Falkvinge, Rik. Swarmwise: What is a Swarm? (08.01.2011) http://falkvinge.net/2011/08/01/swarmwise-what-is-a-swarm/ [2] Shirky, Clay (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York, Penguin Press [3] Holmes, Brian. Swarmachine. Continental Drift Blog (21.07.2007) http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/swarmachine/ [4] Coleman, Gabriella. Anonymous b From the Lulz to Collective Action. The New Significance. (09.05.2011) http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/05/09/gabriella-coleman-anonymo us-from-the-lulz-to-collective-action/ [5] http://torrentfreak.com/4chan-ddos-takes-down-mpaa-and-anti-piracy-web sites-100918/ [6] Ben Mhenni, Lina Tunisian girl, la bloggeuse de la rC)volution. Indigene Paris, 2011 [7] http://www.vancourier.com/Adbusters+sparks+Wall+Street+protest/5466332 /story.html -- --- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------- books out now: *|Deep Search. The Politics of Searching Beyond Google. Studien. 2009 *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [Freedombox-discuss] Freedombox Mesh Network Simulator
by John Gilmore 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> My wife and I are walking in mall with at least one other person every > 40 feet or so. We decide to separate and go shopping. I walk this way, > she walks that way. Before long we're out of direct WiFi communication > range to each other. Now, if enough people there in the mall had > WiFi-enabled devices running some mesh software, I'd like to be able to > stay in contact with my wife as she moves about in her random way, and > as they all move about in their random ways. The One Laptop per Child project also wanted to satisfy this goal. They wanted kids all over a village to be able to reach each other and to reach the Internet via a gateway at their school. They had the advantage of designing and building both the hardware and software. But they failed, partly due to system integration issues. They were using a buggy implementation of 802.11 meshing that preceded 802.11s. But they also used higher level user interface software, which used multicast packets to find and communicate with other nearby laptops. The mesh software worked poorly with multicast. Not only did it send multicasts at the slowest speed (1 megabit), which took up a lot of airtime, but the various nodes would repeat the multicasts to make sure that every node had heard them. This limited the size of the network that they could scale to. They did not discover this unfortunate interaction until very late in the hardware/software/firmware integration process (when the multicast-based application sharing software started working). Another major problem was that a mesh network is very hard to reproduce. If it does something unexpected or suboptimal, the developers can't just teleport themselves to the part of the world where that particular physical configuration of radio nodes, physical antennas, software versions, and firmware versions exists. In many cases they can't even reach into the nodes of that network over the Internet while the problem is happening, to debug it. Many, many OLPC mesh problems occurred in the field which could not be replicated in the lab, which made them 10x or 100x harder to fix. This meant that buggy mesh network firmware and software didn't improve at the usual rate (of the rest of their software). The result was that despite a lot of work addressing bugs and performance in the mesh firmware, they never got their automatic mesh network working with more than a handful of XO laptops. If you put 30 laptops in a classroom, they would burn up 100% of the radio bandwidth (and chew up their batteries) merely with overhead packets ("Hi, i'm here." "Hi you, I'm me; have you heard about Joe and Alice over there?" "In case you want to send a message to Joe, send it via me to Alice; I can hear Alice just fine."). There was no bandwidth left for the users to actually communicate; connections would time out, nodes would appear and disappear from the mesh, etc. So OLPC stopped using the mesh and recommended that each classroom install one or more 802.11 access points. Which has worked ok. They also switched to support ad-hoc 802.11 without meshing, for automatically networking "a few students sitting around under a tree", which also works ok. There ARE some mesh networks that I hear are working on a larger scale, such as B.A.T.M.A.N. I suspect that the large scale meshes are in largely static networks that are tuned by humans to work well (just as the broader Internet's routing system is tuned by humans to work; it's not automatic). I do not know if other meshes support multicast (or other portable ways for high level software to find what nodes are on the network), nor whether they work in a network of mobile nodes with limited battery life. All I can report on is the one project I was involved in (OLPC), in which their mesh implementation failed to accomplish its goals, and was dropped from the next generation hardware and software. This is part of why I recommend using wired connections wherever possible. For FreedomBox to succeed, it needs to succeed at scale. A FreedomBox network that can't route packets for more than 500 nodes worldwide wouldn't be worth building. (Clue: this is why the Internet exists today: it scaled up and kept working, while the proprietary networks that preceded it didn't scale up to worldwide scale.) In a substantial network, your mesh and dynamic routing protocol could require a few megabits of traffic at all times on each node, just keeping track of everything. Over a 100-megabit Ethernet that's just 2 or 3% of the bandwidth. But over 802.11, that burns up most of the available bandwidth. Every connection you move off wireless onto a wire makes more radio bandwidth available for the folks who truly can't run a wire. I have some ideas about how FreedomBox nodes could provide censorship resistant networking via running an overlay IPv6 network using geographically based addressing to simplify the routing problem. I'll dig those up and repost them in the next few days. It isn't an automatic mesh, though; it has explicit connections made by humans among friendly nodes. The part that's automatic is how the packets flow after the humans make those connections. John PS: If you think a mesh protocol shouldn't use even a megabit/second of continuous overhead, please design and build one that doesn't, and that scales up and keeps working. It's harder than it looks. _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss(a)lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

1 0

<nettime> Enter the Swarm: Anonymous and the global protest movements.
by Felix Stalder 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

dear nettimers, here's my take on the endlessly fascinating Anonymous story. Written for LeMondeDiplo, where it appears in the current issue in a slightly edited version and under a different title. All the best. Felix Enter the Swarm: Anonymous and the global protest movements http://mondediplo.com/2012/02/13anonymous In the course of just one year, using the identity b Anonymousb highly efficient digital attacks have been carried out against global corporations and national governments. All in the name of freedom of speech and social justice. The media coverage has done little to clarify the events, rather, contradictory characterizations of Anonymous have been espoused, ranging from an elite hacker conspiracy, to a loose network of ignorant teenagers, from a major cyber-terrorist threat to a mere nuisance driven by sophomoric humor. None of these characterizations is entirely incorrect, because each captures some fragments of the phenomenon, but they all miss the central element of Anonymous, namely that it is not one, but many, and that it is not a group or a network, but a swarm, or to be correct, multiple swarms that feed off each other. Anonymous might be an extreme case, but in important ways it is typical for the wider protest movements spreading across the crisis regions of the Middle East, Europe and the US. It is in the contrasting organizational forms that the chasm between these movements and their political systems is most manifest. One the one side are hierarchical organizations based on the principle of representation, where leaders are formally legitimized through procedures of delegation, usually based on voting, to speak and act on behalf of their constituencies. Corruption, favoritism and institutional capture, however, have weakened this legitimacy. On the other side are self-consciously leaderless organizations which reject the principle of representation in favor of direct participation in concrete projects. Their diversity enables decision-making through rough, ad-hoc consensus, rather than through formal majorities. From the point of view of established political institutions, these new forms of organizations are nearly unintelligible, hence the often voiced astonishment that the protest movements do not articulate any concrete demands that those in power could engage with. Social swarms A social swarm consists of independent individuals who are using simple tools and rules to coordinate themselves horizontally into a collective effort. As Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party, points out b the complexity comes with the meritocracy that makes up how the Swarm operates and decides on courses of action as an organism. As all the people in the Swarm are volunteers b they are there because they think the Swarm can be a vehicle for change in an area they care about b the only way to lead is by inspiring others through action.b1 Thus, the strength of the swarm comes from the number of people who join it and the focus it brings to their distributed, independent efforts. A swarm always starts in the same way. A call for action and the availability of some resources to start acting right away. Social media pundit Clay Shirky identified three main requirements that must come together for such loosely organized cooperation to emerge: promise, tool, and bargain.2 The promise is the call for action. It needs not only to be relevant to a critical number of people but also credibly attainable. The tools are the resources and strategies available to work towards the promise. Today, tools to coordinate the efforts of volunteers are readily available online and different tools, such as online forums, wikis, or chats, are capable of sustaining different social dynamics on all scales. The bargain points to conditions one has to accept when entering the collective space of action. Only when the three dimensions match for a large number of people b the promise being attractive, the tools available, and the bargain not too onerous b cooperation gets underway. Over time, each of the three dimensions can change, and the swarm can grow, change direction, or fall apart. For such swarms not to be random and short-lived affairs, there needs to a fourth elements, a common horizon, which, as cultural critic Brian Holmes explains, b allows the scattered members of a network to recognize each other as existing within a shared referential and imaginary universe.b3 Anonymous is a series of swarms, each organized around a particular call for action, focusing individual efforts towards that common goal. Each swarm is independent of the others in the sense that each must attract its own contributors based on its individual combination of promise, tool, and bargain. But they are united in the sense that they feed off each other by operating under the same open identity, consisting of a few relatively generic slogans, graphic elements and cultural reference points. Anyone can wear this identity like a mask, but it only make sense to be Anonymous if it resonates with the particular culture of twisted humor, anti-authoritarianism and free speech accumulated through its history. The dark corners of the Internet Despite all efforts to b civilize the internetb, most recently re-affirmed by Nicolas Sarkozy during the eG8 meeting in Paris last May, dark corners where anythings goes have continued to exist. Of particular relevance to Anonymous is a site called 4chan.org, a technologically simple, but massively popular web forum, founded in 2003, where people can post images and texts without registration, thus appearing as b anonymousb online. The site not only encourages anonymous postings, but its most active section, the forum /b/-Random, explicitly has no rules as to what can be posted. The site also has no memory, that is, all postings that do not generate responses will automatically move down the queue and eventually be deleted. This usually happens within a few minutes. No records are kept.4 The only memory is in the minds of the users, thus, everything that is not easily remembered and repeated vanishes. To avoid quick disappearance, hundreds of posts per day are framed as calls for action, such as a proposal to vandalize an article on Wikipedia with, say, the 67th suggested article being chosen. If that entices enough people, a small swarm descends on the article. Just for the fun of it. Because of the need to keep things alive through repetition and involvement, over time, a collective culture emerged that was stripped of individuality and origins and was reduced to a few easily available elements that can be assembled and transformed by anyone with basic internet skills. Around such calls, or operations, a culture emerged of b ultra-coordinated motherfuckaryb, as one participant told Biella Coleman, an anthropologist of geek culture.5 Over the course of half a decade, anonymous turned into Anonymous, a simple technical placeholder into a collective identity. Because of the anonymity-induced culture of outrageousness the common horizon of this identity grew from a strong, even extreme commitment to free speech and a deep distrust against any kind of authority that tries to regulate speech based on what are perceived hypocritical lies. Into the limelight It is not a coincidence, then, that in winter 2008, some people began to use this identity to start a campaign against the Church of Scientology. There has been decade old battle between hackers and Scientology. The hackers would facilitate the leaking of damaging insider information exposing fraud and manipulation and the church would ruthlessly use its considerable means to suppress such information and destroy the personal reputation of its critics. Anonymous got involved after the church tried to suppress the circulation of a motivational video in which the actor Tom Cruise, a high-ranking church member, comes across as particularly unhinged. As a response to the usual threads of legal action, a semi-serious video was released in which Anonymous announced the destruction of the church. After a period heated debated inside various chat channels b an important part of the infrastructure of spontaneous, real-time coordination b a particular combination of promise, tool and bargain was hashed out and a common horizon established. Not only were online actions against the website coordinated, but also a global day of action was planned and executed. On February 18, 2008 protests in more than 90 cities in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand were held. Many of the participants were wearing the now famous Guy Fawkes masks to protect themselves against the likely revenge of the church. Their sheer presence and irreverence made up for the lack of political demands, as they pierced an important myth that the church could crush anyone who dared to criticize it. For the first time, some swarms of Anonymous had congregated outside the Internet and had coordinated themselves with more established political activists. The fun turned serious. These protests continued to be the main political focus of Anonymous over the next two years. In September 2010, another Anonymous swarm emerged around the Operation Payback, which began as an attack against Aiplex Software, an Indian Company hired to disrupt file sharing sites such as The Pirate Bay.6 It quickly spread to attacks on the website of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) and many other pro-copyright organizations. The operation's rallying cry resonated strongly within its larger environment: b They call it piracy, we call it freedom.b In the course of these actions, the political identity and technological / tactical sophistication of Anonymous as a set of politically oriented swarms expanded. In December 2010, after WikiLeaks was cut off from receiving donations Operation Payback refocused once again and disrupted the websites of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal, and Bank of America. In January 2011, Anonymous refocused again, attacking the websites of the Tunisian government. This provided the bloggers in Tunisia with some sense of global solidarity and, thanks to media attention Anonymous was focusing, also helped to turn the international spotlight onto the beginnings of the Arab uprisings.7 Throughout 2011, the Anonymous swarms multiplied and innumerable calls for action have been issued, some of them by attention seekers and others hoping to profit from media frenzy. But this has not stopped other swarms to attract people. On August 23, 2011 Anonymous released a video calling for the occupation of Wall Street, taking up an idea that the Canadian Adbusters Foundation had been promoting for a couple of weeks.8 The involvement of Anonymous considerably raised the profile of this idea and helped to move the dynamics towards the tipping point where numerous independent initiative coalesced around the proposed action, starting an open-ended occupation of Wall Street on September 17, 2011. Reaching the limits? The outrageousness and flamboyance of Anonymous enables it us issue slogans that are common sense to many -- like the aforementioned equation of media piracy with freedom -- yet too radical anyone who tries to be regarded as serious by the dominant powers, particularly well-funded NGOs. This radicality galvanizes very significant, yet latent energies where more measured b and b reasonableb b statements would receive lukewarm responses at best. This is contributing to expanding again the scope of what can be debated in public, after decades in which mainstream political discourse has narrowed to such a degree that to even mention social inequality was viewed as in equal measures old fashioned and outrageous. Yet, for all the power of large scale, spontaneity this form of organization cannot engage with the institutional world in any other than destructive ways. At the moment, it cannot, and does not aim at, building alternative institutions. It is, however, contributing to the forging of a common, oppositional horizon that could make it easier to coordinate further action. It has already hacked cracks into many seemingly solid walls. To turn these cracks into something constructive will be the tasks of others. But for now, Anonymous has succeeded to expanded the space of the possible. Notes. [1] Falkvinge, Rik. Swarmwise: What is a Swarm? (08.01.2011) http://falkvinge.net/2011/08/01/swarmwise-what-is-a-swarm/ [2] Shirky, Clay (2008). Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York, Penguin Press [3] Holmes, Brian. Swarmachine. Continental Drift Blog (21.07.2007) http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/07/21/swarmachine/ [4] Coleman, Gabriella. Anonymous b From the Lulz to Collective Action. The New Significance. (09.05.2011) http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/05/09/gabriella-coleman-anonymo us-from-the-lulz-to-collective-action/ [5] http://torrentfreak.com/4chan-ddos-takes-down-mpaa-and-anti-piracy-web sites-100918/ [6] Ben Mhenni, Lina Tunisian girl, la bloggeuse de la rC)volution. Indigene Paris, 2011 [7] http://www.vancourier.com/Adbusters+sparks+Wall+Street+protest/5466332 /story.html -- --- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------- books out now: *|Deep Search. The Politics of Searching Beyond Google. Studien. 2009 *|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008 *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime(a)kein.org ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

1 0

Re: [Freedombox-discuss] Freedombox Mesh Network Simulator
by John Gilmore 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

> My wife and I are walking in mall with at least one other person every > 40 feet or so. We decide to separate and go shopping. I walk this way, > she walks that way. Before long we're out of direct WiFi communication > range to each other. Now, if enough people there in the mall had > WiFi-enabled devices running some mesh software, I'd like to be able to > stay in contact with my wife as she moves about in her random way, and > as they all move about in their random ways. The One Laptop per Child project also wanted to satisfy this goal. They wanted kids all over a village to be able to reach each other and to reach the Internet via a gateway at their school. They had the advantage of designing and building both the hardware and software. But they failed, partly due to system integration issues. They were using a buggy implementation of 802.11 meshing that preceded 802.11s. But they also used higher level user interface software, which used multicast packets to find and communicate with other nearby laptops. The mesh software worked poorly with multicast. Not only did it send multicasts at the slowest speed (1 megabit), which took up a lot of airtime, but the various nodes would repeat the multicasts to make sure that every node had heard them. This limited the size of the network that they could scale to. They did not discover this unfortunate interaction until very late in the hardware/software/firmware integration process (when the multicast-based application sharing software started working). Another major problem was that a mesh network is very hard to reproduce. If it does something unexpected or suboptimal, the developers can't just teleport themselves to the part of the world where that particular physical configuration of radio nodes, physical antennas, software versions, and firmware versions exists. In many cases they can't even reach into the nodes of that network over the Internet while the problem is happening, to debug it. Many, many OLPC mesh problems occurred in the field which could not be replicated in the lab, which made them 10x or 100x harder to fix. This meant that buggy mesh network firmware and software didn't improve at the usual rate (of the rest of their software). The result was that despite a lot of work addressing bugs and performance in the mesh firmware, they never got their automatic mesh network working with more than a handful of XO laptops. If you put 30 laptops in a classroom, they would burn up 100% of the radio bandwidth (and chew up their batteries) merely with overhead packets ("Hi, i'm here." "Hi you, I'm me; have you heard about Joe and Alice over there?" "In case you want to send a message to Joe, send it via me to Alice; I can hear Alice just fine."). There was no bandwidth left for the users to actually communicate; connections would time out, nodes would appear and disappear from the mesh, etc. So OLPC stopped using the mesh and recommended that each classroom install one or more 802.11 access points. Which has worked ok. They also switched to support ad-hoc 802.11 without meshing, for automatically networking "a few students sitting around under a tree", which also works ok. There ARE some mesh networks that I hear are working on a larger scale, such as B.A.T.M.A.N. I suspect that the large scale meshes are in largely static networks that are tuned by humans to work well (just as the broader Internet's routing system is tuned by humans to work; it's not automatic). I do not know if other meshes support multicast (or other portable ways for high level software to find what nodes are on the network), nor whether they work in a network of mobile nodes with limited battery life. All I can report on is the one project I was involved in (OLPC), in which their mesh implementation failed to accomplish its goals, and was dropped from the next generation hardware and software. This is part of why I recommend using wired connections wherever possible. For FreedomBox to succeed, it needs to succeed at scale. A FreedomBox network that can't route packets for more than 500 nodes worldwide wouldn't be worth building. (Clue: this is why the Internet exists today: it scaled up and kept working, while the proprietary networks that preceded it didn't scale up to worldwide scale.) In a substantial network, your mesh and dynamic routing protocol could require a few megabits of traffic at all times on each node, just keeping track of everything. Over a 100-megabit Ethernet that's just 2 or 3% of the bandwidth. But over 802.11, that burns up most of the available bandwidth. Every connection you move off wireless onto a wire makes more radio bandwidth available for the folks who truly can't run a wire. I have some ideas about how FreedomBox nodes could provide censorship resistant networking via running an overlay IPv6 network using geographically based addressing to simplify the routing problem. I'll dig those up and repost them in the next few days. It isn't an automatic mesh, though; it has explicit connections made by humans among friendly nodes. The part that's automatic is how the packets flow after the humans make those connections. John PS: If you think a mesh protocol shouldn't use even a megabit/second of continuous overhead, please design and build one that doesn't, and that scales up and keeps working. It's harder than it looks. _______________________________________________ Freedombox-discuss mailing list Freedombox-discuss(a)lists.alioth.debian.org http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/freedombox-discuss ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: [tahoe-dev] Hello & Questions
by Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Dear til: Yes, please! I would be very interested in new and/or improved documentation about why and how to install and use Tahoe-LAFS. Here are some existing resources: quickstart, which you mentioned: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/browser/trunk/docs/quickstart.rst The "Installation" page on the wiki: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Installation An issue ticket "introductory docs are confusing and off-putting": https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/ticket/1024 Some good editing improvements offered by Dan Connolly: https://github.com/zooko/tahoe-lafs/pull/1 I think the next step is for til, or anyone else who cares about this issue, to write up and post a new "starter document" which is easier for users to follow. Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ tahoe-dev mailing list tahoe-dev(a)tahoe-lafs.org https://tahoe-lafs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tahoe-dev ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: AIR TRAVELER ID REQUIREMENT CHALLENGED
by Somebody 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Bob, I was browsing some of my old mail when I came across this. What's the status of Gilmore's case? Has there been a secret trial? <Somebody> ----- Original Message ----- From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> To: "Digital Bearer Settlement List" <dbs(a)philodox.com> Sent: Friday, July 19, 2002 2:51 PM Subject: AIR TRAVELER ID REQUIREMENT CHALLENGED > > --- begin forwarded text > > > Status: RO > Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 14:12:25 -0400 > To: cypherpunks(a)lne.com > From: "Duncan Frissell" <frissell(a)panix.com>(by way of Duncan Frissell > <frissell(a)panix.com>) > Subject: AIR TRAVELER ID REQUIREMENT CHALLENGED > Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)lne.com > > <http://cryptome.org/freetotravel.htm>Gilmore v. Ashcroft -- FAA ID Challenge > AIR TRAVELER ID REQUIREMENT CHALLENGED > Secret rule demanding 'Your Papers Please' claimed unconstitutional > > San Francisco - Civil libertarian John Gilmore today challenged as > unconstitutional a secret federal rule that requires domestic US travelers > to identify themselves. > > > > > > Smooth move. Attempt to board a flight to DC on July 4th "to petition the > government for redress of grievances". Even if not successful, it will be > annoying and will be worthwhile if it manages to crack out copies of the > secret security directives (like FAA SD 96-05)establishing the system. > > Keep in mind that until the end of the first Clinton administration, it was > perfectly legal to fly domestically without ID. > > -- > Posted by Duncan Frissell to <http://technoptimist.blogspot.com>The > Technoptimist at 7/18/2002 11:12:20 AM > > Powered by <http://pro2.blogger.com>Blogger Pro > > --- end forwarded text > > > -- > ----------------- > R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> > The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> > 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA > "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, > [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to > experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' > --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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Microsoft working to eliminate Internet anonymity
by Curious Kid 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Microsoft working to eliminate Internet anonymity http://gcn.com/articles/2009/08/19/microsoft-internet-anonymity.aspx?s=gcnd… By Jabulani Leffall Aug 19, 2009 Microsoft researchers have unveiled an anti-hacking concept that can help track hackers or malicious content to origin servers. The Host Tracker program's goal is to "de-anonymize the Internet" through the ability to host servers with 99 percent accuracy. Host Tracker is designed to unmask would-be hackers who take advantage of anonymizing techniques by cross-referencing Internet protocol traffic data to identify the true origin. Microsoft's representatives said the Host Tracker system relies on application-level events -- in this case, Internet Explorer browser sessions -- to automatically infer host-IP bindings. Researchers Yinglian Xie, Fang Yu and Martin Abadi ran some initial tests by analyzing a month's worth of data from an e-mail server, roughly 330 GB, to ascertain from the samples who may have been responsible for sending out certain types of spam. They studied some 550 million user IDs and 220 million IP addresses, and matched time stamps for message transmission or e-mail log-ons. "The fact that we are able to trace malicious traffic to the proxy itself is an improvement because we are able to pinpoint the exact origin," Xie said (a PDF of the study can be found at http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/80964/sigcomm09.pdf ). >From a practical perspective, the researchers said they hope that the program will result in better defenses against server-bound online attacks, spam campaigns, adware and other malware that is dependent on HTML code to execute properly. Further, Microsoft thinks this could be a boon for third-party security firms and security administrators at the enterprise level by giving them the ability to block certain hosts from sending messages as well as the ability to use this data as a basis for IT auditing and forensic analysis of messaging and network systems. "In the next-generation Internet, anonymity and traceability should be offered and reconciled by design rather than by accident," the researchers added. About the Author Jabulani Leffall is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Financial Times of London, Investor's Business Daily, The Economist and CFO Magazine, among others. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Microsoft working to eliminate Internet anonymity
by Curious Kid 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Microsoft working to eliminate Internet anonymity http://gcn.com/articles/2009/08/19/microsoft-internet-anonymity.aspx?s=gcnd… By Jabulani Leffall Aug 19, 2009 Microsoft researchers have unveiled an anti-hacking concept that can help track hackers or malicious content to origin servers. The Host Tracker program's goal is to "de-anonymize the Internet" through the ability to host servers with 99 percent accuracy. Host Tracker is designed to unmask would-be hackers who take advantage of anonymizing techniques by cross-referencing Internet protocol traffic data to identify the true origin. Microsoft's representatives said the Host Tracker system relies on application-level events -- in this case, Internet Explorer browser sessions -- to automatically infer host-IP bindings. Researchers Yinglian Xie, Fang Yu and Martin Abadi ran some initial tests by analyzing a month's worth of data from an e-mail server, roughly 330 GB, to ascertain from the samples who may have been responsible for sending out certain types of spam. They studied some 550 million user IDs and 220 million IP addresses, and matched time stamps for message transmission or e-mail log-ons. "The fact that we are able to trace malicious traffic to the proxy itself is an improvement because we are able to pinpoint the exact origin," Xie said (a PDF of the study can be found at http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/80964/sigcomm09.pdf ). >From a practical perspective, the researchers said they hope that the program will result in better defenses against server-bound online attacks, spam campaigns, adware and other malware that is dependent on HTML code to execute properly. Further, Microsoft thinks this could be a boon for third-party security firms and security administrators at the enterprise level by giving them the ability to block certain hosts from sending messages as well as the ability to use this data as a basis for IT auditing and forensic analysis of messaging and network systems. "In the next-generation Internet, anonymity and traceability should be offered and reconciled by design rather than by accident," the researchers added. About the Author Jabulani Leffall is a journalist whose work has appeared in the Financial Times of London, Investor's Business Daily, The Economist and CFO Magazine, among others. ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE

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Re: AIR TRAVELER ID REQUIREMENT CHALLENGED
by Somebody 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

Bob, I was browsing some of my old mail when I came across this. What's the status of Gilmore's case? Has there been a secret trial? <Somebody> ----- Original Message ----- From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah(a)shipwright.com> To: "Digital Bearer Settlement List" <dbs(a)philodox.com> Sent: Friday, July 19, 2002 2:51 PM Subject: AIR TRAVELER ID REQUIREMENT CHALLENGED > > --- begin forwarded text > > > Status: RO > Date: Fri, 19 Jul 2002 14:12:25 -0400 > To: cypherpunks(a)lne.com > From: "Duncan Frissell" <frissell(a)panix.com>(by way of Duncan Frissell > <frissell(a)panix.com>) > Subject: AIR TRAVELER ID REQUIREMENT CHALLENGED > Sender: owner-cypherpunks(a)lne.com > > <http://cryptome.org/freetotravel.htm>Gilmore v. Ashcroft -- FAA ID Challenge > AIR TRAVELER ID REQUIREMENT CHALLENGED > Secret rule demanding 'Your Papers Please' claimed unconstitutional > > San Francisco - Civil libertarian John Gilmore today challenged as > unconstitutional a secret federal rule that requires domestic US travelers > to identify themselves. > > > > > > Smooth move. Attempt to board a flight to DC on July 4th "to petition the > government for redress of grievances". Even if not successful, it will be > annoying and will be worthwhile if it manages to crack out copies of the > secret security directives (like FAA SD 96-05)establishing the system. > > Keep in mind that until the end of the first Clinton administration, it was > perfectly legal to fly domestically without ID. > > -- > Posted by Duncan Frissell to <http://technoptimist.blogspot.com>The > Technoptimist at 7/18/2002 11:12:20 AM > > Powered by <http://pro2.blogger.com>Blogger Pro > > --- end forwarded text > > > -- > ----------------- > R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> > The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> > 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA > "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, > [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to > experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' > --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo(a)wasabisystems.com

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None
by Jim Salters 06 Jul '18

06 Jul '18

*** Feb/March Project Update *** Since our last update, 22 companies have committed to participate and launch the Image Quality and Usability Assurance: Phase I project. Also, we completed the SVPCo/FSTC Black and White vs. Gray-Scale in Bank Operations project in February, and SVPCo is now utilizing that report as a key component of its planning. Lastly, our Minimum Required Practices for Global Sourcing project has issued a call for participation, and commitments are being made by both financial institutions and technology partners. FSTC provides an action-oriented, collaborative forum for our members to address shared business opportunities and challenges through technology projects and knowledge-sharing. We view our projects as our core activity, and one of the key benefits of FSTC membership is eligibility to participate in these projects. In our efforts to keep our members and friends up-to-date on the latest developments in these active and developing projects, we provide our colleagues this periodic project update. As always, please contact me or Zach Tumin, FSTC Executive Director, for more information. Or visit our website at http://fstc.org. Active Projects: 1. Business Continuity: Technology Best Practices Expertise Center (launched Nov 2003) 2. Survivability of Check Security Features in an Imaged Environment (launched Oct 2003) 3. Image Quality and Usability Assurance: Phase I (launching March 2004) Projects in Formation: 1. Minimum Required Practices for Global Sourcing (call for participation issued) 2. Phishing and Financial Services 3. eBilling Self Service through Federated Identity 4. Biometrics in Financial Services: Assessment and Action 5. Treasury Services Integration: Data Exchange and Customer Connectivity through Web Services (on hold) 6. A Federated Identity Implementation Framework for Secure Email (on hold) 7. Transformation to Open Mission Critical Systems ______________ ACTIVE PROJECTS: 1. Business Continuity: Technology Best Practices Expertise Center http://fstc.org/projects/dr-bestpractices/ The Technology Best Practices Expertise Center Phase I initiative has brought industry leaders together to jointly develop consolidated, industry-vetted best practices and actionable recommendations for technology recovery in post-outage, remote recovery. Regulatory compliance will be a key requirement considered by the team. The resulting documentation will define best practices, identify key challenges and gaps in available solutions, and identify recommendations for further actions (such as testing) in future efforts. The objective is to enable participating companies to recover in a cost-effective manner, to validate and compare their own recovery strategies with their peers, and to address regulatory compliance in an industry forum. The project launched on November 5, 2003 in New York, and is expected to conclude in April 2004. Project participants include: Bank One, Bank of America, Comerica, JPMorgan Chase, Huntington, RBC Financial, US Bank, Wachovia, and IBM. This initiative originated in our Business Continuity SCOM. (http://fstc.org/advisory/business-continuity.cfm) ______________ 2. Survivability of Check Security Features in an Imaged Environment http://fstc.org/projects/new.cfm#securityfeatures In this project, participating financial institutions and partner technology companies are selecting current and proposed (next-generation) check security features. Working with participating industry partners and financial institutions, the project will test the survivability of these check security features in high-speed and low-speed capture, in both gray scale and black & white imaged environments. The result will be an independent indication as to the viability of current and proposed next-generation check security features in a truncated (imaged) environment. This project launched in October 2003, held its first in-person meeting November 18th in Charlotte, hosted by IBM, and is expected to conclude in the April 2004 timeframe. Project participants include Bank of America, Canadian Payments Association, Comerica, Federal Reserve, First Citizens, JPMorgan Chase, US Treasury, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, and Zions Bank; ASD Corp, Cheque Guard, Clarke American, Deluxe, Fiserv, Harland, IBM, and SQN Banking Systems. This project originates from the Check Truncation SIG (http://fstc.org/advisory/check-truncation.cfm) ______________ 3. Image Quality and Usability Assurance: Phase I http://fstc.org/projects/new.cfm#imagequality A group of FSTC member institutions and technology companies convened January 13th in Atlanta to develop an initial set of objectives and deliverables for a Phase I FSTC image quality initiative. The goal is to bring financial institutions together with key technology partners to better understand the current industry activities in the area of image quality, identify critical challenges yet to be addressed, and leverage the FSTC project environment as a place to undertake key collaborative development, testing, prototyping, and specification required to ultimately ensure minimum image quality assessment capabilities in centralized and distributed capture points, regardless of vendor or institution. The ultimate objective is to prevent unusable check images (and their financial exposure) from entering the payment system. A call for participation was issued February 4, and since then 22 companies have committed to pariticpate. The first in-person project meeting will be held April 2nd in San Francisco, following the FSTC/ABA/Federal Reserve/SVPCo Image Assurance and Security event March 31-April 1 at the Fairmont (http://fstc.org/meetings/next.cfm) The project is expected to run for 90 days, and conclude in June 2004. ______________ PROJECTS IN FORMATION: 1. Minimum Required Practices for Global Sourcing http://fstc.org/projects/new.cfm#offshore This primary objective of this initiative is to develop a comprehensive set of tactical minimum required practices for both financial institutions and vendors, as a baseline for the industry. With increasing regulatory interest, and a desire to collaborate to improve the overall strength of the financial industry, FSTC members have defined a series of activities for 2004 that address key gaps and opportunities shared by FSTC member institutions. Areas of interest include data privacy, business continuity, governance, safeguarding intellectual property, and others. An in-person meeting was held February 26th in Orlando, bringing our core group together with a broader industry audience to share the group's vision, as well as further refine the scope, objectives, and next steps. A call for participation has been issued, and a number of financial institutions and technology partners have committed to participate. Please contact Zach Tumin (zachary.tumin(a)fstc.org) for more information. ______________ 2. Phishing in Financial Services FSTC member-institutions have expressed an interest in understanding and addressing, at a technical level, the complex problem of phishing via both email and web sites. A core group is developing a strawman statement of financial institution requirements regarding phishing that will address issues of ease of use and acceptance, effectiveness, cost and complexity of implementation, and required industry coordination. When validated with a larger group of financial institutions and technology providers, it is the intention of these members to inventory and evaluate current vendor solutions against the set of known threat models and financial institution requirements, and to work with industry groups to prove/test/validate those solutions. For more information, please contact Zach Tumin (zachary.tumin(a)fstc.org) An FI-only project definition session is being held March 24th in New York to begin this process. ______________ 3. eBilling Self Service Through Federated Identity This proposed project would seek to bring FSTC members together to define an implementation framework for using federated identity standards such as SAML to link financial institution sites with biller self-service sites. The proposition for billers is reduced identity management costs and increased adoption, while financial institutions benefit from increased online traffic, stronger customer service, and increased use of online services. Customers will benefit from having a consolidated access point for disparate billing sites and fewer usernames and passwords to remember. A core group of financial institutions and technology companies are currently developing this concept, and developing an initial set of use cases. Also, these companies are talking to billers and banks who might participate in a pilot. We expect to be able to share more information about this project soon. ______________ 4. Biometrics in Financial Services: Assessment and Action Using as a basis the internal control objectives and practices of the ANSI Standard X9.84 - 2003, Security and Management of Biometric Data, a core group of interested FSTC members is developing a project concept to assist financial institutions in determining the viability of biometric technologies in several financial institution-specific use cases, including account openings. As currently conceived, this effort will culminate in the assessment of the current state (2004) and desired future state of biometric standardization, technologies, and business process efforts, and produce a statement of financial institution requirements and recommendations on issues of interoperability, security and management, and customer service for critical business processes. The requirements for institutions to utilize data in a standardized and privacy-aware fashion will be a important performance metric. Ultimately, the project may include the development of a reference implementation and the deployment of a pilot system to validate the reference implementation. ______________ 5. Treasury Services Integration: Data Exchange and Customer Connectivity through Web Services (on hold) http://fstc.org/projects/new.cfm#tsi As a potential Phase II following the previous Web Services for Corporate Cash Management effort, a core group of FSTC institutions and technology companies have defined key business objectives and deliverables for a discovery phase, and subsequent pilot-level project utilizing Web Services in the Treasury Services / Cash Management area. The project, as it currently stands, will seek to further develop the Phase I set of web services and associated definitions to create new and open-standards-based connectivity options between banks, and between banks and their customers. The business goals are to enable standards-based "plug-and-play" integration capabilities between institutions and customer platforms, whether ERP, Treasury Work Station (TWS), or desktop. A core group of financial institutions and technology companies has committed to launching this initiative in the second half of 2004. This project is considered on-hold until later this year. ______________ 6. A Federated Identity Implementation Framework for Secure Email (on hold) Coming from discussions in the FSTC Advisory Council Security and Infrastructure Standing Committee (SCOM) (http://fstc.org/advisory/security.cfm) FSTC members are putting plans together to create a federated identity implementation framework, with the primary application being secure email. The primary business objectives are to create interoperability for shared customers and business partners, as well as to reduce the cost of managing identity databases internally within institutions. The project would deliver a set of technical, business, and legal/regulatory definitions to create a framework for the industry to utilize in secure email and ultimately other applications. An in-person session was held January 8th in Boston, hosted by Fidelity. A revised proposal was developed coming out of this meeting, however, given the relative immaturity of secure email technology and solutions that have been selected and implemented within FSTC member institutions, the team agreed that this project should be put on hold while those decisions are made. It is expected that later in the year, a discussion about enhancing secure email through federation will be started up again. ______________ 7. Transformation to Open Mission Critical Systems The transformation of systems from higher cost or proprietary delivery to open systems is one of the most hotly debated and discussed topics in financial services IT. While there is great promise in the flexibility and efficiencies gained, there is also risk and cost. An FSTC project will soon form up to determine answers to such key questions as, "Are those transformations viable?" and "What are the costs and processes by which a successful transformation program will be run?" The vision of this initiative is to bring together financial institutions to investigate the needs, processes, best practices, technology issues, risk factors, organizational issues and lessons-learned for transformation projects which move core business processes from legacy IT assets to open systems. We will provide additional details shortly. If you are interested in joining an interest group around this topic, please contact us. ______________ ## ---------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe or unsubscribe from this elist use the subscription manager: <http://ls.fstc.org/subscriber> --- end forwarded text -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah(a)ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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