I have spent a good amount of time today conducting some research on “Operation Payback,” (sometimes also called “Operation Avenge Assange”) and pondering whether or not it represents a tactical toolbox that is appropriate as a response to the recent trend of government and corporate entities attempting to cut off support (financial and otherwise) from wikileaks.

(If you aren’t familiar with the background of this story, here’s some background.)

First, of course, I wanted to be on the “inside” of the story and really see the play-by-play of what was happening.  I tried to go to the publicly announced planning center, a chat room on irc.anonops.net.  Unfortunately, this domain name had also been the target of the volley of attacks that was transpiring.  However, a nice gentlemen in the #wikileaks channel of irc.freenode.net directed me to the server by IP address: 88.198.224.117.  Do have a visit with your IRC client if you are interested.

Upon arrival, I was prompted to check out #operationpayback, the central meeting spot for these hacktivists.  Once in the channel, I was astounded at the pace of the conversation – about 5-7 comments EVERY SECOND.

Most were updates on the state of the LOIC (Low-Orbit Ion Cannon), the tool of choice for taking mastercard.com down from the Internet (LOIC is, or at least was, a fairly mainstream tool for testing server defenses).  The tone was absolutely jovial – mastercard.com was down, and the mainstream media regarded the events of this chatroom as headline-worthy.

Yet, I did not get a sense of constructive, radical civic duty.  In fact it seemed to me that the average age (judging by comment maturity and grammer) was probably about 14.

I do understand how a person of a different bent might derive a bit of glee from the spectacle of the denial of service attack being coordinated.  I, however, noticed a very different sentiment unfold in my gut:

Mere destruction of existing power structures, without contemporaneous (or, for that matter, preceding) construction of alternatives is unlikely to ever result in sustainable positive change.

May I suggest to all the people who are distressed about Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, and whomever else abandoning Wikileaks that their mission needs to be to build peaceful, sustainable alternatives to Amazon, Visa, and Mastercard?

May I further suggest that this is the only truly radical use of information technology?  Destruction has been possible (and in fact normative) since the beginning of time.  Only now, however, is parallel construction possible.

Stop the temper tantrum.  Stop the blame game.  Instead, just work toward an information age where the the quasi-censorship that has characterized the industrial age is mathematically precluded at the infrastructural level.  I suspect that thanks for this work will come not only from Wikileaks (and all those who are spiritually motivated by its basic premises) but in fact also from governments and corporations too.  Everybody has an interest in the tech infrastructure working more efficiently and smoothly, and this will naturally translate to lower costs and increased availability in disadvantaged communities.

Make no mistake: I’m not happy about the treatment wikileaks is getting. But is this really the best that we can come up with as a response? Have we really run out of civil, ethical, and constructive ways to deal with these kinds of issues? If so, doesn’t that make us as bad as “them?”

I urge the young, tech-savvy people who are concerned about technological freedom: shut down LOIC, start up Eclipse and Miro, and get to work – there’s plenty to be done.

Among my personal friends, I don’t think it’s any secret that Django is currently my favorite web framework.  In particular, Django has what I believe to be the very most important element that a MVC framework can have – a solid, consistent philosophy that developers can adopt, meditate on, and integrate into their thinking as they proceed through any project.

One of the tenets of Django (albeit not a “top-level” holding like DRY, OaoO, minimal code, explicit over implicit, etc.) is that Django declines to use “Magic” unless it is overwhelmingly easier than the mundane solution that it replaces.  Django also veers toward the agnostic – meaning that one can use any naming paradigm, template strategy, URL convention, etc.

Exactly what techniques constitute “Magic” may be in the eye of the beholder, but generally we think of magic encompassing those techniques that are not part of a programming paradigm, but that work anyway “just because.”  Gnosticism, on the other hand, is pretty obvious when it rears itself: If you MUST use jQuery or you MUST name every variable drupal.something, you know that you are not working with an agnostic framework.

The SlashRoot team is currently working on a great project for Carbon Ads – a project that aims to enable small publishers to collectively sell ad space to pre-vetted, exclusive, and otherwise unattainable advertisers.  Think Adsense meets your favorite organic co-op.

Among the interesting elements to tackle in Django, as is often challenging in MVC frameworks, in the question of how to model different types of users.

The lazy (inorganic) way, of course, is to simply apply a “type” attribute to the user model and then ForeignKey each individual user class.  However, this leaves tremendous room for error.  For example (and this example in fact has come up in this project) – what if the developer creating the “admin” model has a different idea of how to track names than the developer creating the “publisher” model – may one of them thinks that the full name belongs in a single field while the other separates first and last names.  This is a major problem for any page that lists all users by real name.

To me, the most organic solution is to separate elements into two categories: Those that two or more classes of people have vs. those that only one class of people has.  That way, the attributes in the former category can be assigned to a parent class (perhaps as an optional field) while the latter can belong exclusively in a child class, on a separate database table to enhance performance.

So, how does Django treat this contingency?  With magic, I’m afraid.

The Django documentation on this point suggests using the “lower case” name of the class in question, which has two deviations from the general Django philosophy:

1) It is gnostic, plain and simple.  It assumes that you have adopted upper-case or CamelCase naming conventions for your models, and that you can use lowercase as an alternative.

2) It seems to me to be magic.  There is no *reason* why the lower-case class name should refer to the logical question of whether or not an object is in a child class of a parent model.  It just…. works.

Mind you, I can deal with both these issues.  I think that the “magic” issue is of more concern to the programming purist, because it can be genuinely confusing.  Case in point, I actually had to wonder how to access the “not magic” of this solution – although “if not someobject.somelowercaseclass” does in fact return TRUE for objects outside the child class in question, it took me some time to wrap my head around this, simply because “someobject.somelowercaseclass” is not instinctively a logical value to me – the “magic” distracted my view for a moment.

Thus, I had this interesting (and perhaps telling, I think) exchange in #django:

<jMyles> Philosophical question:  Does the ability to ask for a child class with lower-case lettering represent “magic”?  (see: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/models/#id7)

<jMyles> To rephrase my question: Is the use of a lowercase letter to inquire about a child-class part of an established programming technique?  Or is it a (rare) example of magic in Django?

<igloo_x> jMyles> what do you mean “child class”

<jMyles> igloo_x: Actually I mean child model

<jMyles> igloo_x: Like “Restaurant” becomes “restaurant” in the test in this example: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/db/models/#id7

<jMyles> igloo_x: Also, in that example, how can I ask if the object is NOT in the child class “restaurant”?

<jMyles> igloo_x: I’m looking at the third code block down from that link – “If you have a Place  that is also a Restaurant, you can get from the Place object to the Restaurant  object by using the lower-case version of the model name:”

<igloo_x> it’s magic, as far as I know. you can override it though. I think the argument is ‘related_name’ or something

<jMyles> igloo_x: OK, that’s what I thought.    And then, how can I ask if an object is NOT in that class?

<jMyles> igloo_x: ie, “if p.restaurant:” works fine, but how can I ask if it is not in that child class?

<igloo_x> i’m not sure about that, I’ve never messed with model inheritance before

<igloo_x> does “if not p.restaurant:” work though?

<jMyles> igloo_x: wow.  yes it does – mad overthinking on my part.

<igloo_x> good old python!

Can somebody please explain what Google did wrong?

They drove around with a car, taking photos of the public surroundings of their car (that’s how they make StreetView).  While so doing, they picked up and recorded whatever wireless signals were coming in to their car.

Now people are whining that they are being spied upon.

Does anybody really think that preventing this kind of conduct has anything to do with making our communities secure against unwanted surveillance?  Is this line of defense the best we’ve got?

If you stand at your doorway, yelling at the top of your lungs about many intimate, private details of your life, is it fair to accuse a passerby of illegal (or unethical) surveillance because they happen to be recording their surroundings with an audio recorder?

Do you think that members of congress will rally to your defense, accusing those same pedestrians of spying on you?

There are plenty of very secure options for wireless communication.  If you aren’t using any of them, that’s your prerogative.  If you abstain from secure practices while at the same time communicating about sensitive issues which you bizarrely regard as private, that’s your problem.

On the bigger issue of Google being a scary monster of information collection… Sure, I see your point.  While on one hand, the information they collect is, in every practice I know of, voluntary (search phrases, email contents on Gmail, advertising clicks, cookies, the Google Toolbar, and many other methods), it’s not any less scary that they know more than anybody else about the modern polity.

I’m not usually a defender of google or any other giant corporation – I’ve expressed my fair share of google skepticism.  In this case, I think they’ve actually done wrong by repeatedly apologizing, but I guess that’s a PR move.

Nevertheless, their amazing (and thankless!) gift two weeks ago of releasing the VP8 codec to the public domain under an open source license was perhaps the single most significant act of bolstering independent radical journalism in the (still short) history of website-based video delivery.  Still not as profound as the movement that Miro represents, I’ll grant, but big (and a LOT more expensive).

To my mind, Google gave us as $124.6 million dollar gift, and I think we have a responsibility to accept it in full if we want to take advantage of it. That means in turn taking full responsibility for our network presence.  If your upload stream includes poignant, radical, inspirational content encoded in a free codec for the world to cherish, good.  If your upload stream (and wireless connection) includes unencrypted content that you irrationally regard as private, bad.

I was honored to be invited to speak at a very small panel at the largest and most prestigious gathering of experts in the fields of drugs and drug policy – the drug policy alliance biennial conference. I spoke about the free software movement’s view of cognitive liberty, and why the drug policy reform movement is a natural ally for free and open source software.

….now before you jump on me about the “order of magnitude” comment with encryption – I fully realize that with increasing strength that decryption becomes several orders of magnitude more difficult, but as this was not a technology conference, I didn’t want to belabor the point.