Alex, Gonzalo, mackt

Buzz. No answer.
- Lets try the phone.
No answer. Buzz. Looking up at what we think is the apartment. Buzz. No answer.
- Maybe its the wrong address?
While standing on the other side of the street, looking up, a neighbor opens the door and we quickly run after.

Isak: “When I still was a kid I was working on more educational projects. Questions like; can I make a self replicating program that can spread through other peoples computers without anyone noticing it? It was an intriguing thought that a virus could live on without me. And it did!”

Isak has also studied molecular biology, viruses and performed genetic engineering (on bacteria) at university. The interest runs deeper than hacker graffiti.

“It was always a hard technological challenge, because of the ongoing fight with the anti-virus companies, like David and Goliath. But you were always one step ahead. You act and they react. This has never changed and applies to other kinds of hacking as well.

After a “morning” coffee we continue our conversation.

Isak: “The primary purpose was to be able to spread the virus as much as possible. Not to do any harm to the infected computers, just to spread it. The state-of-art stealth method back then was disinfecting the host program just before the virus scanner read it and infect again when the scanner was done. This didn’t work when write-protection was in effect, disabling stealth in many networks. Another disadvantage was that it that it took time, which could arouse the suspicion of an alert observer. Performance was crucial and the redirection method was much faster. The same was true for size. One non-destructive, memory resident virus I made was just 212 bytes of machine code. Therefore I created a new kind of stealth, named redirection. As far as I know, no previous virus used a similar method. The conceptual virus using it was called Blue Nine, named after the poison used in William Gibson’s cyberpunk epos Neuromancer, [link 1]. This virus returned the original code every time a scanner read the infected sections of the host program. So it looked like the perfect normal program to the virus scanner, but it still was infected. Thus it worked even when the drive was write protected. That technique, I think, has been exploited lately. Probably even in Stuxnet. One unknown source have confirmed this.”

Government leaks confirm that Stuxnet was a joint collaboration between the Israeli cyber warfare unit 8200 and the United States with the goal of stopping Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program. [link 2] [link 3]

- Do you think “virus” is a positive or a negative word?

Isak: “I think it’s a positive word as I respect all forms of life, but there are viruses doing harm to us as well, as we all know. Viruses are evolving continuously. They have been important for the development of the immune systems in our bodies as well as our computers. They do favors for us. The common cold virus, for instance, may protect us against influenza viruses. This has been suggested by the Swedish Institute for Infection Control [link 4]. This might have saved lives in the latest H1N1 influenza epidemic. It is good that virus evolution happens in small steps, so they suddenly doesn’t make a hyper-jump that wipes us out. This is the reason I think that research about viruses, with computer or human hosts, is important.”

References:

[link 1] A Technical Discussion About the Blue Nine Virus by Conzouler (November 19, 1994)

[link 2] Obama’s virus wars: mutually assured cyber-destruction

[link 3] Cyberattacks on Iran — Stuxnet and Flame

[link 4] Changing the Way the World Thinks about Computer Security

[link 3] DOES VIRAL INTERFERENCE AFFECT SPREAD OF INFLUENZA?

Calmly the river runs by a group of people preparing a BBQ. Its one of the last summer days and people seem to make the best of it. We are at the hacker space – no reconstruction place of a space station – C-base in Berlin.

E-punk meets us at the front door and takes us in to the reconstruction site. The sci-fi ‪atmosphere‬ and creativity cant be misted. The space functions around the principals of “core”, “com”, “culture”, “creactiv”, “cience”, “carbon” and “clamp”.

Many people and groups meet here for example the Freifunk (Wifi-) Community, Netzpolitik.org, Hack and Tell, Lockpickers, Go-Players and the Pirate Party Germany was established at C-base.

Looking forward to come back again and start filmning some of the great projects running under this roof – no air lock.

Photo by MeTaVoLuT1oN and C-base.

The hackerspace has its headquarters in the center of La Paz, which also is the capital of Bolivia.

The friendly hackers explained that electronic equipment is hard to come by in Bolivia because it costs a lot of money. To solve this problem the hackers have set up thin clients using one high-end computer to run several older computers from the 90ties. The Internet in Bolivia is also pretty slow and is not well developed but the government of Bolivia has plans for an Internet satellite that hopefully will spread the Internet in the mounty country. In the meanwhile the hackers are creating a wireless mesh network that will spread the Internet threw wireless technology between computers.

The hackers are very strong in influence. Recently they have won a huge battle in Bolivia persuading the government to put into law the prioritization of free and open software over proprietary software leaving some technology giants a little worried.

The hackerspace houses on 3rd Avenue in Boerum Hill upstairs from Makerbot. A drink mixing robot has become a permanent fixture at the location and a USB dead drop was installed in the brick work of the new building by artist Aram Bartholl. The weirdest thing in the hackerspace has to be the irrigation machine that looks like it will open up a Stargate at any moment.

She works on the internet and on the street through a wide range of media and outputs to understand the spaces that emerge when information, property and power collide. She is specially interested in low, open and apocalyptic technologies.

She spends way too much time blogging about the endless tension between intellectual property law and the culture of copy. Occasionally, she ends up doing a bit of civic trolling.

She has been resident artist at inCUBATE in Chicago, Timelab in Belgium and JA.Ca in Brazil (2010) and been one of the recipients of the Makers Muse Award 2011 of the Kindle Project. Geraldine was Senior Fellow at the Production Lab of Eyebeam NYC (2002-2003, 2006-2008).

Her work has been shown internationally at collective exhibitions such as Interference, Feedback and Other Options in Eyebeam (NYC), Creative Times’s Democracy in America (NYC), Secret Project Robot (NYC), State of the Art: New York at URBIS Manchester (UK), Actions: What you can do with the city at Centre for Canadian Architecture (CA), G.R.L.| F.A.T. World Summit at CREAM (Japan) Los Impolíticos at Pan Pallazo delle Arti in Napoli (Italy), DEEP NORTH at Transmediale (Berlin) and festivals such Piksel, Futuresonic, Pixelache, Conflux and Transitio.