We consider personal, professional and social aspects of what we sometimes call hacking. We start by reviewing past CCC sessions.
Science ceases to be amoral when applied. It enters the realm of the practical and is thus the concern of ethics.
Digital technology has the potential to escape from ethics when no ethical agent can predict outcomes.
The unintended behavior of bugs will reveal the true nature of the machine. It's a feature. Bringing forth. Poiesis.
Poetic code can be admired for its uniqueness rather than its utility. It can invoke original mental states. Inspire. An opportunity to become a bit like the creator in the contemplation of the artifact.
Even exploitation techniques have become an object of academic study, application, warfare. Thus the margin of technology expands.
"putting the bot back in botanics"
Sensor and effector intense closed hydroponic system. Water tanks with fish, grow beds with plants.
Accumulated experiments with feedback loops.
Food safe. Non-corrosive. Water-tight. Serviceable.
Add a face to the bot. [ ' _ ' ]
Imagining a botnet of gardens discovering new plant/animal behaviors.
How is this cool when Monsanto is evil? Scale? Consequence? Profit motive?
A child can understand votes placed in a locked box and later counted by representatives of competing parties.
Last vote counts. Safeguard against coercion.
Bug leaked content compromising one security layer. A close call. But no votes were compromised.
No consensus among voters lead to lack of political will to continue the experiment. Also change of government found new pet projects.
Difficulties: hard to monitor due to security considerations. Popular with online voters but few checked their codes. Phishing demonstration showed privacy could be compromised.
Open does not mean reviewed. Speaker was engaged for this purpose. Subversion repo. Didn't build. Complex deployment. Voting == complex. Secure == simple.
Unclear connection between docs and code. Spring injection obsfcuted. Conflating security logic from business logic. Broken security proofs due to enterprise-style mediocre coding style.
this._key = ''
Late delivery and short code stabilization periods discouraged inspection. Little international interest.
Now lost the "do it right" expertise of the project.