Gated Communities

Just after Christmas, between 27 and 30 of December a city of Hamburg, Germany hosted a 32nd edition of Chaos Communication Congress, an annual meeting of hackers, security researchers, freedom activists and tech-savvy artists. This year's theme was "Gated Communities" - from social network walled gardens, vendor locking and filter bubbles to increasingly fragmented societies through Europe and the world.

Even with its usual uncontrollable energy of over nine thousand people buzzing around a variety of stalls, workshops, talks and gatherings - this year's Congress seemed dimmed and bleak. Once mad prophets of state surveillance are now proven right by the Snowden revelations and they are not happy about that. Facebook, Google and other corporations are centralizing the Internet again, and it's becoming even harder to fight their pull. No one believes in simple solutions any longer. Quoting one of the talks:

I love heroes. I love superheroes. I love comics. But unfortunately, this is not realistic in such a situation. We need to work hard.

Katharina Nocun discussing Diaspora*

If you just want to …

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On 25th October 2015 Poland held its 8th free parliamentary elections after regaining independence. With a lot of discussion on the country's situation and the previous ruling party (the Civic Platform) clearly stepping down, I decided to make my voice heard. The following text is a translation from Polish with several sentences expanded for more clarity, created with a great help of Piotr Nowak.

EDIT: A few months before the elections a new political party, called Razem (Together) was brought to life. Their formation is completely grassroots and they made a point of not accepting any of the politicians from other parties, just activists from all over the country. Quoting Wikipedia:

The party advocates labor rights and opposes deregulation and privatisation of public services. Among its main goals are strengthening redistribution, adopting a 35-hour workweek, raising the income tax threshold to 12,000 PLN (ca. $3,200), establishing progressive corporate tax, and creating a healthcare programme funded directly from the state budget. It also wishes to completely remove special economic zones from Poland. The party's …

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Quoting Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia :

Transhumanism (abbreviated as H+ or h+) is an international cultural and intellectual movement with an eventual goal of fundamentally transforming the human condition by developing and making widely available technologies to greatly enhance human intellectual, physical, and psychological capacities.

I've been considering myself a transhumanist for several years now, working towards the transhumanist values in most activities I consciously undertook. While the initial fascination came to me from some excellent hard science-fiction novels, I learned the philosophy from Eliezer Yudkowsky's Simplified Humanism notion and LessWrong community. Very early in my activism I learned to see a strong distinction between the fiction and philopsophy, hoping instead of believing and taking action today.

I've had a pleasure of working with some excellent people in the field, inter alia Anton Kulaga, founder of Ukrainian transhumanist movement, and with his help - doctor Aubrey de Grey, the founder of SENS and a well-known biogerontology pioneer and promoter. I've seen a dozens of educational actions showing regular people the importance of longevity research, took part in …

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At the very end of the previous year I was invited by a Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw to conduct a CryptoParty at the finissage of "Privacy settings" exhibition. I'm very glad that the organizers thought about educating their guests and showing them a real face of the Internet, not only phrased as a contemporary work of art.

Since CryptoParty may mean many things - and I've attended a workshop about it during the 31C3 - it was important to have a clear vision in mind. As the form of workshop was unfavorable in the Museum's conditions: more than 40 predicted guests with almost no prior knowledge and only 90 minutes for the event - I decided to go with a lecture in four parts. I tried to design it this way so every section would build on the previous, and each was more optional for a normal user.

The first one - an introduction - answered a question: why. What is the threat? For whom? Why is it so? Naming cyber-criminals, corporations and government agencies, telling a little …

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I'm writing this article on a train, coming back from the very latest Offtopicarium, a Polish conference organized by scientists about sciences, but not exactly scientific. Held in both Polish and English (participants choose language they prefer), it's quite an intimate event, gathering no more than 25 people, 90% of whom with an active academic background.

The aim of Offtopicarium is to deal with all topics considered too 'loose' or 'in between' to be presented at a regular scientific conference. It covers various people's approaches and de-facto IS about various approaches to science. Some of the presentations contain large amounts of data - something major, on-topic conferences made us accustomed to - while others barely sketch the main idea and hope for a fruitful discussion, where any kind of hard data wouldn't be suitable.

A good example of the latter kind is a presentation about Science Communication (also Promotion and Education) by Michal Krupinski, as it painted all the contrasts between the Warsaw and Cracow approach to promoting scientific discoveries and knowledge.

On the other hand, Błażej …

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