It turns out I’ve gotten suddenly and pretty miserably sick. What I assumed was a combination of new year’s hangover, caffeine withdrawal, and sleeping on a hard wood floor is actually a proper illness with headache, fever, cough, stuffed up nose. I’m trying not to let it ruin my experience, but I do feel awful. I’ve just been sleeping constantly.

The hacklab here in Malmo is called “The Research Department” and it’s a cool place. They do a lot of electronics projects and phone hacking. Strangely enough, they don’t have internet at the hacklab, because “if we had internet everyone would bug us to fix it when they broke it.” I’m posting this from a little 3G cell modem thing somebody brought.

Alright, anyway, back to sleep.

Yesterday, we had an an Alien movie marathon. Aliens is still the best one, because it’s that much more frightening seeing a crack marine squad get picked apart (“Game over, man, game over!”), plus Ripley becomes a total, uncompromising badass in that one.

My host also picked up some cool old phone equipment from a nearby electronics store to play around with. I tried to follow what was going on, but I’m really not feeling 100%. I hope tomorrow will be better, the local hackers are having a meeting at some coffee bar because their normal hackspace is being used for a punk show. I’m going to go if I feel up to it (to the hacker meeting, not the punk show. Definitely not up for a punk show.)

There was a decent article in the New York Times a couple days ago about Ubuntu.

It’s always nice to see Linux getting attention in the mainstream press, although as usual, the author doesn’t really seem to grock free software. The article is in the business section, and the author seems to have a lot of trouble with the idea that software can be something other than a product, that software development can be something other than a business. So we get quotes like the following:
“CANONICAL’S model makes turning a profit difficult.”

“All told, Canonical’s annual revenue is creeping toward $30 million, Mr. Shuttleworth said.
That figure won’t worry Microsoft.”

“Canonical’s business model seems more like charity than the next great business story.”

Also, the NYT writer completely fails to draw attention to the distinction between “free as in beer” and “free as in freedom”. I realize that the average user probably only cares about the former, but it’s the latter that really makes free software a socially significant phenomenon. It’s the difference between software that obeys its user (you) and software that obeys some company that wrote it.

First, I went to the main hospital because that seemed like the easiest place to start. I took a number and waited for about an hour at the ER, only to be told that in Sweden the ER is exclusively for serious emergencies. They told me I needed to go over to this “Vardcentralen Eden” which is some sort of clinic or doctors’ office. I didn’t know how to get there, and they told me there was no good bus line, so I took a cab, which felt like an inexcusable luxury.

The receptionist at the Vardcentralen was very nice about helping me fill out the registration paperwork, and I got to see a doctor pretty quickly. The doctor had them run a test for streptococcus bacteria, which came back negative. He quickly decided that the infection was severe enough that it needed treatment back at the hospital again.

They wrote me a referral, and I had to run down the street to buy a new Swedish SIM card so that the people at the hospital could call me and tell me when my appointment was. At this point, it was around noon, and I’d been dealing with medical stuff since 9 am. They called me and told me I should come to the hospital at 3:30 pm.

I didn’t have anything else to do, so I went back over to the hospital and tried to kill time. The only thing in English at the little hospital gift shop/newsstand was The Economist, so I tried reading that for a while and also tried to sleep a little. At around 2:30 I went and checked in.

The ear, nose and throat doctor seemed pretty decent. I had still been half-hoping to escape with just a prescription for antibiotics, but no such luck. She numbed the infected part of my throat with local anesthetic. Then, she really went to town, lancing it with needles to drain pus, and further cutting it open with a small scalpel. The whole inside of my mouth was a gory mess.

Afterwards, she gave me a prescription for antibiotics and painkillers. I went down to the pharmacy in the hospital. That was probably the worst wait. I kept having to leave to go spit in the bathroom, and I was really worried that I’d lose my spot in line. Plus, I just wanted it to be over.

Finally, I got the medicine and went back to the house of the guy I’m staying with. I feel a little bit better, but not great. I’ve taken two doses of the antibiotics so far (I’m supposed to take them 3 times a day for 10 days), so I’m hoping they’ll be effective.

Anyway, being sick while traveling is miserable. I’m sure Sweden is a perfectly nice country, but in my mind now it will forever be associated with feeling terrible. Dealing with the Swedish health care system is, similarly, an Authentic Cultural Experience I could easily have done without.

I went grocery shopping and discovered that while you can get Campbell’s soup in Sweden, you can only get mushroom, tomato and asparagus; sadly, not chicken noodle. Also, the cans are weirdly small and metric. Every company in the world seems to round down to the nearest metric size.

I promise this story goes somewhere (not necessarily anywhere interesting).

What could this be?

I settled on buying a couple cans of Campbell’s soup, for reasons of homesickness, and also some Swedish(probably?)-brand chicken soup for reasons of actual sickness. The Campbell’s soup helpfully comes with a little pull-tab for removing the lid, but not so the Knorr-brand (Knorr may actually be the Swedish word for “soup” and not a brand name, it’s slightly ambiguous).

I spent a fair amount of time searching through the unfamiliar kitchen, which contains three (3!) garlic presses but zero obvious can openers. I finally settled on the oddly shaped flange of metal pictured above as the most promising can-opener-like object.

By wedging the side notch against the rim of the can and levering the “tooth” part against the top, it’s possible to produce a puncture. But then you’re sort of stuck. There’s no way (I could find) to maintain the pressure, and the edge isn’t sharp enough to allow you to cut your way around the can. I just repeated the puncturing procedure like 20 times until I’d gone most of the way around and could peel back the lid. It took me about 10 minutes, but the payoff was a tasty bowl of soup.

Example (Yes, yes, I know there's a pull-tab!)

I’m still not really sure how to feel about this outcome (obviously, ‘less hungry’ was a first). Either I was marginally clever in improvising a decent way to open a can without a can opener, or I was incredibly stupid at figuring out how to use a piece of technology as simple as a can opener. Does anyone out there in the internet have any idea whether the metal thing is a can opener? If it’s not, what else is it? For the record, the Swedes who own the maybe-opener are uncertain themselves.

In any case, the whole subject of trying-to-open-things-with-other-things-that-weren’t-designed-for-opening-them is particularly relevant to me, since I’ve been trying to pick up lockpicking as a hobby.

Lockpicking is actually a fairly popular hobby among hackers. It appeals to many of the same sorts of impulses: analytic problem-solving, a desire to understand the inner workings of a system, curiosity about whether that system can be exploited. The canonical document on the subject is the MIT Lockpicking Guide (although MIT has been trying to disassociate itself). I read it a couple years ago, and again in the last few weeks. It’s an excellent introduction to the subject, and really drives home the point that lockpicking is at least at much a mental craft as a physical one.

In order to be able to open a lock, you really have to be able to reconstruct in your head what’s going on inside the lock. This is the aspect of lockpicking that’s kind of exciting to me, the idea of possessing some arcane knowledge that’s in and of itself powerful and slightly dangerous.

What's going on in there?

At 25C3, there was an entire section of tables devoted to lockpicking. They had tools you could borrow and lots of different locks to experiment with. They also held several workshops to teach participants how to open different kinds of locks: padlocks, door locks, handcuffs, etc. I went to one of the workshops, but I’m still very much a novice. I think I understand the theoretical underpinnings, but there’s also a tactile knack that I have not come close to developing yet.

The Research Department hacklab here in Malmö has their own nice collection of locks. I borrowed a few and poking at them has been a good way to pass the time while I was sick. So far, all I can do is set one or two pins, not very close to opening any of the locks. I’m curious whether there will be some sort of “AHA!” moment where I get the feel for it, or if it’s one of those things where you just very gradually improve at it.

Locks, locks everywhere

Ref. Number: NM/BC921245/KY17
STAATS LOTERIJ HEADQUARTERS
Lotto Winner of 1,000,000.00 Euros
Ticket number: 46939
ELECTRONIC MAIL AWARD WINNING NOTIFICATION

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We are pleased to inform you of the announcement of the winners of the STAATS LOTTERY POGRAMS
held on 13th January 2009.Your Company or your personal e-mail address is attached to winning number
ticket number: 46949 with Batch number NM/207361/WOP drew the lucky numbers 887-13-865-39-10-83,
and consequently won in the first lottery category. You have therefore been approved for a lump sum pay
out of One Million EUROS (1,000,000.00) in cash credited to file REF NO: NL/BC7765468/WJ14 and Ticket
number: 46949.

This is from total prize money of 10,000,000.00 Million Euros, shared among the Ten international winners in
this category.All participants were selected through our Microsoft computer ballot system drawn from 21,000
names, 3,000 names from each continent, as part of International “E-MAIL” Promotions Program, which is
conducted once in everyfour years for our prominent MS WORD user all over the world,and for the
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Your fund has been deposited in an escrow account with our affiliate Bank here in NETHERLAND, and
insured with your REF NO: NM/BC921245/KY17 and your E-mail address. You are to keep your ref. number
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For STAATS LOTTERY, NETHERLANDS.

There are so many funny things about this spam that I almost thought it was a joke when I first read it. First off, I’m so happy that my status as a “prominent MS WORD user all over the world,” and my
“continuos use of E-mail,” have finally paid off (especially considering I haven’t used Word in months). Also, it’s particularly ironic that the winners were chosen “through our Microsoft computer ballot system,” since they obviously scraped my email address from my website about free software. I’m not wild about Microsoft, but if they really were giving me a million euro I probably would “be happy to promote the use of E-mail and the use of MS WORD.”

Whoever’s writing this email also has a little bit of trouble with math. Their figure for the total prize money, “10,000,000.00 Million Euros” works out to 10 trillion euro (10 million millions). For reference, the 2007 GDP of the entire EU was around 14.43 trillion USD, or about 11 trillion euro. So I may not be impressed with their math skills, but I am impressed with their ability to give away 90% of the GDP of the European Union as prize money.

I am glad I’m one of the winners of the “STAATS LOTTERY POGRAMS” because being on the losing end of a pogrom would certainly suck. It’s also pretty funny that for somebody that claims to be based in the Netherlands, they write in really bad English instead of fluent Dutch (or, really, fluent English).

I’ve been trying to decide what the funniest way to mess with these people would be. I could just sign their email address up for a bunch of spam, but that’s not that creative. I kind of want to try calling the phone number they listed, but that might be expensive.

I’m thinking the best is to email them back, pretend to be very gullible, and string them along for as long as possible to waste their time/amuse myself. The only problem is I’d rather not use my real email to reply, because it’ll just invite more spam. I’ll probably have to change the “reference numbers,” too. If they’re smart, they have some sort of database of what number they spammed to each email address, and they’ll know I’m just messing with them. Based on the quality of the email, though, I’m going to assume they’re not that bright.

Also, if you enjoy laughing at spam, I highly recommend Spamusement (from which I half-stole the title of this post).

However, Europe has absolutely nothing on Japan when it comes to all-night internet places for people with no place to sleep, where they even have a name for such people, the 90s-sounding “cyber-homeless”:

Ralf Baecker, Calculating Space, 2007

The theme for the 2008 exhibition was time and ongoing processes, so most of the pieces involved motion or activity in some way. For example, the piece in the above photo is intended to be a mechanical implementation of a neural network. Weights and servo motors are connected by a network of fishing line. Microcontrollers run the servos and try to compensate for disturbances to the systems in order to reach an equilibrium.

Bill Vorn, Evil/Live 2, 2004

One of my favorite pieces was an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life using bright, rapidly changing strobe lights as a display. Besides being cool-looking, and different every time you see it (I think the initial state was randomized), this was one of the exhibits that can legitimately claim to be computer-based. Perhaps most interesting in the context of my project is the fact that the Game of Life has particular significance within the hacker community. I tried really hard to photograph a glider, but my camera was too slow.

Life in Motion

Voldemars Johansons, Aero Torrents, 2007

This one was pretty cool as well. Basically, it was just shallow illuminated tanks of water in a darkened room. Large speakers aimed at the water played tones of varying frequency and intensity. The result is a vivid demonstration of sound waves.

Kristoffer Myskja, Konspirerende Maskin (Conspiracy Machine), 2006

Kristoffer Myskja, Regel 30 (Rule 30), 2008

These were a couple interesting mechanical pieces by the same artist. The first one is modeled after an old-fashioned music box, only instead of notes, it plays spoken syllables in two voices. The result sounds like an impossible-to-understand whispered conversation. The second device punches holes in patterns in a roll of paper according to “Rule 30,” but the little placard was not clear about the content of Rule 30.

Diane Morin, Articulation, 2005

This piece featured an extensive series of pipes and shower heads interconnected with electric motors. The motors would rotate at different rates and move the pipes around. There was something very melancholy and helpless about the shower heads writhing around on the ground.

Sad Showerhead

There were a couple other pieces that are really worth mentioning, but quite difficult for me to photograph. One is Black Stain by Serina Erfjord. At first, I thought it was just a small (3 or 4 cm) black circle on the wall, and I thought it was some lame modern art thing. Then I looked closer and realized it’s actually a dot made of ferrofluid, and therefore totally awesome. Ferrofluid is a mixture of magnetically reactive particles suspended in a liquid, usually an oil of some sort. When exposed to magnetic fields, it looks really sweet. In this case, the fluid on the wall was under the influence of a dynamic electric field from an electromagnet on the other side of the wall, meaning it was continuously changing appearance, becoming more and less liquid, and generally looking cool.

The other hard-to-photograph piece was easily the most computer-related of any of the exhibits. Entitled Semiotic Investigation into Cybernetic Behavior by Jessica Field, it consisted of two different computers/robots. One was equipped with sensors that only detected motion, the other with sensors that could detect distance, but not motion. The two robots would argue and discuss with each other, and try to reach an agreement about what they were seeing. A conversation might go something like this:
Robot 1: There is no movement from the objects. I believe we are perfectly safe.
Robot 2: You fool! Until a moment ago the object was 6 meters away, now it is so close it could almost touch my eyes.

As far as I could tell, the robots never reached anything like a consensus, but their dialog was fairly entertaining. The project reminded me a little bit of the famous Robin Hood and Friar Tuck hack.

The pirates in Sweden have even created an organized political party to lobby for changes to copyright law in Sweden. Recently, the youth wing of this party, Ung Pirat (Young Pirates) received around $159,000 from the government bureau tasked with giving money to youth organizations  to encourage young people’s participation in politics. Ung Pirat is apparently the third largest youth political organization in Sweden, and the money is distributed according to membership.

Giving money to an organization that’s seen as encouraging illegal behavior was apparently quite controversial. I applaud the Swedish government for standing firm and applying objective standards when giving out the funds. There’s nothing wrong with advocating changes in copyright law. Plus, if your goal is to get young people interested in politics, it would be hard to find an issue closer to their hearts than file-sharing.

I actually have very mixed feelings about copyright infringement on peer-to-peer file networks.  On the one hand, it’s been great for raising awareness about issues of online privacy and security. Hundreds of millions of people are doing not just something they’d rather their neighbors didn’t know about, but something they could actually be penalized for in court. That perspective makes it a lot easier for those people to sympathize with Chinese bloggers, or Iranian dissidents, for instance. File sharing has also exposed how hopelessly broken our copyright laws are. Eventually, statute will bow to status quo and some sort of sane reform will have to be implemented.

On the other hand, I do believe that it should be possible to make a living by producing creative content. Being a writer, musician or artist should not be the exclusive province of the idle rich. Copyright law may be a blunt and clumsy instrument, but it has historically made this possible. Before we do away with the entire structure of copyright, we should try to ensure that a viable alternative model is in place to compensate people for creation.

With regard to software in particular, the easy availability of pirated commercial software probably significantly hurts adoption of free software alternatives. In his well-reasoned article, Windows is Free, Dave Gutteridge points out that for many people, pirating software is so easy and so automatic they never even consider price when choosing between commercial software and free software alternatives.