PyCon Day 3: Opening Plenary
Keynote: Guido van Rossum
Guido started a great programming language and I have all of the greatest respect for him. But… to be perfectly honest, his keynote addresses are always a little… underwhelming (albeit informative). So after the PyCon 5k, I didn’t exactly prioritize getting to the keynote. So, I got there late and may not have missed that much.
Glyphs ideas
- Responsible abandoning of projects
- There are 5k projects on PyPI that have been converted to to Python3
- But there are 55k projects that have not.
PEP 484
- Don’t worry, Python is not “getting types”
- We’re agreeing on a standard notation for function annotations for use by those who care (IDE’s, Google, mypy, …)
Diversity
- Python in Iraq! 50% women
- No women at the language summit :(
- Want at least two female core devs next year
Questions
“I want the first question to be from a woman or girl”
Q: (From a community dev organizer). What process can we make that helps new core devs come on board?
A: Good documentation, but not writing it and running away. Every new core dev has to give feedback and the author updates, cuts, splits, etc. Proposals could come out of this about modernizing the
Q: We don’t want new diversity because it looks good, but because we get those new perspectives. I just wanted to make that comment.
A: You are absolutely right.
Q: We look at diversity of just women, but there is a huge exclusion of non-whites (especially African Americans). People should reach out. How do we help people get to Python3 when everyone is still learning Python2. Poll.
Q: I’ve been lurking on the core-team mailing list. It’s not that scary. People are quite positive and helpful. It’s something that can be inviting.
Q: I submitted a smal patch to the XML encoding. It was a small problem and nobody cared. If I want to propose a change to the contribution process, how would I propose that and get it accepted by the community.
A: Send an e-mail to the python-dev that there’s a patch that’s up for review that hasn’t been reviewed yet. Add “for more dicussion” see the bug tracker. All core developers read the python-dev list, so they’ll be pointed at the patch that way. Few people scour the bug tracker for patches that they should be reviewing. There are so many bugs that don’t get addressed for other reasons… because they’re so obscure or there’s not an obvious solutions, etc.
Q: I recently because a core developer because of my Windows experience. We need more Windows developers.
A: Clone this guy.
Keynote: You can’t arrest an idea: inside Anonymous
with Gabriella Coleman
Anonymous are some of the most politically incorrect people in the world; some of the content of this talk may be the same.
I am an anthropologist and I study computer hackers and geeks. I study the effect that free software has had on people.
Coding Freedom. The cover of the book is DCSS, in perl. The book is an enthnography of Debian.
I did something very foolish, which was writing a second book right after
Hacker Hoaxes Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous
It’s a protest movement, a symbol for a popular revolt. A meeting ground between art and technology. Though, to the public they are anonymous, but within the group they believe very genuinely in identity and accountability. It’s really hard to define.
Within Anonymous, you feel like you’re living through a puzzle. On reader tweeted me that, “I would’ve lost my mind researching for that book.” I kind of did. It was incredibly difficult and there was lots of paranoia.
It is a set of Ideas/Iconography that are free to take. Kind of like GitHub makes it easy to fork… forking from Anonymous is very easy as well. It’s a very dynamic social scene.
This is not a new phenomena of having a name that can be used, reused, and borrowed. E.g.
- Luther Blissett
- Captain Swing (riots in the 1800s against industrial farming)
I spent an enormous amount of time on IRC. Many activities were organized (stupidly) on public channels. If you hang around long enough, they put you to work. I became their Go-for. I taught more journalists how to use IRC than probably any others.
Halfway through my research, Anonymous because less anonymous. Many got arrested and I met most of them in jail. It was much better to be on the other side of the pond. Most of those who were arrested in Brittain are not out of jail (as opposed to the 10+ year sentences in the US).
Anonymous believes in a moral responsibility to disobey laws. Anonymous Montreal DDoS’ed a police website just last night!
History of Anonymous
One person tweeted me that, “Anonymous was never supposed to be a political thing, though.” Which I got scared by, because I just wrote a book about how Anonymous is political.
Original they were supposed to just be about Internet Trolling.
E.g. “weev” who is not anonymous. He’s a troll that does so for his own fame and image.
There were some campaigns that were organized on 4chan regarding bad, bad stuff. Threatening people’s lives.
They were called the “Internet Hate Machine” by Fox News. So they just took on that identity and owned it. But 6 months later, they took a dramatic U turn and got involved in poltical activity.
Anonymous leaked a video of Tom Cruise and Scientology. The church went after publishers to sue them, but Anonymous were enjoying the video quite a bit. So the started the biggest trolling campaign of all times against the Church.
So… a handful of people went on a private IRC channel. And they made a LULZ-y video trolling the church of Scientology. Actual critics and Ex-church members approached them to let go of the trolling side of things and make it a politicial campaign against the church. So, thousands of Anonymous people came out on a single day and protested in front of churches in LA, Sydney, etc. “Operation Chanology”. Many returned week after week.
Many former Anonymous hackers were really pissed about the political turn. And took targeted physical attacks aimed at Epilepsy and endangered people lives with flashing GIFs.
“Keep Scientology Working”. The church’s philosophy of technology. “Correct” and “incorrect” technology.
Soooo, I thought that there was no way that this could possibly go beyond a protest organization of the church. It did.
In comparison to WikiLeaks, Anonymous looked like a small-time player. Wikileaks put out the video of US military attacking Reuters jounalist, the Manning Cables, and the US government pressured PayPal and Visa to stop supporing Wikileaks, which it did. And that pissed off the hackers. So that was the point when many different groups and tactics got involved all around the world.
Operation HB Gary
Brought out the hacking in a very public way, and changed the course of history of the organization.
A many who claimed to be an FBI informant claimed that he was going to release information. He got hacked, and it exposed a lot of information about plans to hack and discredit Anonymous and Wikileaks.
LulzSec. Hacked every day for 50 days.
2012-2014 trolling under the name, more or less stops.
2012 a lot of arrests. One man who was caught was flipped and helped to arrest a lot of others.
Much of the hacking moved off shore to South America.
Not the only player
A lot of geeks and hackers are taking up the political sword. Anonymous is not the only game in town. Wikileaks epitomizes the ones who are willing to take dramatic risks to expose issues.
The Pirate Party begged Anonymous to stop DDOSing, but they said “That’s what we do”. There are many groups, with many different tactics.
Edward Snowden: “What we need to do is remove the capabilities of Governments to take away those rights.”
“Nerd Scare”
The government is not exactly happy that hackers are taking political action.
The most disturbing trend is that the government is also going after journalists. Jounalist Barrett Brown was thrown in jain and threatened with a 100 year jail sentence just for sharing a link to stolen data.
He was charged with “accessory after the fact”. 64 months in jain, $900,000 fine, and the judge ruled that he was “more than merely reported the hacker’s activities, he helped organize them”.
At the same time, GCHQ had hoovered more than 70k e-mails of journalists during the same time. What is remarkable is that journalist were represented as a threat to security… slightly less so than terrorists, but slightly more so than hackers.
Xenu vs. GCHQ. We find Scientology so strange, so absurd, but it’s much more attackable. What is going on with GCHQ is absolutely frightening.
Until June 2013, I portrayed Anonymous as the funeral of my privacy. But after the leaks that spurred new technological tools for encryption, I feel like the reaper has been kept at bay. And seeing the people in this room, I’m reminded of how important Free Software is as part of that fight.
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