Exchange! Congress Berlin

ermsujet_sq_foto-by-damaso_reyes

Exchange! Congress Berlin
20 October 2010, Berlin

10:00 PECHA KUCHA BRUNCH with Wolfgang Krause (art boys, Berlin), Joelle Dietrick & Owen Mundy (Florida, USA), Lilia Dragneva (KSA:K, Chisinau, Moldova), Solvita Krese (LCCA, Riga, Latvia), Barbara J. Scheuermann (Babusch, Berlin), Louise Taylor (UK), Andrew Stooke (Oliver Holt Gallery, UK), Jörn J. Burmester (Performer Stammtisch, Berlin), Club Real (Berlin).

14:00 VIDEO SCREENING (Highlights from Attitude Festival Bitola, Macedonia)

14:30 PERFORMANCES (Liverpool Performance Artist and Drag-”Queen of Culture” Mandy Romero, Sound Artist Alex Decoupigny, Performance Artist Dovrat ana Meron)

15:00 ROUND TABLE TALK with Artists and Exchange Radical Moments! Co-organizers

16:00 TEA TABLE TALKS, an encounter scenario with 12 tables and 24 chairs. Come, sit down and talk to artists, curators and organizers.

Free entry! We ask for registration. Please send email with name and subject “Exchange! Congress”

RSVP on Facebook

19:00 – 22:00 PMC EXPERIMENT: Performance Art Meets Constellation Work (this is with invitation only!)

Location:
GLS Campus Berlin
Sprachschule, AULA
Kastanienallee 82, D -10435 Berlin

Facebook’s recommended privacy settings should emphasize more not less

Facebook’s “Privacy Settings” always seem to be a work in progress. One thing they do consistently is default to less privacy overall, thus more sharing of your information on their site. For a website that depends on user-generated content the motivation to encourage sharing is clear enough. Still, why do they use the word “privacy” if they’re not actually embracing the idea?

For example, a recent update introduces a table with degrees of privacy from less to more (left to right). Types of data are listed in rows, while access is shown in the columns, with Everyone to Friends Only, again left to right.

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Curious about what Facebook “Recommended” settings were, I clicked and am sharing the screenshot below. I am not surprised to see that they wish me to open-up all content I generate; status messages, posts, images, etc. and discourage allowing anyone I don’t know to comment on posts (probably as spam prevention).

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I have been thinking about privacy quite a bit this week, developing ideas for what next to do with Give Me My Data, and providing an interview about social media for Naked on Pluto (along with the likes of Marc Garrett and Geert Lovink). Plus I went to see the “geek hero story” The Social Network at the Babylon Cinema last night.

Anyway, after all this thinking about Facebook’s past, I’m curious about its future, and how it will continue to try to hold on to the #1 social networking website position that Friendster and MySpace lost so quickly. The API, games, etc could be expected, but the Facebook Connect tools that are so prevalent now, even on Yelp, a site I figured could make it without schlepping, were a surprise.

Facebook Connect, a jquery “widget” that allows you to login to other websites using your Facebook ID, is clever and eerie at once. It allows Facebook to track you when you are not even on their site, and make sure you stay loyal. If that sounds sinister, well it is. What other purpose could there be for making available a service with the single purpose of mediating every interaction or bit of content you add to the web? It seems at first like OpenID, and it is, except that its run by a multi-billion dollar social media corporation.

How to install Scrapy with MacPorts (full version)

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Here is a step-by-step explaining how I got Scrapy running on my MacBook Pro 10.5 using MacPorts to install Python and all required libraries (libxml2, libxsit, etc.). The following has been tested on two separate machines with Scrapy .10.

Many thanks to users here who shared some helpful amendments to the default installation guide. My original intention was to post this at stackoverflow, but their instructions discourage posting issues that have already been answered so here it is…

1. Install Xcode with options for command line development (a.k.a. “Unix Development”). This requires a free registration.

2. Install MacPorts

3. Confirm and update MacPorts

$ sudo port -v selfupdate

4. “Add the following to /opt/local/etc/macports/variants.conf to prevent downloading the entire unix library with the next commands”

+bash_completion +quartz +ssl +no_x11 +no_neon +no_tkinter +universal +libyaml -scientific

5. Install Python

$ sudo port install python26

If for any reason you forgot to add the above exceptions, then cancel the install and do a “clean” to delete all the intermediary files MacPorts created. Then edit the variants.conf file (above) and install Python.

$ sudo port clean python26

6. Change the reference to the new Python installation

If you type the following you will see a reference to the default installation of Python on MacOS 10.5 (Python2.5).

$ which python

You should see this

/usr/bin/python

To change this reference to the MacPorts installation, first install python_select

$ sudo port install python_select

Then use python_select to change the $ python reference to the Python version installed above.

$ sudo python_select python26

UPDATE 2011-12-07: python_select has been replaced by port select so…

To see the possible pythons run

port select --list python

From that list choose the one you want and change to it e.g.

sudo port select --set python python26

Now if you type

$ which python

You should see

/opt/local/bin/python

which is a symlink to

/opt/local/bin/python2.6

Typing the below will now launch the Python2.6 shell editor (ctl + d to exit)

$ python

7. Install required libraries for Scrapy

$ sudo port install py26-libxml2 py26-twisted py26-openssl py26-simplejson

Other posts recommended installing py26-setuptools but it kept returning with with errors, so I skipped it.

8. “Test that the correct architectures are present:

$ file `which python`

The single quotes should be backticks, which should spit out (for intel macs running 10.5):”

/opt/local/bin/python: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/opt/local/bin/python (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386
/opt/local/bin/python (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O executable ppc

9. Confirm libxml2 library is installed (those really are single quotes). If there are no errors it imported successfully.

$ python -c 'import libxml2'

10. Install Scrapy

$ sudo /opt/local/bin/easy_install-2.6 scrapy

11. Make the scrapy command available in the shell

$ sudo ln -s /opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/bin/scrapy /usr/local/bin/scrapy

One caveat for the above, on a fresh computer, you might not have a /usr/local/bin directory so you will need to create it before you can run the above to create the symlink.

$ sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin

13. Finally, type either of the following to confirm that Scrapy is indeed running on your system.

$ python scrapy

$ scrapy

A final final bit… I also installed ipython from Macports for use with Scrapy

sudo port install py26-ipython

Make a symbolic link
sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/ipython-2.6 /usr/local/bin/ipython

An article on ipython
http://onlamp.com/pub/a/python/2005/01/27/ipython.html

ipython tutorial
http://ipython.scipy.org/doc/manual/html/interactive/tutorial.html

Was weiß Facebook über mich?, in Bild

Picture 7

The German newspaper, Bild published another article mentioning Give Me My Data today.

Was weiß Facebook über mich? or in English, Facebook knows what about me?

“About 500 million people worldwide use the social network Facebook to stay in touch with friends. In Germany, almost 9.8 million people are registered with Facebook. Many users are worried about their privacy. BILD.de answered the important questions…”