What i’m going to do…

Now that my research has piled up I have decided to make an attempt at Culture Jamming. After looking through all of the privacy research with regards to tracking user and keylogging etc I found that this woul dbe the easiest and legally safest one to pursue. Although I have already pointed out that my intentions are not malicious I would like to stress that whatever is produced isnt not meant to cause harm.

I’ve been brainstorming what I can do, one idea that me and aqeel came up with is to get a product like Sunny D which has loads of E numbers and isnt even Orange Juice and re-label it. I could photoshop a label then film me going in to attach the new label. Sort of like the Re-Code clip that we watched in University.

I’ve always been against the way large supermarkets are taking over from all the smaller chains. Shopping at supermarkets is destroying British agriculture and ruining the countryside. 60-70% of all food now passes through three companies; Tesco, Sainsbury and Asda. This control over the food chain allows supermarkets to determine the price they pay to farmers, with farmers forced to take that price due to there being no other buyer left in the market place. Big farmers are getting bigger to survive while small farmers are going bust, leading to farming monoculture and unemployment.

Supermarkets are owned by people who don’t live locally, or even in the same country. The money you spend there does not go back into the local economy, whereas money spent in independent shops tends to stay in the local economy.

So here is my idea after much pondering…

I’m going to re-create the Coca Cola brand label for a 500ml bottle. Film me putting the label on then getting a friend to buy the product with its new label on, I may be sneaky and put a few more labels on there and just leave them. The label shall have things which the effects of too much Cola does to your body.

Here is an exhaustive list of what Coke does:

In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.
20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get it’s hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)
40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dialate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.
45 minutes: Your body ups your dopamine production stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain. This is physically the same way heroin works, by the way.
>60 minutes: The phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in your lower intestine, providing a further boost in metabolism. This is compounded by high doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners also increasing the urinary excretion of calcium.
>60 Minutes: The caffeine’s diuretic properties come into play. (It makes you have to pee.) It is now assured that you’ll evacuate the bonded calcium, magnesium and zinc that was headed to your bones as well as sodium, electrolyte and water.
>60 minutes: As the rave inside of you dies down you’ll start to have a sugar crash. You may become irritable and/or sluggish. You’ve also now, literally, pissed away all the water that was in the Coke. But not before infusing it with valuable nutrients your body could have used for things like even having the ability to hydrate your system or build strong bones and teeth.

I’ll get a Coke bottle and start designing some labels.

Culture Jamming

Culture Jamming is a form of media activism that incorporates the use of advertising language and imagery to subvert the expected advertising messages. Culture Jamming incorporates political and cultural criticism with the conventions of advertising. American artist Barbara Kruger is one of the seminal culture jammers. As a graphic designer for magazines Kruger learnt the techniques of advertising and then began to create art work that critically analysed consumer culture, racisim, sexism and war using conventional advertising signs and symbols. Kruger’s work has been used as a template for jammers over the years, to see examples of Kruger’s work. Culture Jamming comes in many guises and accomodates a multitude of subcultural practices such as billboard alteration, media hoaxs, fake ads, fake newspapers and fake websites. Culture Jamming is also called ’semilogical guerilla warfare’. Culture Jamming has become a wide spread and popular form of media activism, it is eye catching, effective and is possible for anyone with a sense of humour and a spray can or computer.

Techniques of culture jamming include adbusting, performance art, graffiti, billboard alteration, flash mobs and hacktivism (such as cybersquatting and Google bombing).

“Media Burn,” a spectacle staged in 1975 by the performance art collective Ant Farm.
BUGAUP, an Australian group founded in 1979 and most active in the 1980s, which creatively defaced advertising billboards, especially those featuring cigarette and alcohol advertising. The group’s acronym which stands for Billboard-Utilising Graffitists Against Unhealthy Promotions, is also a pun — to “bugger up” is an Australian slang term meaning “to spoil/ruin”
Naomi Klein’s No Logo, whose section on culture jamming draws heavily on Mark Dery’s 1993 essay on culture jamming, highlights the work of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada, of Artfux and the Cicada Corps of Artists. An excerpt is in Brandweek magazine.
The Bubble Project, a street art project by Ji Lee which involves placing empty “speech bubbles” on posters and advertisements for passers by to write commentary in.
The Church of the SubGenius, a satirical religion.

A “Kill your TV” slogan with skull motif in downtown TorontoGorillaz’ “Reject False Icons” movement, encouraging the placement of stickers on pictures of “False Icons” like Ashlee Simpson and Usher. Supporters also use graffiti to spread the word.
Billboard modifications, done in the style of the original billboard, by groups (e.g., the Billboard Liberation Front) or individuals.
Modifying slogans to create political statements. For example “Just do it… or else!” was used as a modified slogan to comment on Nike’s sweat shop practices.
Google bombing, a widespread effort to purposely influence the automated association of specific keywords with results produced by internet search engines, especially Google.
The Who’s 1967 album The Who Sell Out, featuring satirical faux commercials on the cover and between the tracks.
The band Negativland’s Dispepsi album, in which recordings related in some way to soft drinks are used to comment (in a negative way) on the beverage industry and its marketing practices.
The Church of Satan’s ad featuring founder Anton Szandor LaVey holding a snake in the style of Apple Computer’s “Think Different” campaign.
The 1994 burning of £1,000,000 in cash by the K Foundation.
Sousveillance, the recording or monitoring of authority figures.
Whirl-Mart is an event that seeks to mimic and mock what they perceive as the absurdity of the shopping process, often by organising a crowd to walk around a Wal-Mart in an apparent daze for several hours, buying nothing.
The defacement of stolen (and then returned) library books by Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, for which they were imprisoned for six months in 1962. Written about in detail in John Lahr’s “Prick Up Your Ears.”

André the Giant as street artAndré the Giant Has a Posse, a street art campaign.
Kerry Against Bush a spoof political pressure group, based in Kerry, Ireland who urged voters to vote against GW Bush in the 2004 election. Their logo was a jam of a kerrygold butter logo. The website is archived here
Nike-Jam by 01.org
Stickering stop signs to create messages (e.g., “Stop War,” “Stop Eating Animals,” “Stop! Hammertime!,” etc.).
Operation Mindfuck- Outlined as various projects for Discordians to carry out which involve either defacement or sending absurd letters to people who have political power. Most notably Project Eagle which involves putting up fliers that read “Burn the polls, ye sons of freedom” on or around election day and Project Graffito (and Project Bumpersticker) which involve giving particularly Erisian slogans, such as “Your Local Police Are Armed and Dangerous”, widespread distribution.
500 Copies of the Paris Hilton’s debut album are remixed and retouched by Banksy and Danger Mouse.
Shopdropping (or Reverse Shoplifting) – The placement of art objects in public retail environments (especially large retail conglomerates).

NYCWriting messages on paper currency.
In Reno, Nevada, homemade stickers have appeared on vending machines, stating “The bill you slip/ into this slot/ supports my graft/ so thanks a lot!- Mayor Bob Cashell.”
www.NoArmy.com– a remixed version of the recruitment site, www.goarmy.com, which presents the facts missing in the Army sales pitch, and shows potential recruits what they can really expect if they enlist.

Hacktivism

Hacktivism has been recently defined by a newspaper article in the Guardian as “a highly politicised underground movement using direct action in cyberspace to attack globalisation and corporate domination of the internet”

Targets, mainly multinational corporations and political organizations, are hit with a range of electronic weapons, from viruses to email bombs, which crash websites by bombarding them with thousands of protest messages, said an article.

Privacy in the streets

The Surveillance Camera Players (SCP) is a small, informal group of people who are unconditionally opposed to the installation and use of video surveillance cameras in public places. The SCP was formed in New York City in November 1996 by two groups of friends/activists: one centered around Michael Carter, the author of the manifesto for “The Guerrilla Preprogramming of Video Surveillance Equipment” (1995), and the other around Bill Brown, fresh from the “Unabomber for President” campaign (1996). Both shared a strong interest in the theories and actions of the Situationist International, especially its use of “pranks” or detournement (diverting bland or oppressive materials for subversive purposes).

Super Vision

“A Cross-Media Performance
We are surrounded by subtle and unseen forms of surveillance of the data we create as we move through our daily lives, and at the same time our identities seem increasingly to be constituted of data. What is the relationship between who we are and the cloud of data which surrounds each one of us? In post-9/11 daily life, we have come to accept, allow, and even encourage this new post-visual form of surveillance and its constant incursions into the realm of our “selves.” What forces encourage our permissiveness and engagement in the process of collecting this data and making it public, and what will the results of it be?

SUPER VISION is a collaboration between the New York-based performance and media ensemble The Builders Association (www.thebuildersassociation.org), a company which exploits the richness of contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater, and dbox (www.dbox.com), a multidisciplinary studio whose work explores the intersection of visual arts and architecture through 3D digital media.

SUPER VISION explores the changing nature of our relationship to living in a post-private society, where personal electronic information is constantly collected and distributed. The data files collected on us circulate like extra bodies, and these “data bodies” carry stains that are harder to clean than mud or sin; from birth certificates to bad credit, every moment of activity contributes to the construction of ones own data body. These bodies, separate from our physical bodies and infinitely more accessible, exist in a “data space” which, because it is inherently more complex than the visual, remains mostly invisible.

SUPER VISION makes that space visible. It will illustrate a multi-faceted, multi-layered narrative using the language and technologies of surveillance itself. The data in which every character is immersed both surrounds the story and serves as a “trail” through it.

SUPER VISION tells three stories drawn from the datasphere:
1. As he crosses successive borders, a solitary traveler gradually is forced to reveal all of his personal information, until his identity becomes transparent, with no part of his life left outside the bounds of dataveillance.
2. A young woman, addicted to the white noise of constant connection, maintains a long-distance relationship with her Grandmother. As she makes efforts to digitally archive her Grandmothers past, the grandmother slips into senility. The young woman is left to discover what remains of her Grandmothers life and her own outside the realm of data.
3. A father covertly exploits his young son’s personal data to meet the demands of the family’s lifestyle. This ploy escalates beyond the father’s control, until he is compelled to disappear. His wife and son are left with a starkly diminished data portrait, and his escape is shadowed by the long reach of the datasphere.

SUPER VISION combines cutting-edge digital animation, new video techniques, an architectural set, electronic music, and live performance. We will use computer animation not only to create an artificial ’space’ but also to overlay information and data onto the 3D world of the theater and create an immersive environment with which the performers will interact.

Please visit www.superv.org to view the SUPER VISION concept trailer and images.” - http://thebuildersassociation.org/flash/flash.html?homepage

Keylogging

I have come across Keylogging. Its a term that is used when the input of a persons keyboard is tracked and copied using an application. These are generally used in a malicious way which costs millions every year to unsuspecting victims on the internet.

“Track activities from all computer users: data typed, sites visited, applications launched etc. With this easy-to-use spy software you will learn more about your spouse, kids, colleagues, and employees activity. 123 KeyLogger is fully hidden from its users and logs everything that is typed or viewed through the computer in a protected file. 123 Keylogger is absolutely undetectable, which means that no button or icon can be seen in the task bar and no process title is present in the Task Manager list. This spy software is able to catch all keystrokes made on your computer, log the programs that are run and closed, capture screenshots, monitor clipboard content, view active windows, program execution, web pages opened and loaded and much more.” – http://www.sharewareconnection.com/123-keylogger.htm

The site scarily uses relaxed terminology when actually tracking your employees input is a breach of their privacy (unless they are fully aware obviously).

I have installed a keylogger onto my machine and will a demonstation of it at the presentation on wednesday. This will point out how easy and very scary it is from someone to fall into the trap.

The History of Privacy

“Privacy is a fundamental human right. It underpins human dignity and other values such as freedom of association and freedom of speech. It has become one of the most important human rights of the modern age.” – http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-559062

The earliest piece of law in England which related to privacy is in 1361, the Justices of the Peace Act provided for the arrest of peeping toms and eavesdroppers.

Of course privacy is recognised in the Qur’an and in the says of Mohammed, as to it is mentioned in The Bible.

More recently, it wasnt until around the 60’s and 70’s that the interest into the right of privacy had risen. With the surveillance poterntial of powerful computer systems prompted demands for specific rules governing the collection and handling of personal information.

The first data protection act was created in Germany, 1970.

Without listing endless amounts of details about out current Data Protextion Act(1998) here is a link which has it all – http://www.opsi.gov.uk/Acts/Acts1998/ukpga_19980029_en_1

Online Predators

While researching for online privacy issues, I thought it would be a good idea to point out a few stories which I have come across. The following article is from a reporter trying to catch out pedophiles by posing as a 14 year old girl. I imagine that its on facebook as she “petted her virtual pet”.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/7171589.stm

Such a frightening thought and the way its done to lure users away from the privacy of that site. It seems like Instant Messengers like MSN have an important role in the mind of these predators. They seemingly know that its safer to use that type of content on there rather than through a website.

This is useful link if you feel that you are being victimized – http://www.media-awareness.ca/english/resources/special_initiatives/wa_resources/wa_shared/backgrounders/online_predators.cfm

The direction of the project is looking at privacy and how users seemingly give endless amounts of information away just because its a secure and legitimate website, what you dont think of at the time is that your private information is easily accessed by anyone (unless you set up the right settings). But unless your computer literate most people generally dont know how to protect themselves, one way to think of it is would your mum or dad know what they were doing? Imagine how would a young teenager know what they were doing.

Sort it!

Phishing explained

Most people associate phishing with e-mail messages that spoof, or mimic, banks, credit card companies or other business like Amazon and eBay. These messages look authentic and attempt to get victims to reveal their personal information. But e-mail messages are only one small piece of a phishing scam.

From beginning to end, the process involves:

Planning. Phishers decide which business to target and determine how to get e-mail addresses for the customers of that business. They often use the same mass-mailing and address collection techniques as spammers.
Setup. Once they know which business to spoof and who their victims are, phishers create methods for delivering the message and collecting the data. Most often, this involves e-mail addresses and a web page.
Attack. This is the step people are most familiar with — the phisher sends a phony message that appears to be from a reputable source.
Collection. Phishers record the information victims enter into web pages or popup windows.
Identity Theft and Fraud. The phishers use the information they’ve gathered to make illegal purchases or otherwise commit fraud. As many as a fourth of the victims never fully recover .

“Phishing scams began in the mid-1990s not to obtain bank or credit card information, but to get free online access. In those days, ISPs like AOL charged by the minute. Phishers would try to obtain AOL members login user id and passwords by sending e-mails appearing to come from AOL’s member services department. The fake email would ask recipients to verify their user names and passwords. The scammers would then log on, using the victims’ accounts, and run up a bill.” - http://www.consumerfraudreporting.org/phishing.php

I think it would be quite interesting to create an example of phishing for the final piece. Mimicing a website is very easy nowadays and using the users input I could hopefully save to a text file. Just like to point out that this is for know financial gain and will not be used maliciouslly it’s merely for a university project which is due in on wednesday.

Online Identity

Having an online identity is a social idenity in which online communities can recognise you, the content which you should choose to put is entirely up to you. Creating an online identity can give the user a different perpective on social networking sites. These identies can be used maliciously i.e. pedophiles to create make belief characters in which young children can talk to.

It is reported that there are countless underage users on facebook who dont actually meet the criteria of being over the age of 14. So as soon as they start communicating there are immediately breaking facebooks privacy policy.

“Facebook began life as a way of keeping US college students in touch with each other. Devised by Harvard drop-out Mark Zuckerberg, the site now accounts for 1% of all net traffic and is the sixth most visited site in the US

The social networking site is thought to have about 39 million members. Numbers have jumped since the firm removed the need to have an academic e-mail address in September 2006.” - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6980454.stm

From this something so harmless has been built into everyday life. Facebook ha now come to the point where they want to discreetly create revenue without annoying the users for example when someone list their favourite movie as Spiderman they could get a video trailer sent to them for X-Men.

So it would seem that facebook want to give their advertisers more opportunities to target individuals according to their interests, this inevitably conflicting with the users privacy.

When obtaining private data from a user this can be known as phishing. The first documented use of the word “phishing” took place in 1996. Most people believe it originated as an alternative spelling of “fishing,” as in “to fish for information.”