Cell Phone Hacktivism
Tonight I dropped into the latest Hacktivism presentation, this time focusing on Cell Phone Hacks. The regular speaker had to be rescheduled, but InterAccess managed to have a couple of fill-in’s who work in media arts. I didn’t catch the two guys names, but one was involved with TorontoWireless. Either way the substitutes proved to more than adequate, especially given that they were mostly improvising.
Topics discussed included:
A mention that the Nokia 6670 Phones have built in Python interpreters, which is probably ancient history, but was news to me. Not exactly a killer feature for me, but pretty cool either way.
There was something about an installation where people could pay a small fee to create a virtual tree within an art installation, and have the proceeds go towards reforestation. An interesting juxtaposition of the virtual and the real.
Pointed out the various SMS services that allow you to send messages from the web to phones and commented on the fact that they were all a little too expensive to go crazy with. Still, if you wanted to you could get rates around $0.06 a message. While looking around I did find a list of sites that provide some free services if your interested in experimenting.
Demoed an application that accepted pictures sent via MMS and added in real-time to a visual display. The address to send the MMS to was at the e-mu.org domain, which leads to me to think Rob King who owns the site was one of the presenters.
Brought yellowarrow.net to my attention which is an interesting project to “mark” public places with user contributed stories.
Amodal.net a large-scale interactive installation that let users control a series of high powered lamps via their call phones. The photographs of the event are quite striking and makes the site worth checking out.
The more practical side of phone messaging was pointed out in a new project called Washroom Quest. The project wasn’t set for a wide scale roll out just yet, but the presenter did ask for help in filling out the database. Washroom Quest is a collection of public washrooms in the Toronto area. If you know of one that’s not in the system help them out and add it.
My mind started to wander a little bit and I wondered if anyone had created a weather proof enclosure for Wi-Fi equipment, yep. Then if it had been called Dry-Fi, nope. Feel free to use that if you are in the marketing department of a wi-fi enclosure company or the labeling department of a surplus store and you need to “fancy up” some plastic boxes.
Pointed to an article by Clay Shirky on the different types of network structures. I wasn’t familiar with Shirky before this meeting, but I think he might find a way into my permanent reading list.
Finally when the conversation had shifted more toward the topic of activism, with a healthy dose of paranoia, there was mention of a project that would sniff networks activity similar to “Carnivore“, and render the types of activities aesthetically. My notes contain the wrong URL, so if anyone knows anything about this project, I would love information on it.
The whole thing left me excited for the next Hacktivism on February 15th… Toy Hacking!