The future of social is personal: the potential of the personal data store

This chapter argues that technical architectures that facilitate the longitudinal, decentralised and individual-centric personal collection and curation of data will be an important, but partial, response to the pressing problem of the autonomy of the data subject, and the asymmetry of power between the subject and large scale service providers/data consumers. Towards framing the scope and role of such Personal Data Stores (PDSes), the legalistic notion of personal data is examined, and it is argued that a more inclusive, intuitive notion expresses more accurately what individuals require in order to preserve their autonomy in a data-driven world of large aggregators. Six challenges towards realising the PDS vision are set out: the requirement to store data for long periods; the difficulties of managing data for individuals; the need to reconsider the regulatory basis for third-party access to data; the need to comply with international data handling standards; the need to integrate privacy-enhancing technologies; and the need to future-proof data gathering against the evolution of social norms. The open experimental PDS platform INDX is introduced and described, as a means of beginning to address at least some of these six challenges

MAZI Deliverable Report D2.5: – Design, progress and evaluation of the Deptford CreekNet pilot (version 2)

In this deliverable, the second in a series of three, we report on progress in the Creeknet pilot. We describe progress towards tasks identified in the Description of Work (DoW) for Task 2.2, focusing on activities in Year 2 (2017: months 13-24) and look forward to Year 3. The Creeknet pilot consists of four phases. This year, our focus has been on consolidating initial contacts made in Year 1 (Phase 1), and continuing community engagement activities alongside carrying out an initial deployment of the MAZI toolkit with a number of engaged community groups and individuals (Phase 2). In the second half of the year, as the toolkit was developed and an integrated set of tool established these groups and others were invited to engage in further trials, and feedback was gathered to further inform onward development (Phase 3). We have continued with our efforts to build upon existing relationships in Deptford Creek and further afield to help us explore the different ways in which DIY networking in the broadest sense and the use of the MAZI toolkit in particular might help address local challenges. We have reassessed some of our foci through seeking out new opportunities for engagement and trialling the MAZI toolkit. A major activity was planning and running the two day MAZI London Cross-fertilisation symposium. This created the opportunity for Creeknet participants to share their experiences and engage with the other MAZI pilots, bringing together existing community contacts in Deptford Creek, and MAZI partners, and attracted new contributors. Through our activities, working with the emerging MAZI toolkit that evolved through several iterations during the year, we have better understood local circumstances and the complexity involved in the conceptualisation of ‘DIY networking’ - it cannot be assumed to be a single notion. We have identified that both social and technological concerns can restrict its uptake, and consider routes to overcoming these challenges. We provide analysis of work carried out so far, and look towards the future activities

Security Evaluation of Arduino Projects Developed by Hobbyist IoT Programmers

Arduino is an open-source electronics platform based on cheap hardware and the easy-to-use software Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Nowadays, because of its open-source nature and its simple and accessible user experience, Arduino is ubiquitous and used among hobbyist and novice programmers for Do It Yourself (DIY) projects, especially in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. Unfortunately, such diffusion comes with a price. Many developers start working on this platform without having a deep knowledge of the leading security concepts in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). Their applications, often publicly available on GitHub (or other code-sharing platforms), can be taken as examples by other developers or downloaded and used by non-expert users, spreading these issues in other projects. For these reasons, this paper aims at understanding the current landscape by analyzing a set of open-source DIY IoT projects and looking for potential security issues. Furthermore, the paper classifies those issues according to the proper security category. This study’s results offer a deeper understanding of the security concerns in Arduino projects created by hobbyist programmers and the dangers that may be faced by those who use these projects

Making Culture: 21st Century Communities of Practice

4 pagesIn this article, Darts explores intersections of technology and hackerspaces, cultural participation and knowledge generation, and collaborative maker culture. As a response to many of the community conversations that took place during the November event, Darts invites us to consider questions such as: How do we live and make meaning in this era of pervasive interconnection? How do we establish collaborative communities of practice online as well as in physical spaces? How do we make culture through shared creative activity and active shared creation

Artivis diy forest surveillance kit.

Surveillance has become ubiquitous. From video cameras in public places to Internet-enabled devices, wireless sensor networks and flying drones, privacy is becoming a scarce resource. What if, instead of resisting the use of surveillance technology, we could harness it for the public good? ARTiVIS is a research project exploring how real-time video can be used as a powerful tool for environmental awareness, activism and artistic explorations. ARTiVIS aims to create a citizen-run peer-to-peer forest surveillance network through the use of affordable open source hardware and software, such as the DIY kit we are developing both online and in community workshops

Open Aerial Map, Drones and Archaeology: The implications of using drones to contribute and share aerial data on an open data repository

The purpose of this research is to determine the potential benefits and challenges of volunteered aerial imagery by looking at OpenAerialMap (OAM) and by presenting how a repository like OAM may be applied in archaeological studies. The interviews and survey conducted in this research indicate that the main benefits of OAM are affordability, accessibility, rapid mapping and historic image preservation. Among the key challenges identified are concerns around data quality and privacy. Though most of the images on OAM are of high resolution, there is currently no way to guarantee the quality of images that people share on OAM. Similarly, there are no real safeguards against the misuse the openly available imagery. This is a prominent concern in archaeology, where open aerial images may increase the looting and destruction of heritage sites. Then again, OAM can aid in a number of ways in terms of archaeological research and it may even contribute to citizen engagement in archaeology. The research indicates that OAM is a positive endeavour that makes spatial data more accessible and provides drone users with the ability to engage in citizen science

‘Searching for District 9 in the Archives: archaeology of a transmedia Campaign’

Film marketing materials have conventionally been regarded as both ephemera and ephemeral but in a digital environment they have become increasingly significant colonising the spaces before, between and beyond the film itself. Indeed the distinctions between promotion and content have become so blurred that, arguably, marketing campaigns have become as entertaining as the films they promote, raising questions about the cultural value of such ephemera. This project set out to examine what transmedia contributes to the narrative ecology of the film and took the award winning campaign designed by the marketing agency, Trigger for Neil Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009) as a starting point. But the research did not get off to an auspicious start because shortly after the project began, the site disappeared. This paper will give an account of a media archaeological excavation to find for District 9’s web campaign. During the search archival sites encountered included institutions set up with the aim of preservation such as the Internet Archive, commercial archives such as the Webby awards as well the ‘new’ generation of web 2.0 archives – a personal blog, YouTube and social media sites. In the light of this, the paper will then reflect on what the German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst referred to as the ‘machine perspective’ and how the mechanisms of the digital archives condition the way we know things about the recent digital past. It will conclude by suggesting that these archival encounters in this research project revealed as much about the nature of digital archives as the film transmediation.Non peer reviewe