August 2015

ibm mainframe computing bitcoin hash function (slowly)

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ibm_mainframe

This animated GIF comes from Ken Shirriff's blog. Shirriff used a vintage IBM mainframe computer to compute the cryptographic "hash" functions that are the basis of bitcoin mining:

The IBM 1401 can compute a double SHA-256 hash in 80 seconds. It requires about 3000 Watts of power, roughly the same as an oven or clothes dryer. A basic IBM 1401 system sold for $125,600, which is about a million dollars in 2015 dollars. On the other hand, today you can spend $50 and get a USB stick miner with a custom ASIC integrated circuit. This USB miner performs 3.6 billion hashes per second and uses about 4 watts.

Shirriff's also produced a Mandelbrot image on the mainframe. His photos of the hand-wired guts of the IBM 1401 are fascinating.

drawing by stage (from twitter)

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stage_CJprnrbVAAAjuNi

This resembles (riffs on?) those "deep dreaming" composite fractal-like photo-drawings everyone was posting a few weeks ago. Some Google programmers came up with a script that makes morphy psychedelic images that supposedly plumb the depths of wide internet (i.e., Google Images) but seem very big on attaching dog's eyes to things. Imagine a universe of Dali-esque monstrosities sprouting hundreds of dog's eyes, or the scene in John Carpenter's The Thing where the husky splits open, saturated in rainbow colors, with extra dog's eyes, and you've pretty much got it. Stage's drawing above captures the suffocating paranoid universe of these eye-vortexes, in a slightly less robotic context, without the rainbow colors.

".art" top level domain goes to UK Creative Arts Limited

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Art F City reports that e-flux and deviantart.com lost their joint bid for .art, the so-called generic top level domain created by ICANN, the internet naming cartel.
ICANN's plan to offer specialized "not-coms" has been criticized as unnecessary at best and a protection racket at worst.
It cost $185,000 just to apply for a domain. E-flux, an art-listing-with-theory service run by artist Anton Vidokle, promised to make administration of .art broad-minded and fair if it won, but Rhizome writer Orit Gat noted that “wield[ing] a kind of centralized power ... seems incongruous not only with the egalitarian politics advanced through e-flux’s editorial, but also with the concept of the Internet as a shared resource.” [link added -tm]

The winner of the domain, UK Creative Arts Limited, plans to use it for:

the creation of an online community for artists, owners and keepers of works of art, commercial art organisations (such as galleries and auction and trading houses), not-for-profit organisations (such as museums, foundations, professional associations), supporting businesses (such as insurance, appraisal, transport) and customers and members of the general public interested in art.

That sounds kind of familiar. Going back in time, here is how e-Flux described itself when it launched in the 1990s:

The e-flux mailing list is made free for readers by a set fee paid by museums and other institutions of art to publish their press releases and other communiqués via e-flux. All information disseminated is permanently archived for reference and research. While its network is limited to public art centers and museums, e-flux offers similar platforms to commercial galleries through its art-agenda subsidiary, and to art schools and art academies through art&education, which e-flux jointly administers together with Artforum International.

This is a business model, and 17 years later it's still a business (apparently doing well enough to scrape together $185,000). Despite having "flux" in the name, what's being offered is the stability of a permanent archive. Which is a kind of power. To support e-Flux in its bid for .art, you would have to assume that (i) it would have no editorial/curatorial/gatekeeping stance in running the domain, which is impossible unless every registration is granted, or (ii) that its criteria for granting domain rights agreed with your notion of good or acceptable art. e-Flux supports many worthwhile projects (including an OptiDisc) and they'll continue to be able to do so without the added authority of deciding who has "art" appended to their names. People might actually care to have this designation, since e-Flux has spent years building a rep as a place for theory, whereas ".art" as administered by something called UK Creative Arts Limited will be seen, at least initially, as another private commercial fiefdom (i.e., of little consequence to left intellectuals). Art F City attempts to demonize the winner as the puppet of a "Russian Venture Capitalist" -- possibly a venture communist would be more acceptable?

It will be interesting to see if any cognizable editorial position emerges out of UK Creative Arts Limited's newfound "centralized power." None of this should be of any great concern since we're being told that serious art discourse has moved to Facebook.

more on radical facebook groups

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Am still mulling over Dorothy Howard's call on Rhizome for radicals to embrace Facebook and start "groups" (where users create secret or non-secret circles of "friends" within the larger Facebook ecosystem). When commenters (including yrs truly) criticized this idea, Howard responded with a veiled ad hominem argument that we were "privileged" and therefore, presumably, compromised to speak. Here is a slightly condensed version of this colloquy:

pastasauce: ...rather than roll up your sleeves and learn HTML and make your own thing, you've instead chosen to "work within the system" and create another dumb Facebook group, add all your friends to it, and wait for the likes to roll in.

tm: Pastasauce's notion of sleeve-rolling and HTML-learning (if it rises to the level of a notion above hardcore trolling) is scary for many people ("what, just put up a site and wait for people to find me?") but that direction offers a hope of independence, as opposed to Howard's "learn to embrace the system" accommodation.

howard*: I personally don't think independence should be constituted by who can code. That would be derived from the systematic opportunities given to some privileged members of society to acquire such knowledge required to participate in resistance.

tm: I've been "indie" on the web for about 15 years but I don't consider myself a "coder." It's possible to host content on the web outside of Facebook without any specialized knowledge. There are many sites looking to host content, and bots crawling all of them for searchable information.

Howard's response employs a rhetorical strategy that has been called "privilege shaming." It's difficult to combat, because it creates an absurd race to the bottom to establish that both speakers have the same "street" bona fides. Let's look closely at the phrasing. Pastasauce didn't mention "coding," he (let's assume it's a he) suggested "learning HTML" as a way to put up web content without joining Facebook. That isn't actually necessary -- plenty of sites will host you without any HTML knowledge. And in any case the HTML knowledge to create a web page consists of handful of "tags" that can be mastered in an afternoon. Nevertheless, Howard translates "one who is learning HTML" to "one who can code," a substantial leap. From there, Howard decries the coder as having a "systematic opportunity" that non-coders lack. If we were racing to the bottom, we would point out that anyone who could write the sentence "Jürgen Habermas identifies the public sphere as a historical condition emerging in the late 18th century, spurred by the merger of state and private life under capitalism concurrent with the abolishment of feudal states" probably has had educational "systemic opportunities" that the rank and file Facebook user does not have. (Howard would then have to establish that she is an autodidact who came from nothing, and yet was not "privileged" by her own pursuit of knowledge.) Ugh.
But instead let's just point out that the Facebook owners "can code" and that Howard suggests we ignore this ultimate trump card control over all discourse on Facebook. If an offending word or image suddenly disappears from Howard's Facebook group discussion she can't change it back -- she must petition her feudal overlords for redress. In order to be "street" she must treat the owners of the roads as benign and invisible. That's just not very radical.

*Update, Dec 2015: Sometime after the discussion Howard's screenname was changed to Vaughn88, so this comment is no longer attributed to "Dorothy Howard."