Accused! ds106 on Trial

It’s been 12 or 13 years since its inception and I must say it’s kind of wild that ds106 won’t die. That’s gotta say something about how awesome it was/is/will be, right? I guess it really is #4life!

Few people have done more over the past decade to keep this course chugging along than the great Paul Bond. So, when Paul approached me with the idea of putting ds106 on trial at Reclaim Open, I was in. Paul and I have worked together over the years on a few classes, and ds106 was just one of them. We co-taught the True Crime course as well as the Internet Course at UMW, both of which were laboratory experiments in the spirit of the hallowed ds106. So when Paul framed the session as a trial we immediately went back to our True Crime roots.

Paul decided to frame the session as a sensational trial using the Aesthetic of the colonial American trials often predicated on a public display of shame and condemnation. Paul wrote the script, created the awesome trial poster above, and essentially did all the work. He was to be the accused, Martha Burtis the ornery judge, I was type-cast as the boisterous prosecutor, and the audience played the jury. It was really quite fun.

To promote the talk, Paul not only hung the poster in the main conference area during the art fair, but we also staged a short, impromptu performance wherein Paul was seated near the poster and I gathered the attention of the group loudly and started listing his crimes against ds106, while imploring attendees to join the session later that day to find this miscreant guilty of….

• The infiltration and usurpation of the ds106 course
• Unauthorized coat-tail riding
• Slothfulness in the presence of an evolving web
• Remixing without a license
• Engaging in online pirate radio broadcasts
• Promoting “blogging” and other vulgar forms of authorship
• Enabling cultural commentary through media manipulation
• Behavior unbecoming of a well ordered web

I mean, that list of abuses is pretty awesome, no? Paul is pretty awesome, and once again he delivers for ds106 because he’s definitely guilty of being #4life! You can see the entire session below:

Both the impromptu public shaming and the official trial were loose, rough, and a total blast, much in the spirit of ds106. But what was even cooler was the response from the audience calling for more art, dammit. It was even floated that the whole trial was just a ruse to re-engage some of the original ds106 crew to get the band back together. I can neither confirm nor deny any of this, but I will say after seeing what Michael Branson Smith did with the A.I. Levine session at Reclaim Open Paul, Martha, and I decided we are interested in creating a class for Spring 2024 that would essentially be a ds106 course focused on AI. Any folks interested in collaborating on such a project? Any schools willing to throw a course at it? Or have us teach a course for your campus? Let us know.

A ds106 focused on AI means we may be able to coax Dr. oblivion out of hiding to run this course. He was always a staunch champion of interrogating the contested future of digital storytelling, so it may be high time!

A New Milestone with Galaxian

While I did happen to set a personal best on the Galaxian cabinet in the bavacade as my account was being migrated to our newest shared hosting server named after that 1979 classic alien space shooter, that’s not what this post is about. This post is about the amazing work Reclaim’s sysadmin Chris Blankenship has been doing behind the scenes to get our cPanel servers running on Ubuntu. It’s a long story and Chris does an amazing job narrating why we have to move our infrastructure from Centos7 to alternative Linux distros on his blog, but the short version is they killed Centos7 and Kenny, so we have come up with alternatives over the next 18-24 months. Read Chris’s post for the bigger, longer, and uncut version of the story.

via GIPHY

The milestone the post title refers to is running a cPanel server on top of Ubuntu rather than CentOS, the shared hosting server Galaxian located in Frankfurt, Germany is doing just that, and I believe we’ll have another, Galaga, running on the West Coast of the USA. It’s a big deal because we wanted to ensure in 2023 that all new shared hosting servers were were running on Ubuntu in order to future-proof our server fleet. The upgrading of our existing infrastructure will be a big job and we will be doing it over the course of at least two years, but this moment highlights the beginning of that shift, and that is really exciting. Sometimes the work of infrastructure can be not only invisible but thankless given the only time folks are knocking on their door is when something goes wrong. So join me in celebrating the awesome work happening, as hidden as it might be, when something not only goes right, but marks a path for moving our entire fleet of servers into the future. Avanti sysadmins of the world, and avanti Reclaim!

So Your iPhone was Stolen in Milan

This statue in front of the Milan stock exchange is the last photo taken before my phone was stolen 10 minutes later—foreshadowing?

It all happened pretty fast. Antonella and I were eating ice cream in a gelatteria not far from the Duomo in Milan when a woman came up to our table with an infant on her hip asking for money while laying an 8×11 map on the table. I should’ve known right then and there. My colleague Lauren Hanks related a similar scenario where someone in Madrid tried to take her phone after laying a map on the table, and grabbing the phone while lifting the map. Lauren was quicker and smarter than me, she caught on and saved her phone. I didn’t. I was too transfixed by the infant child and the discomfort of being on the receiving end of the ask. I also had no cash so callously tried to avoid eye contact, and bam, the mother, child, and my iphone were gone in an instant.

It took me about 10 minutes to realize my phone was gone, we had moved along to a nearby bookseller’s stand, and I reached for the phone to take a picture of one of the covers and I knew what had happened almost immediately. The map on the table, my recollection of the phone there as well, my avoidance of the discomfort by turning a blind eye, it all clicked and I knew it was gone. The immediate emptiness of being robbed hit me and I did a pro forma, half-hearted trek back to the gelatteria to confirm what I already knew. How stupid? I replayed the moment of her laying the map on the table and me avoiding her at all costs over and over in my mind. Further confirmation came after recalling the moment she removed the map and the shopkeeper offered her something to eat and drink—in striking contrast to my reluctance to help—which was met with a quick dart out of the store. “I should have know then too,” I lamented, “that was the telltale sign.” But in some ways I’m happy to have been oblivious because realizing at that moment and actually chasing and confronting her would probably have been far worse.

Antonella had her phone, and given we share a family iCloud account with tools to track our devices—surveillance tech #4life—I checked to see if could find it. It was reporting as being located back in Trento, which is about 200 miles away, so that’s not right. I soon after called my tech support, namely Tommaso, who suggested that they may have turned on AirPlay from the home screen as a tactic to report a different location and trick the Find My app. This is still unclear to me, and I need to confirm, but Antonella’s phone was definitely not tracking mine, so any hope of mounting a real-time sting operation was not in the cards—again probably for the best.

So, at this point the phone is long gone and I’m still pretty bummed at my stupidity, but I also saw this as an unfortunate opportunity to give iCloud’s lost phone and backup features a live test. First, remotely lock the phone and provide a number for anyone who “finds” it to call. I did this, but after thinking on it for a bit—like 5 minutes after confirming I had a full backup from the day before in iCloud—I decided to go nuclear and set the phone to delete all data as soon as it came back online given at this point there was no doubt in my mind it was stolen.

The other things pending were calling my cell provider to block the number via the SIM card as well as making a report to the police. I called TIM and blocked the SIM and that was quick and painless. I entertained going to the police station in Milan, but I know that would mean the day was a complete loss, and we had tickets to see the “Bosch and Another Renaissance” exhibit at the Palazzo Reale Milano, so I canned the police visit. The exhibit was underwhelming, and I’m not sure that’s because my phone was stolen, or that Bosch is kind of a mess of an artist. His stuff is weird, granted, but it is also kinda flat and un-compelling once the shock and awe effect wears off, much like a lot of David Lynch’s work. I think if they framed his art as a kind of b-movie, splatter/exploitation take on the Renaissance I would be a lot more interested. But what do I know, I am just a lowly blogger who lost his phone in Milan….those bastards!

After the exhibit we were shot and decided to head back to Trento, although we did catch an amazing show on the Radio Popolare station that turned us onto the Beta Band—I’ve been listening to them pretty regularly since. Anyway, once home I decided to check the Find My app on my computer and to my surprise the phone was located on the outskirts of Milan.

Once I zoomed in I could pinpoint it near near the river Lambrato and one of those navigli (canals) that often make an appearance in the Milan polizieschi films of the 1970s I love so much. The seedy underbelly of the city playing out in the margins then and now.

Then I checked in Google’s Streetview to see what I was looking at on the ground:

Crazy, it was located near the canal, or even in the canal, which is what I was thinking. They must have realized I locked the phone and erased the data, so they tossed it in the canal. RIP phone.

But not so fast, early Monday morning I got the above email informing me the phone was being deleted. So it was not at the bottom of the canal after all. What’s more, according to Find My app the phone had moved to a new, close-by location. In fact, according to the Find My app it is still there as I write this, although at this point erased. A shell of its former self.

As of Monday I had still not reported the phone lost, and it is recommended you do that within 48 hours. I was wondering if I needed to report it or not, but a few things happened that assured me I did. Antonella started receiving messages on her phone given that was the number I initially gave in the hopeful phase I still imagined it might be found and returned. They must have recorded the number, and started sending phishing messages telling us the phone’s been found. The first was in English from a New Orleans area code and that tricky URL that is begging for a click for more details:

The next message was in Italian, and basically said the same thing, but with a different link:

At this point these people were starting to piss me off. So the next morning I went to the police station and filed a formal report, which was pretty easy, and for that I’m kinda glad I waited to do it in Trento. Small can be beautiful, or at least easier. The other  reason reporting the phone as lost with the police was important is that’s the only way to keep my old number. I had to take a copy of the police report to the local TIM store in order to re-activate the old number. So, that’s something to keep in mind—you can’t reclaim your number, at least in Italy, without a formal police report.

The next and final step at this point was restoring all my almost 40,000 images and videos and countless apps to a new phone. And, as the big middle finger that started this post suggests, every single file, image, video, app, note, contact, etc. were restored seamlessly to the new phone in minutes. That, my friends, was both awesome and a huge relief. I understand the closed, app-store ecosystem driving Apple has its definite issues, and their hardware is ridiculously expensive, but having everything restored almost immediately to a new phone and picking up where I left off after some deep angst around losing my memories certainly highlights one beautiful element of the Cloud, and while no means unique to Apple, this experience did not suck when it came to being able to pull up the image I took 10 minutes before my phone was stolen.

I was stupid. It was stolen. But all is well that ends well, at least for me, but I am still a bit haunted by the Find My map pointing to my lifeless phone on the outskirts of Milan on the banks of a series of interlocking canals that track another world where all may not always end so well.