Tag Archives: Noah Swartz

Aaron Swartz Day 2018, Art, Chelsea Manning, History, Internet Archive, Swartz-Manning VR Destination, Virtual Reality

Progress Report: The Swartz-Manning VR Museum, Art Gallery and Fun House

Updated May 30, 2018

By Lisa Rein

From “The History of Aaron Swartz Day” Museum/Art Gallery Installation. By Lisa Rein, Ryan Sternlicht, Bernice Chua, Alex Peake, Tracey Jaquith & Matteo Borri. Border Artwork: Kenneth Bryan Smith. Pixelated Aaron Artwork: Ryan Junell.

At the end of last year’s annual event (Fifth Annual Aaron Swartz Day – 2017) we decided collectively to keep the momentum going on all of our hackathon projects. Some of us had experimented with VR that weekend, and a group of us decided to keep going with our VR project.

As a result, a small team (Ryan Sternlicht, Bernice Chua, Alex Peake, Tracey Jaquith, Matteo Borri, Kenneth Bryan Smith & Ryan Junell) has been working closely with me on the first exhibit of what will be “The Swartz-Manning VR Museum, Art Gallery, and Fun House.”

We are building everything using the Unity gaming engine, and incorporating 3D art, gaming, history, and storytelling into an interactive virtual reality environment.

We will teach history and technology, while helping folks get acquainted with the basics of being in a Virtual Reality environment. We can help “newbies” get acquainted with VR, while providing entertaining and educational content.

Our hope is to become a premiere location – for artists, historians, educators and VR newbies, as VR gradually becomes more popular and enters into the mainstream – by providing an accessible, educational VR destination, and development platform, that can serve as an example to others.

The Swartz-Manning’s first exhibit will provide a detailed history of Aaron Swartz Day, including the story of how I worked with the Aaron Swartz Day community to provide friendship and support to Chelsea Manning, before she was released from military prison, in May 2017.

Noah Swartz (Aaron’s Brother) and his letter to Chelsea Manning, July 2016. From “The History of Aaron Swartz Day” Museum/Art Gallery Installation. By Lisa Rein, Ryan Sternlicht, Bernice Chua, Alex Peake, Tracey Jaquith & Matteo Borri. Border Art: Kenneth Bryan Smith.

The second set of exhibits, displayed in their own “Leary Wing” of the museum, will eventually provide a complete timeline of Dr. Timothy Leary’s life, starting with his birth in 1920. For these exhibits, we are collaborating directly with Dr. Leary’s son, Zach Leary and his Personal Archivist, Michael Horowitz.

From the “Folsom Prison Dr. Timothy Installation” By Lisa Rein, Ryan Sternlicht, Bernice Chua, Alex Peake, Tracey Jaquith & Matteo Borri. Floor Artwork: Kenneth Bryan Smith.

There will be numerous other museum and art gallery exhibits to follow, including historical artifacts such as letters, photographs, and audio/video recordings, merged with artistic installations; paintings you can step into and walk around in, to re-creations of historical rooms and locations, journals you can read through, so you can peer into the minds and thoughts of these three inspirational icons.

The Swartz-Manning VR Museum, Art Gallery, and Fun House will include four different types of installations:

1) A “traditional” kind of museum, in Virtual Reality.

“Traditional” museum exhibits (essentially, artifacts presented on walls and displays). (It seems kind of like a waste of VR to us, but we can do it, easily, and there seems to be a demand for it :-)

2) A “Fun House” version of the museum’s archival content.

The Fun House is a VR game that teaches about history while you wander around in different environments made up of the the same art and historical artifacts as the traditional version, all woven into a game, using animations and visually stimulating content and characters to create an ever-expanding game-like learning environment.

You can explore completely anonymously, or keep track of your trip, and share with others as a “flashback.” There is literally a trivia game that can be played with the “TimBot” robot character, or the player can watch videos, look through pictures, or just keep walking around looking at stuff in the house.

3) Art Gallery Installations, Platform & Templates to enable artists to create their own VR worlds.

An experimental Art Gallery platform and installations with “educational zones.” This Art Gallery platform will provide templates to enable artists to exhibit their own creations in VR easily. Artists may wish to exhibit in our gallery or greate a gallery of their own and we encourage derivative galleries – and make our templates freely available for use under a Creative Commons license.

Users can frequent our “Educational Zones” to learn how to quickly build their own VR spaces using CAD templates.These educational areas will explain and teach how the museum itself was built, step-by-step. (Complete with CAD templates.)

4) Learning Maker Technolgies and “Solar Survival” Technologies. (Coming Soon, Solarsurvival.net)

A focus on teaching “Solar Survival Technologies” – using VR and special inventions by our team members, to help teach folks that might be temporarily homeless (after a natural disaster, or just from being displaced) how to build devices such as solar cell phone chargers, or a freshly-invented “Vampire Charger,” that actually enables a cell phone to be charged safely from whatever random batteries happen to be lying around after a disaster, while protecting the phone from blowing up from a sudden power burst – for use by the homeless or after a natural disaster. (Technology courtesy of Advisory Board member Matteo Borri, who has just built a chlorophyll detector for NASA’s next MARS rover-like robot.)

We will most likely make the project available for download from the Internet Archive, and will have versions running on all platforms. Ideally, we will have multiple implementations going at first, while we conduct user testing and build out the first version of a framework.

Dr. Timothy Leary, Chelsea Manning and Aaron Swartz have more in common than you might think. All three of these people risked their freedom and their lives to make a positive difference in the world (whether they realized it at the time, or not :-) We will tell these stories, and others, while also creating an experimental art and teaching everyone VR development basics.

We are also experimenting with photogrammetry and 3D scanners, to construct 3-D models of many interesting objects from several historical archives, and also locations in nature, such as the desert.

The goal is to use a 3D scanner for some objects, and use photogrammetry “in the wild” for taking pictures of living objects. (I have a team member in the Imperial Desert, for instance, capturing wild flowers and insects there.) We are looking to partner with 3-D scanning companies and VR haptics companies, and various hardware accessory companies of all kinds. (Contact: Lisa Rein: lisa[at]lisarein.com)

I am also collaborating on the project on Tuesday nights with the folks at the Gamebridge Unityversity Meetup at Noisebridge in San Francisco, on Tuesday evenings.

See you there, if you’d like to learn more or contribute. Or email lisa[at]lisarein.com.

Thanks for taking a look and giving me your ideas.

Lisa Rein
Founder, The Swartz-Manning Museum, Art Gallery, and Fun House

Lisa Rein, Founder, Swartz-Manning VR Museum, Art Gallery, and Fun House, Co-founder of Aaron Swartz Day, Chelsea Manning’s Archivist, Co-founder, Creative Commons
(Photo: Kevin Footer – Art Design/Concept: Kenneth Bryan Smith)

 

 

Chelsea Manning, Electronic Frontier Foundation

EFF Pioneer Awards – Part One

Last week’s Pioneer Awards were absolutely amazing. I will be posting video soon, but here are some photos.

Come to this year’s Aaron Swartz Day evening event!

Lawrence Lessig & Chelsea Manning – So great finally introducing these two to each other :-) !
Noah Swartz & Brewster Kahle
Brewster Kahle & Chelsea Manning – both will be speaking at the Aaron Swartz Day evening event!
Chelsea and the EFF gang! :)
Rainey Reitman (EFF)
Dave Maass (EFF)
Cindy Cohn (Executive Director, EFF) – Cindy will be speaking at the Aaron Swartz Day Evening Event on November 4th!

Aaron Swartz Day 2016, Reform the CFAA

Lauri Love – A Call to Action to Friends in the US

As read at the Aaron Swartz Day Evening Event, on November 5, 2016, at the request of Noah Swartz                    Free Lauri Love Website

By Mustafa Al-Bassam (friend of Lauri)

Lauri Love is a computer scientist from the UK, who was a long-time friend of Aaron Swartz. He is facing extradition to the United States for various CFAA charges, including his alleged involvement in a series of online protests that followed Aaron’s persecution and untimely death. He is being pursued by the US criminal justice system for allegedly protesting abuses of that same system, with prosecutors in three US court districts accusing Mr Love of hacking into various government websites.

In July 2015, Lauri was arrested by UK officials on the request of the US government, who had issued several indictments and corresponding extradition warrants. The FBI and Department of Justice allege that Lauri has been involved in hacking into various governmental agencies, including the US Army, NASA, the Federal Reserve and the Environmental Protection Agency. Britain’s National Crime Agency had actually arrested Lauri two years before but never found enough evidence to charge him. Now he is facing extradition to face charges in the United States.

Lauri’s case bears very close resemblance to that of Gary McKinnon’s, who fought a 10 year battle against extradition to the US. Gary was accused of hacking into US military and NASA networks. Gary ultimately won after Home Secretary Theresa May blocked the extradition due to concerns over Gary’s mental health as he was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and battled with depression and anxiety.

Like Gary, Lauri is also diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome and suffers from depression and anxiety; he needs to be close to his family and needs health care that he would not be able to access in the US prison system. Human Rights Watch, reporting on the state of US prison conditions, has noted “disturbing delays in providing vital medical help” and “serious concerns about the overall quality of medical help for federal inmates.” I’m sure most of you are aware of the lack of adequate care in the US prison system, and those of you who have been following Chelsea’s case know how her recent suicide attempt resulted in being sentenced to solitary confinement. In the UK a suicidal inmate would instead be offered the help they require, rather than being punished. Lauri’s family has serious concerns about this as he has a long history of suicidal tendencies. If extradited, he would be thrust into a cell an ocean away from the support system that has sustained him.

On September 2016 a British Judge ruled in favor of extradition, passing the case to Secretary of State Amber Rudd. While Lauri can appeal to the High Court, the Secretary of State no longer has power to block the extradition on human rights grounds like in Gary’s case. This means that Rudd will have no choice to approve the extradition.

In light of this, and thanks to campaigning by the Courage Foundation and friends, 114 British Members of Parliament have recently signed a letter to Barack Obama to call on him to stop Lauri’s extradition. Support from the British public and politicians has been immense, but unfortunately there has been little attention bought to this case in the US, which is much needed.

If Lauri were to be extradited, even if he survived his time in prison awaiting trial, it’s likely that a sentence given to him by a US court would destroy his life. While in the UK it’s common for convicted hackers to return to a normal life within a few years, the US justice system could easily sentence Lauri to a nearly life long prison term, or fine him for an amount large enough that he would spend the rest of his life paying it back. His US charges would land him up to 99 years in prison.

I myself was threatened with extradition to the US by the FBI in 2011 due to my involvement in hacktivism. My case ultimately ended up being heard in the UK, and I ended up relatively unscathed having spent no time in jail, compared to my co-defendants in the US, including Barrett Brown and Jeremy Hammond, who are still in jail to this day. I do not wish for anyone else to become another victim of the disproportionate US justice system, including Lauri.

We call on friends in the US who are concerned about the unjust nature of the CFAA, the overly harsh US sentencing system and the mental health limitations of the US prison system to campaign and raise awareness for Lauri’s case. The US justice system has international consequences, and it would be extremely powerful if American citizens campaign in solidarity on behalf of international citizens in recognition of these harsh laws.

Please spread the word about Lauri’s case. You can find out more at freelauri.com. I hope that some of you will spend your time tonight talking about how to raise awareness for those, like Aaron, who find themselves at risk of being crushed under the US’s overly harsh, outdated, and misused hacking laws.

Takepart.com Articles

Op Ed By Noah Swartz: My Brother Aaron Changed the Internet Forever

My Brother Aaron Changed the Internet Forever

Noah Swartz is on the organizing team for this year’s Aaron Swartz Day and International Hackathon, which happens on November 8th, all over the world.

By Noah Swartz for Takepart.com

From the article:

So when mere months after his death Edward Snowden released his cache of internal NSA files, and we the public and the media all struggled to understand it and figure out what to do, it was hard not to miss Aaron immensely. It was a surprise of sorts seeing that I wasn’t the only one who looked to Aaron for guidance, and that I wasn’t the only one having a hard time without him. Remember when Wikipedia blacked out to protest SOPA/PIPA? A lot of people wondered why something similar didn’t happen in protest of the NSA, why something similar didn’t happen more recently in the fight for net neutrality. The answer, in large part, is because Aaron isn’t around anymore to do these things. To motivate and guide us.

In a deeply personal way Aaron lives on in me, but similarly his ideals live on in a whole crowd of organizations and people he collaborated with. Demand Progress is still running strong, with David Segal at its helm. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is still fighting for tech law reform, with Cindy Cohen as legal director and Peter Eckersley and Seth Schoen advising it on tech. The Freedom of the Press Foundation is supporting projects like SecureDrop, a tool Aaron helped develop to protect the anonymity of journalistic sources, and Fight for the Future is educating people about net neutrality.

Aaron Swartz International Hackathon website.