Luca App: CCC calls for a moratorium

The CCC is a mature organization and culture, there would be some clear challenges to bootstraping something similar elsewhere that wouldn't be quickly infiltrated and co-opted the way that civil liberties, environmental, and other activist organizations have. CCC (and defcon) appeared to work because they operated in a similar grey-area of risk and competence as a motorcycle club.

I've been pitching around the idea to use hackerone as a framework but restricted to local college and university programs to do bug finding in provincial/municipal public service delivery systems as a way to create a pipeline of competent public service talent, develop real civic engagement, and create the incentives within govt to build less appallingly shitty systems.

The main challenge with that is it requires a total rethinking of what government is, which is already happening organically as dev/eng people and culture builds more generational influence in govt beyond being just "IT," but that's a longer term vision. GenX doesn't code and they're still 10-15 years from retirement, but internet generation people are slowly taking the management reins.

Near term, absolutely hack your region's contact tracing apps, and if you want to really affect change, use technology and data to create and test hypothesis' to find corruption. It's going to be unpopular and even make you a target, but if you want to summarize what the cyberpunk aspect of hacker culture was, a lot of it was based on the hypothesis of there being a corrupt conspiracy running infrastructure of The System, and by learning its secrets you could become somehow more safe from it, or expose it.

It's a good question and not easy to answer in general as there a lot of different types of hackerspaces.

Some hackerspaces are more a kind of makerspace and provide expensive, large or complicated hardware like industrial laser cutters, 3D printers, embroidery machines and (electronics) workshops with soldering irons, electronic parts etc.

Other hackerspaces are focusing more on the social side and offer a space to hang out, meet and discuss with beverages (I guess mostly mate and beer). There can be talks, workshops or competitions (like CTFs) and so on.

Also providing services to the public, like repair cafes and holiday programs for kids can be a way to further engage in society to share technical knowledge.

hackerspaces.org has also extensive explanations on theory of hackerspaces: https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Theory

Do you have a link of the email correspondence?

What's the difference between this Luca app and the "official" German covid tracing app (Corona-Warn)? Or are they the same thing?

> Government procurement is so focused on the appearance of fairness and money saving that all other goals, like actually getting something that works, take a back seat.

I worked at a small 2 year college for many years. One time, my Dean I reported to was on vacation, so I had to go talk to the college president, and get him to sign a form for a $7 petty cash reimbursement for some zip ties I had bought to clean up some cabling.

One year, our President had to travel to the capital city (about 250 miles away, over the mountains) almost every other week for some budget discussions with other colleges, legislators, etc. We could have saved the taxpayers THOUSANDS of dollars by renting a modest house to use for him (and some of the other staff members that regularly traveled to the capital). But that "might" look like we were providing them with a second home, so we spent thousands more on hotels.