User:Dusan Barok

Bio

Right now I'm keen on diving into SuperCollider software; spoken written Dutch; more writing talking thinking about media culture; and playing a piano.

Running Sanchez free art server, talk to me if you like to have anything hosted!

Last years i've been researching media arts and culture in East/Central Europe in 1960s-90s.

Sites

• http://3hoursold.tumblr.com/page/4
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/51815608@N07/page2/
• http://www.last.fm/user/veriveri

Projects

FaceLeaks

Leak your friends.
Anonymously.

FaceLeaks is a Firefox/Chrome browser add-on which attaches a leak button to Facebook photos, allowing user to leak them to http://www.faceleaks.info website.

Launched in December 2010 at Rebelhuis Piet Zwart Institute student show at Ace Teleboutique in Rotterdam.

Next

12 January 2011: featured at Artzilla.org website.

22 March: the software was open-sourced and is available for forking, remaking and remixing at http://gitorious.org/faceleaks/

9 April: Add-on was reviewed and approved by Mozilla Add-ons editor and besides its add-ons gallery now it also appears in search results and categories.

14-17 April: exhibited at Enter: Datapolis, 5th art-science-technology biennale in Prague, Czech Republic.

As of April, Firefox version counted more than 400 installs.

Essays

The Web Time

Short essay considering the variable of time as the building material for web infrastructure. Submitted as a part of school application in May 2010.

Download

Sourced in, unsourced out: Leaking as the common knowledge production

Essay on Wikileaks' and Wikipedia's seemingly incompatible models of common knowledge production.

Written on November-December 2010, rewritten in May 2011.

Download

Privatising the Privacy: Trojan Horse in Free Open Source Distributed Social Platforms

The critique of social graph, written in February-May 2011.

Abstract

In recent years, social graph surfaced as the representation of how people are present on the web and how they are related to each other, on a global scale. It is generated by user activity on a wide range of social networking sites. Being offered the privacy control settings within the network, the users "perform their privacy" and voluntarily feed in the content designated solely for their peers. This creates not only "walled gardens" of closed systems, but more importantly, "privacy lock-in" for users who are left to demand protection of their personal data.

By creating a problematic private/public divide, the network owners are justified to take upon the role of protector, "privatise" the private data and enclose the social graph generated in this way. The owners extract the value and monetise these data sets particularly through direct marketing and social commerce by renting data to advertisers and social applications developers.

They also keep control over access to social graph because it serves as their competitive advantage. This process has created the asymmetric power relations, leading to establishment of an oligarchy of social graph owners, particularly Google and Microsoft-backed Facebook, who now dominate the social web.

Recent arrival of distributed/federated social networks (Diaspora, StatusNet) did not trigger the debate about implications of social graph and in most cases it was simply replicated as the network backbone. The essay concludes by questioning the potentiality of open sourcing the social graph.

Keywords

social graph, diaspora, statusnet, facebook, google, network based marketing, online advertising, social media, federated social networks

Essay

Download

Bibliography

http://www.mendeley.com/groups/1060921/social-graph/papers/title/0/

Reading notes (in .bib format): http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/~dbarok/social-graph-annotations.bib

Next

13 May 2011: Essay was presented and expanded under title "Like Powered Sensus" at Art Meets Radical Openness (Linuxwochen Linz 2011) festival within the Plutonian Striptease programme moderated by Marloes de Valk.
Talk: Download

Prototyping

• Markov Chain