news – gender-in-the-middle attack

f3mhack

Another super interesting thing I found: https://f3mhack.org

The lack of women, queer and trans persons, and diversity in technological fields in general and hacking more specifically is acute. To change this state of affair, critical approaches towards technologies, the tech/hacking culture, among others are needed. Looking at gender issues is admittedly important, but we must compound it with an intersectional analysis to be truly cognisant of existing systems of oppression. An intersectional approach requires all of us to engage with the diversity of cultures, social status, sexual orientations, ethnicities and other power structures that create various forms and levels of inequality (in tech production centers, access, design, usability, hacking potential, etc.) for different individuals.

Moreover, we believe that to have more feminist and post-colonial activists and practitioners at the forefront of the use and development of liberation and (free)dom technologies requires safe spaces to ignite desires!

The FemHack will focus on doing just that: triggering this desire towards feminist and post-colonial approaches to technology that foster differences, autonomy, liberation and social resistance. To start this process of liberating ourselves from patriarchal technologies, we will need to push a bit more the boundaries of technologies.

Besides, let’s not forget that everybody is an expert in relation to the technologies they use in their everyday life. And as we consider gender as one of the most pervasive social technologies ever created, we bet that everybody has a lot to share on this topic too! Join us in creating an international global event for women, queer and trans people, feminist and post-colonial activists to learn, share and connect on technical, theoretical and performative issues with the long-term goal of liberation and autonomy. Join our forces in challenging the systems of oppression we encounter on a day-to-day basis.

We as citizens and communities continue to organize against different systems of oppression be it: the so-called “austerity” measures, financial system bankruptcy, mass surveillance, infringement on privacy rights, governmental and business appetite for our (meta) data, witch hunts to rule our bodies, criminalization of our reproductive rights, etc.

cyber-feminism

might be interesting for the ones in Athens.

For the ones in Germany!

Super cool (:

Android mobile malware attacking women activists

I found the following quite interesting, since it is the first time I see a mobile malware specifically crafted for attacking a feminist campaign

reposted from: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/20/android_malware_targets_saudi_woman_drivers/

Reactionary hacktivists have brewed up a strain of Android malware targeted against the Alsharif campaign, which encourages Saudi Arabian women to defy their country’s ban on female drivers.

Women have long been effectively banned from driving in the Middle Eastern kingdom, thanks to local interpretations of Islamic customs not shared elsewhere in the Muslim world. There is no law on women driving, as such, but anybody who wants to drive in the country needs to obtain a local driving licence – and women are not allowed to take the test.^*

A grassroots movement, dubbed the Oct 26th Driving Campaign, is fighting for the right for women to drive in Saudi Arabia. Local police have arrested women who allegedly drove around the country before uploading videos of their activities to YouTube.

In addition, the driving campaign website has been under constant attack – including defacements – from forces who would wish to see the ban kept in place.

This turn of events is perhaps not too surprising given that Saudi Arabia is a “region of the world where the penalty for hacking a website is less than the penalty for female found defying the ban on driving a vehicle,” according to mobile security researcher Irfan Asrar.

More recently, hackers who share the same patriarchal point of view have upped their attempts to mess with the car-driving-for-women movement by cooking up an Android trojan.

The malware, dubbed Hackdrive, comes disguised as an Android app to support the campaign, even featuring the icon that has come to symbolise the movement of the Oct 26th Driving Campaign – a pink car. In reality, the app is designed to spew the same hate-filled propaganda that accompanied the earlier defacement campaign, Asrar reports.

“Firstly, audio is jammed by the app repeatedly playing the audio from the YouTube video hit “No woman, no drive”[embedded below for our readers’ delight], making it impossible to listen to anything else on the device or carry out a phone conversation,” he writes.

“Additionally, a message in Arabic text is displayed similar to the defacement messages used on the hacked website.”

Routines in the malware contain the ability to scour through the contact database of compromised smartphones, harvesting names and numbers before uploading the information to a remote server. However the functionality is not turned on, something that might change with possible follow-up versions of the malware.

Asrar – whose write-up of the threat, complete with screenshots, can be found in a guest post on security researcher Graham Cluley’s blog – writes that it would be a mistake to interpret the malware as a childish prank.

“On the surface the antics used in the app and the website defacing may seem juvenile. But make no mistake, this is hate and prejudice manifested into an Android app,” he concludes.