Your hosts Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala look back on three seasons of this podcast panel format. How did this get started, how does it work, and what has been fun so far?

This episode is a live recording from Hacker Cultures! The Podcast Panel Season 3 panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology and Society for Social Studies of Science EASST/4S 2024 conference in Amsterdam on 2024-07-16. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for funding.

Who is operating the Tor network, and why? Victoria Neumann from Lancaster University tells us.

Tor (acronym for The Onion Router) is one of the most famous projects focusing on online privacy and anonymity. Using the Tor Browser, one can access clear net websites without being tracked or traced or so-called "onion services (formerly hidden services)," which can only be accessed via the Tor network. Nowadays widely known for darknet marketplaces, it is also used by journalists, human rights and digital activists, spies, hackers, and ordinary people to circumvent state surveillance, internet blockades and to stay anonymous.

Originating from military research, the Tor Project is non-profit and open source after being taken over by hacktivists in the in the early 00s. Today the network has 6,000+ volunteer-run nodes called "relays." When the network began, relay operators were friends, colleagues, and collaborators of the original Tor developers. Over the years, grown beyond trusted/known collaborators to thousands of people and organizations, many of whom the Tor Project does not know. This has led both to a more diverse and hence resilient network, but it also made it easier for malicious actors to join.

Who are the volunteers behind the network and what motivates them? Very little research has been conducted so far focusing on Tor relay operators. We conducted two surveys and 20 interviews to find out more about demographics, privacy values, trust, network health and community.

This episode is a live recording from Hacker Cultures! The Podcast Panel Season 3 panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology and Society for Social Studies of Science EASST/4S 2024 conference in Amsterdam on 2024-07-16. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for funding.

We are happy to hear back from Sylvain Besençon from University of Fribourg, who wraps up research we learned about in 2020 about caring for open source cryptography.

This paper suggests a shift from information security as a matter of war to security as matter of care. Based on my 6-year long PhD research among a community of open source hackers and developers maintaining a crypto protocol, this paper deconstructs what I call the “warlike crypto imaginary” that often represents cryptography as a fascinating totem pole in the form of a blue lock. This paper tackles the rhetoric of war and violence that shapes our binary understanding of information security and proposes the work of making and unmaking security as a question of care, collaboration and negotiations. In other words, rather than portraying hackers and security experts as lonely teenagers wearing hoodies and deemed to break things, brute force passwords, and penetrate systems, this paper looks at how security people keep collaborating one with another to fixing things that never cease to break.

Inspired by the feminist STS field, I look for a “different voice” (Gilligan, 1982) through an ethnographic case study focused on the maintenance of an old crypto protocol called Pretty Good Privacy (PGP). PGP was developed in 1991 by an antinuclear activist to protect emails from being spied on. Since then, and despite many controversies, different generations of coders have been maintaining this piece of technology for more than three decades. Their persistent, engaged and humble tinkering let me identify values that steer the community towards careful and dedicated practices of maintenance, long-term collaborations, negotiations of compromises, and affective attachment to the technology.

This episode is a live recording from Hacker Cultures! The Podcast Panel Season 3 panel organized at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology and Society for Social Studies of Science EASST/4S 2024 conference in Amsterdam on 2024-07-16. The hosts are Paula Bialski, Andreas Bischof and Mace Ojala. Audio production by Heights Beats at Hotmilk Records, who also produced the theme track. We are grateful for Chemnitz University of Technology for funding.