<nettime> Micz Flor, "Hear me out" - Free Radio Linux

["Steve Dietz" <steve.dietz@walkerart.org>]

Hear me out
Free Radio Linux broadcasts the Linux sources on air and online
Micz Flor

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Flor's essay is written for r a d I o q u a l i a's "Free Radio Linux,"
which was commissioned by Gallery9/Walker Art Center and is presented as
part of Open_Source_Art_Hack.
http://www.netartcommons.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/12/038213&mode=thread
http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/
German version at http://crossfade.walkerart.org
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Every community deserves a radio. And every community gets the station it
deserves. "Free Radio Linux"[1] is a new station on the map, catering to a
number of contemporary interest groups, such as the free software advocates,
the net.radio digerati, the Open Source community and the new-media art
crowd.

In a unique blend of contemporary academic and legal debates as well as
technological possibilities, "Free Radio Linux" is formulating questions to
do with the relation of language and code, technology and art, the history
of community radio and computers, as well as the battle of freedom of speech
and copyright protection. And how is it doing it? Simply by reading
thousands of lines of source code on the air and on the web.

In "Free Radio Linux", the entire source code of the Linux kernel[2] will be
webcast over the Internet. A speech synthesizer will convert into talk radio
the 4,141,432 lines of code, which will take about 600 days[3] to read. From
a London flat, the sonic entrepreneurs behind the project--r  a  d  i  o  q
u  a  l  i a--will feed the computer voice via a standard cable connection
to the streaming media server Montevideo in Amsterdam, from where it will be
made available to whoever wants to listen in.[4]

On its first day of webcasting, February 3, 2002 (the fourth anniversary of
the term Open Source), "Free Radio Linux" proved to hit a nerve. With more
than 300,000 visitors on the first day, the server delivered one gigabyte of
data to listeners; this refers to the text only and excludes the audio
stream. On the same day, two more servers offered to mirror the stream,
which is lucky as it would be hard for one server alone to cope with this
level of popular demand.

"I don't think the chief virtue of a language is beauty"[5]

This spectacular reception of the new community station on the block is all
the more surprising given that listening to the "spectacle" itself turns out
to be a rather sobering experience. Semantic entities such as "struct
sigframe underscore ia32"[6] really do not appeal to a wide audience. In
fact, it is hard to believe they would appeal even to the core of the Linux
developers community.

But "Free Radio Linux" is out there to be heard. And it is not even limited
to the Net alone. Various smaller and independent--let's say
experimental--stations decided to pick up parts of the audio stream and
rebroadcast the voice over their local radio frequencies.[7] Which is fair
enough, given the kind of programs you receive these days to fill the void
of the signal, featuring loops of anything from open fireplaces to live
satellite images, aquariums, cameras mounted on trains, webcams from around
the world, and so on.

Why listen to thousands and thousands of lines of computer code? It is a
reasonable question. A reasonable answer would be to decide only after
having listened to them. Reading out the sources adds an aesthetic quality
to the code that it obviously was not intended to possess in the first
place. The code was, after all, meant to be configured and compiled into a
binary format that can run on certain computers. But in "Free Radio Linux"
the code is shifted away from this context and introduced into another
universe altogether: radio. By stressing the fact that code is a human
invention and does have language-like features, "Free Radio Linux"
foregrounds an aesthetic quality of the code that has been hidden inside its
rule set.

The strategy of dislocating a set of rules or categories from their initial
purpose and implementing them in another context is an interesting
conceptual tool. Creating a different sensual experience by forcing this
shift has been used in various forms. Early examples of this mechanism would
be Bach's use of the notes B-A-C-H in his work--widely applauded by
mathematicians and programmers alike--or Mozart's use of the notes
C-A-F-F-E-E in a children's song on coffee, which is widely criticized by
cultural theorists, but for different reasons.

To use computer code as a set of rules for a similar purpose is to play in
the same league. Code itself is a human creation and far from random. In
fact, programmers do speak of beautiful code, even though this would usually
refer to the creative usage of the code's rules to achieve a certain aim.

But programming languages and the aesthetics of digital systems have had an
immense influence on contemporary poetics, music, and writing. Net.art
projects such as jodi.org[8] illustrate how this influence can develop into
its own aesthetic. "Free Radio Linux" places itself in proximity to such
projects, specifically referring to net.artist Vuk Cosic,[9] who was
essential in establishing ASCII art as a genre when he converted the porn
movie Deep Throat frame by frame into ASCII images, to be reassembled into a
movie.[10]

Besides the clear influence of computer aesthetics and code on cultural
production[11], the attraction of the "Free Radio Linux" project lies more
in the cultural currency surrounding Linux and the Open Source movement
today. The language being read out does not appeal as such, but stands for a
wider context that has entered the cultural mainstream. In connection to
another Open Source project, Larry Wall, linguist and creator of the
programming language Perl, has summarized this connection:
A language is not a set of syntax rules. It is not just a set of semantics.
It's the entire culture surrounding the language itself. So part of the
cultural context in which you analyze a language includes all the
personalities and people involved--how everybody sees the language, how they
propagate the language to other people, how it gets taught, the attitudes of
people who are helping each other learn the language--all of this goes into
the pot of context.[12]
"the memory management can be a bitch"[13]

Listening to the "Free Radio Linux" audio stream can be a tiring experience.
At irregular intervals, however, the monotonous flow of commands, variables,
and punctuation is interrupted by coherent sentences. Such little passages
are usually preempted by "slash asterisk" and constitute comments that are
written inside the code to make it easier for other programmers to
understand what the code is actually intended to do--and are a good example
of the cultural context surrounding the programming languages Wall
describes.

Comments placed inside source code vary in degrees of directness and
intention. "Fork is rather simple, once you get the hang of it, but the
memory management can be a bitch" is a concrete statement in the fork.c
code, apparently written by Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself. On the
other hand, this statement from ia32_support.c really excites only the
in-crowd: "We never change the TSS and LDT descriptors, so we can share them
across all CPUs."

To this extent, reading source code out line by line, "Free Radio Linux"
manages to achieve something that could not be achieved in any other way:
The audio stream makes audible the silent comments that developers wrote in
to communicate among each other. These are discussions and experiences
living within the code that would never see the light of day if not read out
loud.

"the good ol' days when I was recording ZX Spectrum games played on
radio"[14]

Besides the aesthetic pleasure of listening to nearly two years of Linux
code on the radio, transmitting code over radio broadcasts can also serve as
a different way of distributing software. And if it can be done, it usually
has been--as is the case here.

In the late seventies and early eighties, pirate broadcasters would exploit
the fact that in the early days many computers would store and retrieve code
by using audiotapes. The ZX Spectrum is probably the most popular home
computer using this technology. Broadcasting such an audio signal allowed
listeners to tape the software and load it into their computers. Systems
employing different ways of storing data would require special software to
modulate it into audio signals, which would then be demodulated by the users
at the receiving end.

One of the first stations to broadcast computer code was the Dutch station
NOS in 1979-80. In its program Hobbyscoop[15], the station would deliver
software for specific computers whose storage methods were acoustic.[16] In
the United Kingdom, Radio West in Bristol and Radio Victory in Portsmouth
were doing the same for their regional communities. The idea was so
successful that even the BBC decided to go along with the idea and launched
the Chip Shop[17] in the mid-eighties.[18]

The limitations of early "code stations" can be boiled down to the fact that
each computer had its own way of translating source code into audio. This
generated an artificial distinction, as many computers were using the same
programming language (BASIC) and the source code itself could in theory be
used across a number of computers. To overcome the obstacle, a specific
program--Basicode[19]--was invented. It ran on many platforms and made radio
transmissions accessible to every computer running it.[20]

To bring this little excursion back to "Free Radio Linux", the analogy
between audio streaming today and software over the air in the eighties is
based on a similar paradigm of reaching a variety of platforms with one data
stream.

The conversion of an audio signal into data requires a piece of software
similar in character to Basicode. Two widely known formats used on the web
are RealMedia and MP3, both of which are proprietary standards (meaning that
the actual code is owned by private companies).[21] For its audio stream,
"Free Radio Linux" uses the Open Source codec Ogg Vorbis[22], which is an
alternative audio format published under a nonproprietary license. To the
ordinary listener, this difference is not audible. Given the fact that
proprietary standards are not open, however, they require the availability
of a player if the data stream is to be translated back into audible
information. Using a proprietary standard is not unlike locking away your
belongings and trusting someone with the key.[23] If such a private company
went bust, all the content available in its format would slowly become
inaccessible.

Being in sync with the Open Source concept, today Ogg Vorbis might therefore
be the best candidate to assure the kind of interoperability that Basicode
offered in its day.

"why publish an entire book ... of boring source code"[24]

Listening to thousands of boring lines of source code on "Free Radio Linux"
might be only a slightly less numbing experience than reading thousands of
boring lines of code in a book. In both cases, the medium chosen to carry
the text seems inadequate.

But shifting the context alters more than the code's aesthetic quality.
Putting code on air stresses the fact that we are dealing with language
after all. Software is not merely a combination of tools on a hard disk;
software is language, an assumption with legal consequences.

Over the past years, a great deal of juridical effort has been spent on
establishing a clear distinction between "language" and "code." The mere
fact that the U.S. legal system might dedicate its attention to such a
linguistic discourse indicates a serious political and economic interest in
the issue.

The political dimension becomes instantly apparent when taking a closer look
at the code that triggered a previous legal battle. This was Pretty Good
Privacy (PGP), a powerful encryption software that allows secure
communication for anyone on the Internet, without any third party
intercepting, not even the government of the United States.

In June 1991, Philip Zimmermann's encryption software PGP was made publicly
available as freeware on the Internet. As the name suggests, Pretty Good
Privacy was developed to secure privacy in digital networks, which the
software's author believed to be a fundamental right.[25]

Needless to say so shortly after the Gulf War, the U.S. government had other
plans. In 1991, the Senate was discussing Bill 266, which had been designed
to force manufacturers of secure communications to provide a hidden access
point, a back door, by which the federal government could retrieve
plain-text versions of encrypted messages.[26] As it was becoming clear that
this might be the reality of the Internet in the near future, Zimmermann
decided to act and publish the software before it was too late.[27] Soon
afterward, he became the target of a criminal investigation by the U.S.
Customs Service.

The case against publishing PGP on the Internet was based largely on the
notion that PGP's potential global availability constituted a security
threat. Exporting strong encryption software was similar to exporting
munitions, it was decided under the International Traffic in Arms
Regulations. Since the main accusation against Zimmermann was based on this
notion of international export, PGP developers looked into ways of
distributing the source code across borders legally.

To cut a long story short: The source code was printed by the respectable
institution MIT under the title PGP: Source Code and Internals. It was
published in March 1995, priced at $55 and with the ISBN 0-262-24039-4. The
book is out of print today, which does not matter much as the only relevant
delivery of the book was to the University of Oslo.

The font used is also capable of being scanned by computer scanners. If the
source code were scanned in and then run through a compiler program, it
would be translated into an executable application or object code, which
could then be read and executed by a computer to encrypt text and binary
files.[28]

With a small tweak in the medium by which the source code was delivered, the
legal framework prohibiting its use had become unhinged. It was no longer
the "weapon" it had represented in digital form--merely language in a book.
Needless to say, the program was successfully compiled at the receiver's
end. And nearly a year later in January 1996, the case against Zimmermann
was dropped.

"is there a point in distinguishing between source code and English
prose"[29]

The relation between code and language is not resolved yet. In fact, it is
again being debated in and outside the U.S. courts in relation to a short
piece of code published under the name of DeCSS, which effectively
undermines DVDs' copyright protection. DeCSS means that playing DVDs does
not require any customized hard- or software solution. Instead, they can be
viewed on any machine using the DeCSS code.

The case against those who developed and/or published the DeCSS program and
source code still continues today. One of the remaining questions, since the
case against Zimmermann, is to what extent source code is protected by the
First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In other words: Is code speech?

Listening to "Free Radio Linux", which runs by virtue of speech synthesis,
it seems to be speech after all. Still, it is clear that its 4,141,432 lines
of code could in theory be translated back into the code's digital form and
compiled into the kernel. Similarly, this could be done using scanned
versions of Zimmermann's book.

In both the Linux kernel and PGP source code cases, we are dealing with a
large amount of data. In contrast, the DeCSS program is rather short. (In
fact, it is short enough to be printed on T-shirts30 that one can buy to
support the legal defense of the accused in the DeCSS case.[31]) Because it
contains only a few lines of code, several versions have been developed in
various languages.[32] This diversification--T-shirts on one side, clones
and translations on the other--attempts to point out the absurdity of a
situation in which source code can be legally differentiated from other
forms of written expression. In fact, the algorithm protecting the DVD
content from "unauthorized" use could even be described in plain English in
an essay. Based on the description, a programmer could conceivably develop
the DeCSS code without ever having seen the source code itself.

In an interesting attempt to blur the distinction even further, Jonathan
Baccash coded the software BabelBuster, which translates C code to some form
of colloquial English and back again without losing the information
contained in the code. One simple line of C code, "main ()," would translate
into the more poetic phrase "Let main be a function returning an integer. It
is called with no arguments."[33]

As the discussion unfolds and the lobbying interests of the multinational
entertainment industries become both transparent and vicious, "Free Radio
Linux" will continue blurting out source code for a year to come.

"can we submit bug reports to the radio station now?"[34]

The bizarre reality is that "Free Radio Linux" marks a specific point in
time in which issues to do with Open Source, Linux, software licensing,
copyright protection, and streaming media are being debated in the
mainstream, while the project itself demands stamina to be followed until
its completion in late 2003.

In the initial postings on the Slashdot website, this schizophrenic aspect
became an issue, with users asking if the station would provide updates if
the kernel changed in the meantime.

Looking at "Free Radio Linux" from a conceptual point of view, it seems
adequate to continue broadcasting a code freeze of the day transmission
started and carry it all the way. It might remind its listeners of the open
legal disputes and multinational lobbying occurring when the project was
launched.

Looking at "Free Radio Linux" from a pragmatic point of view, another
posting on Slashdot suggested that something useful is finally leaving this
planet in the form of radio transmissions. Intelligent alien life forms
could receive a stable version of the Linux kernel. What a success for the
Linux community and what an audience for grassroots media!

Micz Flor works with and writes on new media. http://mi.cz

1. "Free Radio Linux" http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/
2. Kernel meaning the part of the operating software Linux on top of which
all other applications run. "Free Radio Linux" is webcasting Linux kernel
2.4.18 from http://www.kernel.org.
3. 14,253.43 hours, or 593.89 days, to be precise. See the readme file on
the site.
4. Live audio link of "Free Radio Linux".
http://www.xs4all.nl/~qualia/freeradiolinux/playlist.m3u
5. Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language, on computer code
and linguistics: http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=923/ddj9802a/9802a.htm
6. A small extract from the code at linux/arch/ia64/ia32/ia32_signal.c
7. Find a list of some of the rebroadcasters at
http://www.xs4all.nl/~qualia/freeradiolinux/cron.html
8. jodi http://www.jodi.org
9. Vuk Cosic, "ascii history of art for the blind"
http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/blind/
10. Vuk Cosic, "Deep ASCII." http://www1.zkm.de/~wvdc/ascii/java/. See more
of his work at http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/.
11. For a good introduction to the subject, see Florian Cramer's text
"Digital Code and Literary Text" at
http://beehive.temporalimage.com/content_apps43/app_d.html
12. Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language, on computer code
and linguistics: http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=923/ddj9802a/9802a.htm
13. Comment taken from fork.c of the Linux kernel
14. Posting by Shiny Metal S. on Sunday, February 3, 2002, on Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/
15. For a brief introduction, dust down your Dutch:
http://www.hobbyscoop.nl/NOStalgie.htm
16. Such computers would include TRS-80, Commodore PET, Apple II, Exidy
Sorcerer
17. Find more information on the Chip Shop history:
http://www.sincuser.f9.co.uk/024/news.htm
18. When exactly the first BBC software broadcast happened is hard to
research: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~jimg/yr09/yr09_03.htm
19. More information on the history of Basicode:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~lennartb/basicode.html
20. The Basicode software is still available today:
http://www.void.jump.org/utils/b.html
21. For a detailed discussion see
http://mi.cz/txt/crosscodeccompatibility.htm
22. More on the Ogg Vorbis format: http://www.vorbis.com/
23. This comparison was brought up by Adam Hyde in preparation for this
article.
24. Philip Zimmermann's preface to the book PGP: Source Code and Internals:
http://www.philzimmermann.com/essays-preface.shtml
25. The International PGP Home Page http://www.pgpi.org
26. Introduction to PGP encryption
http://www.lugod.org/presentations/pgp/history.html
27. Philip Zimmermann's preface to the book PGP: Source Code and Internals:
http://www.philzimmermann.com/essays-preface.shtml
28. Declaration of Philip R. Zimmermann in support of plaintiffs' opposition
to defendants' motion to dismiss:
http://people.qualcomm.com/karn/export/zimm.html
29. Jonathan Baccash: BabelBuster--C to English to C Translator:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Baccash/
30. Copyleft DeCSS T-shirt:
http://www.copyleft.net/item.phtml?dynamic=1&referer=%2F&page=product_276_fr
ont.phtml
31. Wired News on DeCSS T-shirts:
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,37941,00.html
32. Gallery of CSS Descramblers:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/index.html
33. BabelBuster example:
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Baccash/example1.e
34. Posting by mESSDan on Sunday, February 3, 2002, on Slashdot.:
http://slashdot.org/ 7 of 7

"Hear me" by Micz Flor is first published May 2002 for r a d i o q u a l i
a's ""Free Radio Linux"," which was commissioned by Gallery 9/Walker Art
Center with the support of the Jerome Foundation. All rights reserved to the
author.

http://gallery9.walkerart.org/radioqualia/
http://netartcommons.walkerart.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/12/038213&mode=threa
d
German version at http://crossfade.walkerart.org/

Crossfade is a joint project of San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker
Art Center, and ZKM with support from the Goethe Institute

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Steve Dietz
Curator New Media, Walker Art Center
gallery9.walkerart.org
www.netartcommons.net
www.mnartists.org

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