DATELINE: W3 Applications Galore, Internet Protocol Suite

many of us who enjoy Tommy Wiseau’s masterpiece film entitled The Room do not watch it as the romantic drama it was probably intended to be; instead we view it as something of a black comedy.  if you’re unfamiliar with the film, watch it immediately – but if you’re not going to do that, here are some favorite scenes:

a frozen bag of peas can be used as a cold compress to reduce inflammation of swelling.  your coffee mug is a paper-weight. take a moment, if you would, to pause reading this motd and to recall/consider all the things you utilize in a manner other than that for which they are implicitly intended. is there anything wrong with intentionally watching a bad horror film as if it were supposed to evoke laughter? one might highly doubt it.

every hacker’s toolbox contains an appropriation methodology. this is nothing more (nor is it anything less) than the ability to discover &or invent uses for existing things. how developed is your personal instance of this mental faculty? do you apply it by default when observing, and if so, how far do you take the theory, how far do you act on appropriated uses of which you theorize?

let’s look at some examples on the w3 spec:

• a mobile application designed to connect nearby singles for dating was used by students on a university campus to make efficient shared use of their credits at the cafeteria – users would swipe through profiles looking for a particular tag such as “cafeteria: in need” or “cafeteria: have extra” then use the application’s chat feature to work out details.

• recently a pizzeria solicited fabricated horrific reviews of the restaurant via a commonly-used ranking & comment application;  the business owners answered a question (follow link-image to read more)

• many new top-level domain (TLD) including country-codes have been used to create shorter urls; the search engine góoģle registered goo.gl to use for their url-shortening service. long before that, the domain inter.net was registered long before alternatives to com, net & org showed up. idiots refer to this as domain hacking and it raises an interesting issue regarding the practice of appropriation:

in the case of appropriating top-level domain, we can see the potential for abuse. the amount of domains that have been bought with the expressed purpose of selling them, i.e. predicting that they’ll be needed by someone else, has gone up drastically since the introduction of new TLD. unarguably, this so-called domain squatting is highly-unethical and more-or-less equivalent in morality theory to concepts such as extortion or blackmail. interesting, isn’t it, that the act of domain squatting is in fact a very pure form of appropriation on the w3 spec: using a service intended for to register domain names for to direct to an IP of a machine serving a web page or other internet protocol-based service. so here we see that, as a form of magic, the practice of appropriation in the sense of witchcraft, i.e. hacking, can be unethical, or at least destructive.

this topic interests us at the grapevine greatly. consider this motd to be more of a conversation we need to start; in fact, we’re already considering creating a website dedicated to appropriation magic, instances thereof, organization of large-scale counter-intended-use of a thing – with or without a goal, theory being built around the appropriation faculty, etcetera. so we’d love to hear your thoughts on this one.

note: for the time being, this motd’s composers here at the grapevine have intentionally left out any attempt at a clear definition of appropriation hacking because we want to study it further before putting on this concept the confines of diction specification.