Never forget the anti-fascists and the Partisans who were of many nations, including Jews, who fought the Nazis and rescued concentration camp survivors.
Never forget the smaller acts of resistance like industrial sabotage practiced by those in the concentration camps to reduce their contribution to the Nazi war machine.
Never forget that the United States of America’s xenophobic, racist, eugenicist, antisemitic, ableist, and anti-Romani immigration quotas policy condemned millions of people to death.
Never forget the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party of Germany) who violently suppressed political radicals (including killing the Jewish communist Rosa Luxemberg and other members of the KPD) during the Wiemar Republic, inadvertently aiding the Nazis.
Never forget
Willem Arondeus, a Dutch Homosexual gentile artist, writer, and resistance leader who led a group in bombing the Amsterdam Public Records Office on July 1st 1943 in order to hinder the Nazi round-up of Jews.
Never forget his final words: “Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards.”
Never forget all the Holocaust survivors who escaped the concentration camps and arrived in Britain, the USA, and the USSR and told the world their stories.
Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of Silicon Valley, there was an age undreamed of…
Movies were sold on big reels of tape, wound up inside little plastic boxes.
And played on machines called VCRs.
And if you wanted to create a copy of a movie, you could hook two of these machines together and do it with no problem. In fact, it was ruled in a court of law that it was a fair use of someone elses copyrighted movie to make yourself an archival copy, so that if your tape broke, or the machine ‘ate it’ you wouldn’t have to buy another one.
Hollywood didn’t care for this.
So, when the digital age dawned, someone came up with the bright idea of selling movies on DVDs. And one of the big selling points, so far as Hollywood was concerned, was that you could encrypt the data of the movie on the disc, and put hardware to decrypt it in the DVD player, in such a way that it wouldn’t play if two DVD players were hooked together, and so that someone who put a DVD into a computer couldn’t copy it.
Techies and hackers didn’t care for this.
So, they started trying to figure out how to cryptanalyze the DVDs, which were encrypted with a tech called CSS, for Content Scrambling System. And they didn’t have much luck, because crypto is hard, and breaking it is harder. And then one day they caught a lucky break.
Some manufacturers of DVD players, from Taiwan iirc, put out a new product, one of which was bought by a hacker somewhere, who tinkered with it and realized that the makers had made a mistake. They hadn’t properly protected the chips that contained the CSS decryption key, which allowed this guy to get access to it and copy it. He then created a program called DeCSS, which would allow you to put a DVD in a computer and then ‘rip’ the data to your hard drive, then write it to another DVD. He posted it online, and within hours the news, and copies of the key and code, had spread all over the world.
Hollywood flipped their shit over this.
They brought the legal hammer down on this guy, and it ended up in court. He said he had a right, as per the previous Fair Use ruling, regarding VHS tapes, to copy DVDs as well. When people had previously complained that encryption was stripping them of their rights, Hollywood had argued that there was nothing in the law that said they had to make copying easy, and basically challenged them to figure out how to break it. In the court case, Hollywood argued that under a new law that had passed, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, it was illegal to circumvent an DRM, or Digital Rights Management system. The plaintiffs counter-argued that they hadn’t really reversed engineered anything, that the dumb machines had been built wrong, that they had a right to tinker with it and see how it worked.
So, sitting between these parties was a judge who… to put it kindly, was probably in over his head. Probably some old guy, the kind of guy who still owned a VCR with the clocking blinking 12:00 PM because he didn’t know how to adjust the time. An old grandpa sorta guy. Maybe not a bad guy, just clueless about how tech works. So, when Hollywood argued that there should be some sort of injunction against the spread of the DeCSS software online, that it should be illegal for people to host it, or for others to download it, or to tell people how it worked, or even to link to it, gramps said, “Sure, why not? Here you go, here’s an order that says it’s illegal to possess this software.”
Well, the tech people freaked out about this, because it contradicted a number of already established precedents. Like Phil Zimmermann publishing the source code of PGP and shipping the books containing it to Europe, despite the fact that the encryption tech it contained had been ruled a munition that couldn’t be sold overseas. The precedent, that code was speech, and therefore subject to first amendment protections, seemed to be being thwarted in the DeCSS case. And the tech/hacker community wanted to make it clear that they weren’t going to stand for that.
So, some bright person somewhere, went out and got himself a shirt made, that had the source code of DeCSS printed on it, along with some quote from the order basically saying that it was illegal to buy or own this shirt, then started selling them on his website. This clever idea opened a floodgate of people coming up with unique ways to spread the source code of DeCSS, in a way that was tempting the court to try to stop them, on the grounds that the ruling would then go to a higher court and be turned over on first amendment grounds.
“Take t5’s low byte (AND t5 with two hundred fifty five) to put it
in the ith byte of the vector called k. Now shift t5 right eight bits;
store the result in t5 again. Now that’s the last step in the loop.
No sooner have we finished that loop than we’ll start another; no rest
for the wicked nor those innocents whom lawyers serve with paperwork.”
One of these people, Phil Carmody, raised an interesting argument. He said that software is just numbers. In fact, every piece of software is a single number, that is also a infinite number of numbers (or practically so) as there are nearly an infinite number of mathematical conversions or encodings you can perform on a number. So he wrote a little script version of DeCSS, then converted it to a number, then started to look to see if this number was the same as another somewhere. Was it hidden somewhere in pi? Or the Golden Ratio? What if you doubled it? or added 1 to it?
And after some searching, he found a list of the largest known prime numbers, wherein the 19th largest prime that had been found by that time, was the same as his code for DeCSS. So he posted this info online, and said, “If you go to this website, take this prime number, and save it in a file, then compile it, the output is this piece of software that is illegal to possess, transmit, or share information about.” Here it is, by the way:
Carmody argued, if the ruling that it’s illegal to do these things with the DeCSS software
holds up, then it’s also illegal to possess, transmit, or share
information about this prime number. It will become an illegal number. It would have to be redacted from websites, and whatever books it might appear in. People searching for new primes, or any other number, will have to worry about sharing them online, that they are on some list of illegal numbers somewhere. The lists will grow exponentially, as the precedent that this software is forbidden to possess or share, will lead others to demand that software, and numbers, they don’t care for be made illegal as well.
And then… I forget the rest. Whether it was finally ruled in the favor of common sense, or if the case simply petered out and nothing more was ever heard about it. I do know that no one was ever brought up on charges for possessing a number, and DeCSS has been widely available ever since the day it was first posted online (if you’ve ever used a movie ripping software like ffmpeg, you’ve used DeCSS or it’s descendents.)
More info. Also, this is now a crypto history blog, deal with it
‘I would get up at one or two a.m. and I would call every gay bar I had the number to from the 1940s. I wouldn’t say anything. I would just stay on the phone and listen to the sounds in the background. I would stay on until they hung up, and then I would call another one of my numbers, until I had called all the numbers I had … That phone. Those numbers. That was my lifeline … It meant there was a place somewhere — even if I couldn’t go there — that place was out there. I could hear it. Freedom.’ She called the bars two to three times a week like this — for fourteen years.
From an interview with Myrna Kurland in Baby, You Are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall, by Marie Cartier (2013). Myrna passed away in 2014, at age 86. A video of an additional part of her interview may be viewed here. (via songsforgorgons)
The way that we learn about Helen Keller in school is an absolute outrage. We read “The Miracle Worker”- the miracle worker referring to her teacher; she’s not even the title character in her own story. The narrative about disabled people that we are comfortable with follows this format- “overcoming” disability. Disabled people as children.
Helen Keller as an adult, though? She was a radical socialist, a fierce disability advocate, and a suffragette. There’s no reason she should not be considered a feminist icon, btw, and the fact that she isn’t is pure ableism- while other white feminists of that time were blatent racists, she was speaking out against Woodrew Wilson because of his vehement racism. She supported woman’s suffrage and birth control. She was an anti-war speaker. She was an initial donor to the NAACP. She spoke out about the causes of blindness- often disease caused by poverty and poor working conditions. She was so brave and outspoken that the FBI had a file on her because of all the trouble she caused.
Yet when we talk about her, it’s either the boring, inspiration porn story of her as a child and her heroic teacher, or as the punchline of ableist, misogynistic jokes. It’s not just offensive, it’s downright disgusting.
the reason the story stops once hellen keller learns to talk is no one wanted to listen to what she had to say
how’s that for a fucking punchline
It’s not that I disagree that we should all be aware of what a badass Helen Keller became, because she had a long and amazing career as an activist and yes, a feminist hero. It’s that somehow when people talk about the ableism of the way Helen’s story is told they always seem to forget this: Anne Sullivan, her teacher, was blind. Seriously. From Wikipedia:
“When she was only five years old she contracted a bacterial eye disease known as trachoma, which created painful infections and over time made her nearly blind.[2] When she was eight, her mother passed away and her father abandoned the children two years later for fear he could not raise them on his own.[2] She and her younger brother, James (“Jimmie”), were sent to an overcrowded almshouse in Tewksbury, Massachusetts (today part of Tewksbury Hospital). He, who suffered a debilitating hip ailment, died three months into their stay. She remained at the Tewksbury house for four years after his death, where she had eye operations that offered some short-term relief for her eye pain but ultimately proved ineffective.[3]“
Eventually some operations did restore part of her eyesight, but by the end of her life she was entirely blind. Also:
“Due to Anne losing her sight at such a young age she had no skills in reading, writing, or sewing and the only work she could find was as a housemaid; however, this position was unsuccessful.[2] Another blind resident staying at the Tewksbury almshouse told her of schools for the blind. During an 1880 inspection of the almshouse, she convinced an inspector to allow her to leave and enroll in the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, where she began her studies on October 7, 1880.[2] Although her rough manners made her first years at Perkins humiliating for her, she managed to connect with a few teachers and made progress with her learning.[2] While there, she befriended and learned the manual alphabet from Laura Bridgman, a graduate of Perkins and the first blind and deaf person to be educated there.”
So Anne Sullivan, disabled and born into serious poverty, learns the manual alphabet from a deaf and blind friend; passes that alphabet on to her deaf and blind student. This isn’t the story of an abled-bodied teacher swooping in to ‘save’ a disabled child; it’s a series of disabled women helping each other. Helen Keller’s story is the story not of one badass disabled woman, but of two. Anne and Helen were lifelong friends; Anne died holding Helen’s hand.
Also is there a book called “The Miracle Worker”? I thought that was the movie/movies based on “The Story of My Life” by Helen Keller. But I could be wrong. And I didn’t learn any of this in school in general but that’s neither here nor there.
I can recommend the ‘62 version of “The Miracle Worker” with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. It’s blatant about Sullivan’s impoverished background and eye problems - her rage on Helen’s behalf isn’t abstract at all, it’s very, very personal. And that’s the most amazing thing about this movie: Anne and Helen are the angriest people on earth. I have no idea if that was erased from the remakes but in the original they are both allowed to have a ton of anger about what has been done to them and what they have been denied.
Anyway, I’ve rambled enough. Here’s a picture of Helen Keller meeting Charlie Chaplin:
omfg I am so mad right now because not only did the kids biography of Helen Keller I read when I was younger erase all her activism, but it very explicitly completely erased anything about Anne being blind herself.
There were scenes of her WATCHING Helen from across the room or yard, and it was all very “oh my, I just MUST save this poor little disabled girl, no other deaf blind person has EVER BEEN EDUCATED and basically it was awful and shitty.
I think everyone should read Helen and Teacher. It’s an absolute brick of a book, hundreds of pages, but it is wonderful. It’s about their whole lives, right up to Helen’s death in old age. It talks about Helen’s feminism, socialism, and campaigning for everything from equal rights to sexual health. Helen Keller was not a syrupy, greeting card girl who existed to make able people feel warm and fuzzy, she was a tireless academic, political activist and writer. She was making noise about the issues she cared about from the moment her partnership with Annie Sullivan began, and she never stopped.
as much as Paris Is Burning is praised and quoted, I wonder how many know how much it was despised by the people who were actually in it.
What happened?
i feel strange tagging this as history because this was not long ago or distant, but also – history is who we are, history is not at all just in the past
In the last year or so I’ve learned an awful lot about just how much I never learned. My plan is to write up a short piece each day this month on an important or influential black figure from history beyond the whitewashed MLK/Rosa/Malcolm/G.W. Carver bits that we always got in school, because I think it’s important for white kids to know about things beyond themselves and it’s important for black kids to know things about themselves.
Ronald McNair
Plenty of little kids have astronauts as heroes. Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, and Sally Ride come to mind. My older brother, who is a huge nerd, once tried to fistfight me in a bar because he thought I had insulted Buzz Aldrin. Space is such a mystifying thing that it’s hard not to be enthralled by tales of the men and women who breach our atmosphere and explore it.
One name I had never heard until recently was that of Ronald McNair. McNair was one of the astronauts on the doomed Challenger launch 30 years ago, so when his name is mentioned, it’s usually in that context: as a tragic figure. But man, was he so much more than that.
McNair was the second African-American to go into space. On his first trip, he played his saxophone on board, making him quite possibly the coolest person to ever board a space shuttle.
NPR’s profile of McNair from the 25th anniversary of his death goes into great detail about his refusal to let the odds dictate what he would and would not try. Perhaps no story about McNair says it better than this:
“When he was 9 years old, Ron, without my parents or myself knowing his whereabouts, decided to take a mile walk from our home down to the library,” Carl tells his friend Vernon Skipper.
The library was public, Carl says — “but not so public for black folks, when you’re talking about 1959.”
“So, as he was walking in there, all these folks were staring at him — because they were white folk only — and they were looking at him and saying, you know, ‘Who is this Negro?’
“So, he politely positioned himself in line to check out his books.
“Well, this old librarian, she says, ‘This library is not for coloreds.’ He said, ‘Well, I would like to check out these books.’
“She says, ‘Young man, if you don’t leave this library right now, I’m gonna call the police.’
“So he just propped himself up on the counter, and sat there, and said, ‘I’ll wait.’ ”
McNair graduated from North Carolina A&T and went on to MIT, where he earned his Ph.D. in physics. He applied and was accepted into the astronaut program. He had planned to teach physics at the University of South Carolina, one of the schools that had turned him down for undergrad because of his race, when he returned from the Challenger mission.
That dream was never realized, but in its place, his family established the McNair Scholars Program, which has helped more than 60,000 disadvantaged students attend college since that tragic day. A ridiculously brave man with a ridiculously strong legacy.
Her governess couldn’t handle her, so she was educated by her brothers’ tutor, which enabled her to get a better education than most women of her time
She was so witty, charismatic and beautiful that she got famous just by showing up at a dinner party
She became so wildly famous and obsessed over simply for being herself that her effect was referred to as the Langtry Phenomenon
She charmed the pants off of royals galore, having affairs with Prince Louis of Battenberg, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and the future King Edward VII, who had a mansion built for her which she designed herself
When she lost favor and nearly went bankrupt, she reinvented herself as an actress and played to full houses every time she appeared
Her complexion alone was so great that she made money off it by appearing in ads for Pears soap, making her one of the first ever celebrity product endorsers
She became a successful businesswoman, with her own theatre company, a winery in America, and a stable of racehorses
This was a lady who started out with nothing. She knew what she wanted, so she went out and made it happen. She’s one of my personal heroes. I highly suggest picking up one of the books about her, especially her autobiography. She was an incredible character.
The at-the-time Prince of Wales (who would become Edward VII) once, in an argument with her, said, ‘I have spent enough on you to build a battleship!’
To which she sweetly replied, ‘Yes, and you have spent enough in me to float one.’
“As Paul Hogan came dashing down the steps of London’s Tate Gallery in 1956 with a £7m Impressionist masterpiece under his arm after coolly unhooking it from its hanging place moments earlier,
his picture was taken by a press photographer who happened to be waiting outside.”
(independent.co.uk)
the rest of this story is even cooler than the excerpt.
researching 17th century piracy tonight. came across this:
One popular pastime amongst pirates was the mock trial. Each man played a part be it jailer, lawyer, judge, juror, or hangman. This sham court arrested, tried, convicted, and “carried out” the sentence to the amusement of all. (x)
how widespread could this have really been? how would it have gotten passed from ship to ship? can you imagine a pirate crew at a tavern, bragging to another pirate crew about how good they are at playing pretend? why was their go-to game “legal system”? were they performing incisive satire? is this some sort of pirates-only inside joke that’s been lost to the ages?
update: the mock-charge in the mock-trial was piracy
they used to pretend to try each other for piracy
as a stress relief
ok but it’s got to have been a lot of fun to be the pirate defense lawyer, for the pirate accused of piracy, to attempt to argue to the pirate judge, in front of a jury of pirate peers, that your client could not possibly be a pirate
Anyone else imagining the Amazons from Swallows and Amazons playing this game?
