Living in a Sandbox

Introduction

A Sandbox

Living in a Sandbox is an optional bi-monthly course that aims at exploring the culture of free and open source UNIX-like software and computer hardware from the viewpoint of a small device: the Raspberry Pi. During this course, students will be exposed to historical and technical elements of computing that are nowadays buried under an app centric culture grown in the names of user-friendliness, transparency and deceptive allegories such as the cloud.

When people hear the word sandbox, it is very likely that most of them will be thinking of the outdoor playset that consists of a container filled with sand. You probably have seen many already and have possibly played in one as a child. Using sand as medium and a couple of tools, the sandbox opens the door to a world where anything can be pretended and experimented with. For some others though, the sandbox is linked instead to the realm of software. Indeed, and similarly to its analogue counterpart, software sandboxes are used both to provide testing and prototyping environments, as well as to describe how users and processes can be isolated for security purposes. These two approaches play an important role in the development and execution of software. As a matter of fact, whether you are browsing a website, using an app, or working with your favourite digital tool, sandboxes have been and are currently used to enable and allow this action.

Truth is, digital sandboxes are everywhere and it is a bit ... problematic. Indeed, stepping out of an analogue sandbox is as easy as dusting off from your clothes the particules left from the imaginary world. The same cannot be said of the digital sandboxes which bits are tightly interleaved with our daily activities and digital diet. Seeing our increasing dependence on software and network infrastructure and in a post-PRISM age, it is becoming urgent to understand how these sandboxes operate and impact our social relationships. The best way to do that is to run your own sandbox.

The course

• Facilitators: Aymeric Mansoux & Michael Murtaugh
• When: roughly once every 2 weeks
• Duration: ~3 hours
• Location: Piet Zwart Institute
• Eligibility: places are limited. See your course supervisor for details.

Planned Activities for 2013/2014

The activities will be detailed and documented progressively, as the course is being developed, that is, depending on the feedback, interests, new ideas and questions from the participants. For now a rough list of things that we aim at covering across the year:

• Install party: running Raspbian on the Pi.
• operating system basics: administration and UNIX history
• C oneliners: C and shell programming basics with pipes
• wireless deaddrops and access points: setting up a standalone wireless network to share files outside of the Internet.
• camera/sensors machines: turning the Pi into a surveillance machine
• spiders/crawlers: turning a network of Pis into a data harvesting fest
• basic client/server service development: Python, node.js and others.
• Pd patch player: a more elaborate network and web application using golang and libpd