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"The maker movement is gathering momentum. Slowly but surely people around the world are changing from passive consumer of the latest gizmo to active maker and modifier of existing designs. The promotion of an open source philosophy in the online era has given people access to myriad designs allowing them to make and modify almost anything. These days DIY not only applies to making simple home improvements, you can go online and learn how to build a robot if you feel up to the challenge! In America, MAKE magazine is the go-to publication for DIY and hack enthusiasts. Humans Invent spoke to MAKE's editor and overall hack guru, Mark Frauenfelder, to get an insight into how this movement is changing the nature of our consumerist culture."

In the middle of last year, the hacking group Anonymous tried but failed to attack various Vatican Internet servers. A report that was just released by Imperva shows the extent of their prowess, and is a blueprint for other corporate security managers who want to try to protect their own networks in the future from miscreants. While the report itself doesn't divulge the destination of the attack, it has been widely reported by the New York Times and other news outlets that it was the Vatican.

Un projet de directive européenne prévoit de pénaliser la possession et la distribution d'outils de hacking pour lutter contre la cybercriminalité. Une disposition aberrante y compris aux yeux de plusieurs communautés d'experts en sécurité informatique.

Inside the civic digital space, anyone can download a public dataset, build an app, share it with others. There are no permit fees, no regulations to research, no paperwork to file. You don't have to trudge to City Hall. Everything is (or at least, it should be) open. In this way, the digital world is vastly different from the physical one. Want to make use of a transit dataset at a hackathon? Have at it. But want to hack the physical space at the actual train station, maybe plant a few flowers, throw up a bike rack? Well, good luck with that.

Watch out! Internet connections worldwide may have been slower past weekend! Last weekend hundreds of hackers, programmers, designers and anti-corruption experts and activists in Bogotá, Budapest, Casablanca, Jakarta, Moscow and Vilnius gathered last weekend to develop new ICT tools that can help citizens monitor government and report corruption. Websites like ipaidabribe.com in India and use of twitter in events like the Arab Spring have shown that technology can be a powerful vehicle for people power. Hacks Against Corruption (HAC) is Transparency International's first attempt to bring together technology and anti-corruption specialists to use technology to come up with some of the challenges we face in fighting corruption: visualising the cost of corruption, monitoring complex, massive public budgets and allowing citizens to safely report corruption in their life.

Building fully functional electronic devices yourself is a satisfying process. That magic moment when your experimentation combines software, hardware and mechanical know-how all together to become a finished product. Add a 3D printer to the mix, and you are really in for a treat. Rob Miles knows his way around Gadgeteer, the Microsoft .NET hardware enabler that turns a developer's dreams into reality. Although he was already off to a great start, it all changed when Rob set himself up with an Ultimaker 3D printer. Designing and printing his own enclosures has given him a whole new perspective on DIY development and hardware hacking. 

The Internet of Things should be its own category on Kickstarter, since there's yet another project on the site that hopes to connect your physical and digital worlds. But its real promise may be in providing context to computers that will evolve into new user interfaces. Guess what! There's another Kickstarter project that pushes the Internet of Things forward in a fun way. For as little as $10 you could pledge money to SmartThings, which wants to develop sensors and an application environment that lets people who may not be comfortable programming an Arduino board tie the physical world to their virtual one.

This book is the culmination of several years of thinking about the principles behind the open government data movement in the United States. In the pages within, I frame the movement as the application of Big Data to civics. Topics include principles, uses for transparency and civic engagement, a brief legal history, data quality, civic hacking, and paradoxes in transparency.

Crowdfunding has become increasingly popular lately. That is, those who are looking for funding for their various projects can now turn to the community at large, which makes small contributions that are pooled resources into some pretty sizable chunks of change. Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter have been able to boast some phenomenal success stories recently - the $3 million raised for the Double Fine Adventure video game being a case in point. Of course, not everyone who tries to raise money via Kickstarter is successful (actually less than half are.) But by bypassing traditional fundraising channels - investors or banks or grants, for example - crowdfunding sites have supported a flood of new creative projects. In many cases, these are projects that would not have ordinarily received funding.

It seems very promising to chart the genealogy of hackerspaces from the point of view of hacklabs, since the relationship between these scenes have seldom been discussed and largely remains unreflected. A methodological examination will highlight many interesting differences and connections that can be useful for practitioners who seek to foster and spread the hackerspace culture, as well as for academics who seek to conceptualise and understand it. In particular, hackerspaces proved to be a viral phenomenon which may have reached the height of its popularity, and while a new wave of fablabs spring up, people like Grenzfurthner and Schneider (2009) have started asking questions about the direction of these movements. I would like to contribute to this debate about the political direction and the political potentials of hacklabs and hackerspaces with a comparative, critical, historiographical paper. I am mostly interested in how these intertwined networks of institutions and communities can escape the the capitalist apparatus of capture, and how these potentialities are conditioned by a historical embeddedness in various scenes and histories.