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The wethepeople "Chaos Machine 22" BMX Frame - 22 Inch is the signature BMX frame from the Australian BMX Trails legend Tyson Jones-Peni and comes in a 22" inch version for 22" inch wheels. The wethepeople "Chaos Machine 22" BMX Frame - 22 Inch features a long and stable geometry and mounts for a disc brake (and regular U-brake).

• Wheel Size: 20"
• Material: 100% 4130 Japanese CrMo, top tube and down tube gussets, butted tubes, integrated headset, integrated seatclamp, offset thickness dent resistant chainstays and mid bb for grind resistance
• Geometry:
  Top Tube Length (TT): 22.25"
  Chainstay Length (CS): 14" (35.56cm) - 14.75" (37.47cm)
  Head Tube Angle (HA): 74.25°
  Seat Tube Angle (SA): 71°
  Bottom Bracket Height: 12.25"
  Standover Height (SO): 9.75" (24.77cm)
• Seat Clamp: integrated
• Seat Post Diameter: 25.4mm
• Bottom Bracket: Mid BB
• Dropouts: Investment cast, 6mm thick, 14mm slots, CNC machined, 4130 CrMo
• Chain Tensioners: integrated
• Brake Type: U-Brake & Disc Brake
• Brakemounts: without
• Brakemounts included with delivery: No
• Gyro compatible: No
• Features: Tyson Jones-Peni Signature, long trail geometry, disc mount for 120mm - 160mm rotors, 127mm high head tube, strut tube with larger radius, stiffer & stronger back end, larger weld on the head tube, wider dropout for wide 2.4" tires
• Model Year: 2024

FDA announced this week the formation of a new advisory committee – the Digital Health Advisory Committee – for the purpose of providing the agency with advice on matters related to digital health technologies (DHT). FDA does not form new … Continue reading →

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Privacy: In the analog world of our parents, as an ordinary citizen and not under surveillance because of being a suspect of a crime, it was taken for granted that you could walk around a city without authorities tracking you at the footstep level. Our children don’t have this right anymore in their digital world.

Not even the dystopias of the 1950s — Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Colossus, and so on, managed to dream up the horrors of this element: the fact that every citizen is now carrying a governmental tracking device. They’re not just carrying one, they even bought it themselves. Not even Brave New World could have imagined this horror.

It started out innocently, of course. It always does. With the new “portable phones” — which, at this point, meant something like “not chained to the floor” — authorities discovered that people would still call the Emergency Services number (112, 911, et cetera) from their mobile phones, but not always be capable of giving their location themselves, something that the phone network was now capable of doing. So authorities mandated that the phone networks be technically capable of always giving a subscriber’s location, just in case they would call Emergency Services. In the United States, this was known as the E911 regulation (“Enhanced 9-1-1”).

This was in 2005. Things went bad very quickly from there. Imagine that just 12 years ago, we still had the right to roam around freely without authorities being capable of tracking our every footstep – this was no more than just over a decade ago!

Before this point, governments supplied you with services so that you would be able to know your location, as had been the tradition since the naval lighthouse, but not so that they would be able to know your location. There’s a crucial difference here. And as always, the first breach was one of providing citizen services — in this case, emergency medical services — that only the most prescient dystopians would oppose.

What’s happened since?

Entire cities are using wi-fi passive tracking to track people at the individual, realtime, and sub-footstep level in the entire city center.

Train stations and airports, which used to be safe havens of anonymity in the analog world of our parents, have signs saying they employ realtime passive wi-fi and bluetooth tracking of everybody even coming close, and are connecting their tracking to personal identifying data. Correction: they have signs about it in the best case but do it regardless.

People’s location are tracked in at least three different… not ways, but categories of ways:

Active: You carry a sensor of your location (GPS sensor, Glonass receiver, cell tower triangulator, or even visual identifier through the camera). You use the sensors to find your location, at one point in time or continuously. The government takes itself the right to read the contents of your active sensors.

Passive: You take no action, but are still transmitting your location to the government continuously through a third party. In this category, we find cell tower triangulation as well as passive wi-fi and bluetooth tracking that require no action on behalf of a user’s phone other than being on.

Hybrid: The government finds your location in occasional pings through active dragnets and ongoing technical fishing expeditions. This would not only include cellphone-related techniques, but also face recognition connected to urban CCTV networks.

Privacy of location is one of the Seven Privacies, and we can calmly say that without active countermeasures, it’s been completely lost in the transition from analog to digital. Our parents had privacy of location, especially in busy places like airports and train stations. Our children don’t have privacy of location, not in general, and particularly not in places like airports and train stations that were the safest havens of our analog parents.

How do we reinstate Privacy of Location today? It was taken for granted just 12 years ago.

Privacy: We’ve seen how our digital children’s privacy is violated in everything they buy with cash or credit, in a way our analog parents would have balked at. But even worse: our digital children’s privacy is also violated by tracking what they don’t buy — either actively decline or just plain walk away from.

Amazon just opened its first “Amazon Go” store, where you just pick things into a bag and leave, without ever going through a checkout process. As part of the introduction of this concept, Amazon points out that you can pick something off the shelves, at which point it’ll register in your purchase — and change your mind and put it back, at which point you’ll be registered and logged as having not purchased the item.

Sure, you’re not paying for something you changed your mind about, which is the point of the video presentation. But it’s not just about the deduction from your total amount to pay: Amazon also knows you considered buying it and eventually didn’t, and will be using that data.

Our digital children are tracked this way on a daily basis, if not an hourly basis. Our analog parents never were.

When we’re shopping for anything online, there are even simple plugins for the most common merchant solutions with the business terms “funnel analysis” — where in the so-called “purchase funnel” our digital children choose to leave the process of purchasing something — or “cart abandonment analysis”.

We can’t even simply walk away from something anymore without it being recorded, logged, and cataloged for later use against us.

But so-called “cart abandonment” is only one part of the bigger issue of tracking what we’re interested in in the age of our digital children, but didn’t buy. There is no shortage of people today who would swear they were just discussing a very specific type of product with their phone present (say, “black leather skirts”) and all of a sudden, advertising for that very specific type of product would pop up all over Facebook and/or Amazon ads. Is this really due to some company listening for keywords through the phone? Maybe, maybe not. All we know since Snowden is that if it’s technically possible to invade privacy, it is already happening.

(We have to assume here these people still need to learn how to install a simple adblocker. But still.)

At the worst ad-dense places, like (but not limited to) airports, there are eyeball trackers to find out which ads you look at. They don’t yet change to match your interests, as per Minority Report, but that’s already present on your phone and on your desktop, and so wouldn’t be foreign to see in public soon, either.

In the world of our analog parents, we weren’t registered and tracked when we bought something.

In the world of our digital children, we’re registered and tracked even when we don’t buy something.

Privacy: At worst, our analog parents could be prevented from meeting each other. Our digital children are prevented from talking about particular subjects, once the conversation is already happening. This is a horrifying development.

When our digital children are posting a link to The Pirate Bay somewhere on Facebook, a small window sometimes pops up saying “you have posted a link with potentially harmful content. Please refrain from posting such links.”

Yes, even in private conversations. Especially in private conversations.

This may seem like a small thing, but it is downright egregious. Our digital children are not prevented from having a conversation, per se, but are monitored for bad topics that the regime doesn’t like being discussed, and are prevented from discussing those topics. This is far worse than preventing certain people from just meeting.

The analog equivalent would be if our parents were holding an analog phone conversation, and a menacing third voice popped into the conversation with a slow voice speaking just softly enough to be perceived as threatening: “You have mentioned a prohibited subject. Please refrain from discussing prohibited subjects in the future.”

Our parents would have been horrified if this happened — and rightly so!

But in the digital world of our children, the same phenomenon is instead cheered on by the same people who would abhor it if it happened in their world, to themselves.

In this case, of course, it is any and all links to The Pirate Bay that are considered forbidden topics, under the assumption — assumption! — that they lead to manufacturing of copies that would be found in breach of the copyright monopoly in a court of law.

When I first saw the Facebook window above telling me to not discuss forbidden subjects, I was trying to distribute political material I had created myself, and used The Pirate Bay to distribute. It happens to be a very efficient way to distribute large files, which is exactly why it is being used by a lot of people for that purpose (gee, who would have thought?), including people like myself who wanted to distribute large collections of political material.

There are private communications channels, but far too few use them, and the politicians at large (yes, this includes our analog parents) are still cheering on this development, because “terrorism” and other bogeymen.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: In the analog world of our parents, it was absolutely unthinkable that the government would demand to know every footstep you took, every phonecall you made, and every message you wrote, just as a routine matter. For our digital children, government officials keep insisting on this as though it were perfectly reasonable, because terrorism, and also, our digital children may be listening to music together or watching TV together, which is illegal in the way they like to do it, because of mail-order legislation from Hollywood. To make things even worse, the surveillance is retroactive — it is logged, recorded, and kept until somebody wants all of it.

About ten years ago, a colleague of mine moved from Europe to China. He noted that among many differences, the postal service was much more tightly controlled — as in, every letter sent was written by hand onto a line in a log book, kept by the postmaster at each post office. Letter from, to whom, and the date.

At the time, three things struck me: one, how natural this was to the Chinese population, not really knowing anything else; two, how horrified and denouncing our analog parents would have been at this concept; three, and despite that, that this is exactly what our lawmaker analog parents are doing to all our digital children right now.

Or trying to do, anyway; the courts are fighting back hard.

Yes, I’m talking about Telecommunications Data Retention.

There is a saying, which mirrors the Chinese feeling of normality about this quite well: “The bullshit this generation puts up with as a temporary nuisance from deranged politicians will seem perfectly ordinary to the next generation.”

Every piece of surveillance so far in this series is amplified by several orders of magnitude by the notion that it you’re not only being watched, but that everything you do is recorded for later use against you.

This is a concept so bad, not even Nineteen-Eighty Four got it: If Winston’s telescreen missed him doing something that the regime didn’t want him to do, Winston would have been safe, because there was no recording happening; only surveillance in the moment.

If Winston Smith had had today’s surveillance regime, with recording and data retention, the regime could and would have gone back and re-examined every earlier piece of action for what they might have missed.

This horror is reality now, and it applies to every piece in this series. Our digital children aren’t just without privacy in the moment, they’re retroactively without privacy in the past, too.

(Well, this horror is a reality that comes and goes, as legislators and courts are in a tug of war. In the European Union, Data Retention was mandated in 2005 by the European Parliament, was un-mandated in 2014 by the European Court of Justice, and prohibited in 2016 by the same Court. Other jurisdictions are playing out similar games; a UK court just dealt a blow to the Data Retention there, for example.)

Privacy remains your own responsibility.

Marvin Maiocchi always smiles and feels most comfortable with smooth transitions.

BMX Since: 2009
BMX Disziplin: BMX Park, BMX Bowl, BMX Dirt
Hometown: Stuttgart
Residence: Sindelfingen
Sponsors: kunstform BMX Shop
Homespots: HLT Dirts, Waiblingen Bowl, Glaspalast Sindelfingen
Favorite thing beside BMX: BBQ and Rock'n'Roll
Instagram: @marv.bmx

Marvin Maiocchi recently went on a BMX Park session at BMCC in Mannheim. On this occasion, he met with our bro and Mannheim local Robin Kachfi, who has captured the events on video. You can see the result above!

Enjoy the video, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!

Video: Robin Kachfi

Related links:

• all products of kunstform

The Stuttgart Street Crew around Miguel Smajli have launched Chinklife, a new BMX street video. The name says it all, the bros are all about the chinklife and are showcasing their love to metal pegs in this video which they've filmed throughout the year. Now hit that play button!

Have fun with the video, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!

Video: Chinklife Crew (Filming), Miguel Smajli (Editing)

Related links:

• all products of kunstform

Seppl Pospischil aka Sepple is the founder of kunstform BMX Shop and has been actively riding BMX for 25 years. For the silver jubilee Seppl cut a compilation from his favorite clips from the last few months, in which he skilfully mixed the BMX disciplines BMX Flatland and BMX Street. With this in mind, all the best for your anniversary and stay ridin bro!

Have fun with the video, your kunstform BMX Shop Team!

• all products of kunstform

Our bros Miguel Smajli and Marvin Maiocchi got the possibility to test the new Vans X Courage Adams collection. The shoe has an smooth pedal feel and comes with an awesome style.

LEGO has revealed three Chinese Traditional Festival (CTF) sets and two Monkie Kid models at the 2024 China International Import Expo, which is currently taking place in Shanghai.

The subject matter may not mean much to some of us here in the west, but the CTF sets once again look to be exceptional, although not as packed with minifigs as they usually are. They will probably be good value, too.

View photos after the break, and keep up to date with everything that's been officially revealed for next year in our 2025 set listing.

Continue reading »

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