Despite being considered a fundamental issue in the design, use, and appropriation of digital technologies, IT security has found but little attention in CSCW so far. Approaches in Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering do not account appropriately for the weave of dispersed practices that it takes to 'do' IT security---practices that involve a heterogeneous set of actors and unfold at diverse sites and across organizational, legal, and professional boundaries. In this paper we propose to conceive of IT security through the lens of care, a notion that we draw from Science and Technology Studies. Caring for IT security requires continuous, often invisible work that relies upon tinkering and experimentation and addresses perennial oscillations between in-/securities. Caring for IT security, then, engages with established accountabilities and cultivates a moral stance that refrains from blaming insecurities upon single actors. We conclude with outlining a caring approach to IT security for CSCW.

This paper studies how communication infrastructure is explored, examined, and evaluated by self-identifying 'security researchers' at hacking conventions. We analyze mobile phone 'security research' as a case of negotiating infrastructural repair. 'Security research' seeks to re-negotiate with industry actors what 'security' actually means, which technological 'insecurities' need mending, which bugs, mistakes, and risks should be repaired. These negotiations are tense and contested because the relations between 'security research' and industry reach across utterly different identities and commitments, spanning an arena of repair. To investigate how 'security research' situates itself in this arena, we analyze presentations about hacking mobile telephony that have been given at events organized by the Chaos Computer Club between 2000 and 2015. With the help of qualitative coding techniques, we examine the identities and commitments involved in 'security research,' the agendas that 'security research' pursues, and the ways in which it addresses and relates to industry actors. We interpret our findings in terms of friction, highlighting how a social arena of mobile phone repair is constituted through difference, rather than despite it.

Mobilizing the modernist ethos of ‘analyze and you shall know’, this article critically reconsiders the nexus of emotion, interaction and design in human–computer interaction. In particular, this article examines interactional affective computing, and it elaborates upon its underlying notion of emotion, making a case for the role of introspective reflection for emotional experience and expression. Moreover, the article offers a critical reading of two interactional affective design prototypes. On this basis, the article formulates three pairs of design concepts, all of which address the question how emotional reflection can be curated.

This paper applies the theoretical lens of infrastructure to study hacking practices that take issue with large-scale communication networks. The paper analyzes a series of hacks targeting the Global System for Mobile Communications (i.e., networks for mobile telephony) carried out by a cluster of people affiliated or sympathetic to the German Chaos Computer Club between 2001 and 2014. These hacks aim at acquiring proprietary knowledge and facilitating the autonomous operation of local mobile phone networks for communities, independent of corporate network providers. The contribution of this paper is to show how hacking of this kind can be understood as transgressive infrastructuring, a way of engaging critically with infrastructure that, in the case of GSM hacking, relied on three strategies---reverse engineering, re-implementation, and parallel operation, all of which aim at appropriating the targeted network intellectually, legally, functionally, and/or operationally.