makers

In this encore edition of the Morning Media Menu, we spoke novelist and blogger Cory Doctorow, author of the 2010 book, "For the Win." 

He spoke about online currency, book promotion and the feasibility of unions in digital culture. Doctorow discussed his strategy of releasing a free eBook edition of his book alongside the print book.

Cory Doctorow on Free eBooks & Unions

Cory Doctorow thinks aloud about the imminent wave of DRM infecting the web, perhaps leading to its death. Terribly sad. From his podcast: http://craphound.com/podcast.php

The most important bit are the four last paragraphes. If nothing else, please read those!

If you're interested in more after you're done with this, please listen to/read this too: http://pad.mdg.no/p/Doctorow_Sense

--------------------------

Transcript:

The year has not been a good one for internet liberty. And you might have seen something I posted on Tumblr, We are huxleying ourselves into the full orwell (http://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/72759474218/we-are-huxleying-ourselves-into-the-full-orwell), which was a kind of nacant thought about the way DRM, Digital Rights Management, is worming itself into webstandards, thanks to the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C opting to put it into Scope, and that leading other institutions, noteably the Mozilla Foundation deciding that DRM is something they need to support too, and so DRM is now coming to Firefox, I think. I think that's a safe bet based on my discussions with them. I don't know that they've said that exactly, but when you read between the lines I think it's kind of inevitable. 

And when DRM arrives, open source ends. Free Software can't coexist with Digital Rights Management, because Digital Rights Management, it has to be illegal to modify it, or tell people how to modify it. Otherwise they'll just take away the restricitive elements of it. Digital Rights Management is there to stop you from doing something you'd otherwise want to do. If the tool is modifiable by you, then you will modify it to let you do the thing you want it to do and that the tool is stopping you from doing. That seem pretty self evident to anyone who's ever thought about it.

I don't know that anyone really claims that user modifiabillity and auditability and transparency can ever peacefully coexist with a tool that treats the computers owner as someone who's not trusted. And that's a really big deal because of where we are at the moment. The Snowden revelations jump started a global conversation about the requirement that our tools be transparent, auditable, free and open, so that we can be sure that they're not being exploited to attack us, to surveil us, to compromise us in lots of ways. 

Once the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) [says it's ok] to try and controll the users computer to do things that the user doesn't want it to do, and to prevent it from doing things the user does want it to do, then it no longer will be possible, I believe, for us to have auditability in software and transparency in software. And I think that it's unreasonable to expect that once this is standardized that people will opt not to use it. 

For one thing I think that once it's standardized and widely available we can expect things like YouTube to start adopting Digital Rights Management. And once YouTube adopts DRM, it's really implausible that there's any widely used browser that doesn't support DRM, and that is to say no widely used browser that isn't opaque to users and illegal to audit and report vulnerabilities in. And therefor no browser in wide use that wouldn't allow for widespread surveilance, either by the NSA or other government agencies, or by criminals who gained access to its vulnerabilities. So I think that's a really, really dangerous state of affairs.

The W3C is now hearing petitions from other groups that want DRM, and I think they're going to be hard pressed to reject them. So the e-book people have turned up and said why can't we have DRM for e-books on the web, if you can do it for video? Functionally it's hard to understand what the distinction would be between DRM on an e-book and DRM on a web page.

After all an e-book is just a text file with some formating, which is what a web page is too. And again, I think it would be naïve to expect there to… if there was fascility available by default to stop people from copying text from their browser windows, from using text from their browser window in ways that they choose to, from saving it, it would be unreasonable to expect that a lot of publishers wouldn't adopt it. I could easilly see the New York Times and the other newspapers with paywalls adopting it. I can't imagine why they wouldn't adopt it if it where available in the browser. And at that point, again, noone is going to make a browser which you can't use with the New York Times.

And I don't think that the New York Times or Netflix or Hollywood want to abet the NSA, I don't think they want to make it easy for people who run remote access trojans, the software that lets them spy on you trough your webcam, I don't think they want to abet those people in their surveilance of their victims. I just think that they're indifferent to it, indifferent to the possibillity that that's what's going to arise from it.

So I'm going to be writing this up more formally soon, and if I sound down that's why.

[THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PART:]

I'm really kind of running out of hope for the internet, and for the future. The reason my hope for the future and my hope for the internet are bound up is that it's hard to imagine how we can meaningfully change the world if we don't have the possibillity of a free and open internet to use to organize that change. The rich and the powerfull already enjoy the facillity to organize themselves. That's how they got to be rich and powerfull.

But for anyone else, for anyone hoping to upend the order of things, to have a more egalitarian, democratic society, I can't concieve of how that would work if there wasn't a free and open infrastructure on which to organize it. And that free and open infrastructure is incompatible with the idea that owners of computers are treated as untrusted by those computers. And the law prohibits telling people when their computers are doing things that they don't want them to do, or telling people about voulnerabilities in their computers that might allow som third party to exploit their computer against their owners interests.

That's pretty wonkish, I know. And not entirely coherent, I know. That's why I haven't written it up yet. But I'm going to. And I hope maybe we can start joining up the dots here. That the institutions we rely on to keep the internet safe and free, like the World Wide Web Consortium, like the Mozilla Foundation, will understand that no matter what the cost to their wider relevance to the wider internet that this is not worth it…

It, it can't be worth it. That there's nothing that is worth participating in the creation of a mandate that makes it illegal to tell people when their computers are not trustworthy. There just isn't.

Cory Doctorow on the end of the internet

Cory Doctorow discusses the ways to oppose DRM and make it a political issue so that maker culture and open source software are not killed off.

Cory Doctorow Huxley And Orwell Pt 5

Cory Doctorow explains why the W3C is standardising on a future where computers will be vulnerable and open to surveillance.

Cory Doctorow Huxley And Orwell Pt 4

Cory Doctorow explains how Netflix video streaming has led the W3C to promise to build DRM into HTML5, potentially making all of our computers flawed and vulnerable.

Cory Doctorow Huxley And Orwell Pt 3

Cory Doctorow explains how we use metaphors to explain computing and the internet and how that can lead to wrong conclusions about how the technology works - including 'streaming' and 'downloading'.

Cory Doctorow Huxley and Orwell Pt 1

EDP13 - Show Notes

In this episode, I interview a slew people focused on of Internet activism, politics, and business that are interested in internet freedom, privacy, and surveillance. SXSW Interactive had a big focus on internet activism. With sessions including Glen Greenwald, Jullian Assange, Barton Gellman, Cory Doctorow, the EFF, the ACLU, and Fight for the Future, this year things were 

One on One interviews
Chris Conley policy attorney with the ACLU of Northern California
Evan Greer - Campaign Manager at Fight for the Future
Holmes Wilson - Co-founder at Fight for the Future
Ali Sternburg - Public Policy Counsel at Computer and Comunications Industry Association (CCIA)
Rep. Bryan Hughes - District Five in the Texas House of Representiatives
Ron Yokubaitis - Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Goden Frog, Giganews, Datafoundry and Texas.net

Take Back Your Internet Party

Speakers
--------
Kevin Bankston - Policy Director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute
Evan Greer - Campaign Manager at Fight for the Future
Ali Sternburg - Public Policy Counsel at Computer and Comunications Industry Association (CCIA)
Rep. Bryan Hughes - District Five in the Texas House of Representiatives
Ron Yokubaitis - Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Goden Frog, Giganews, Datafoundry and Texas.net
Stacey Higgenbotham - Panel Moderator and senior writer at GigaOM

LINKS in Podcast
Disruptive Competition Project - http://www.project-disco.org  
SXSW Session - Telling the NSA to Back Off - http://schedule.sxsw.com/2014/events/event_IAP20908
Barton Gellman & Cory Doctorow Talk NSA - http://www.sxsw.com/interactive/news/2014/barton-gellman-and-cory-doctorow-talk-nsa-sxsw-interactive-monday-march-10
ACLU - http://aclu.org
ACLU Northern california - http://aclunc.org
Free Future - http://aclu.org/blog/free-future
Demand Your Dot Rig hts - https://www.dotrights.org/
Metadata Report https://aclunc.org/tech/meta
Reset the Net - https://www.resetthenet.org
Texas Linux Fest - http://www.texaslinuxfest.org/

You can find more information about the project Embracing Disruption at embracingdisruption.com

About the host:
You can find more information about me here: n82ps.io

About the podcast:

Embracing Disruption (embracingdisruption.com) started as a kickstarted funded, open-source manifesto about the cloud, disruptive technology, and internet freedom. The manifesto was co-authored by Nathan Toups and Brad Carleton. This podcast grew out of the desire to continue the conversation after the manifesto was completed and is run by Nathan Toups.

The music on this episode was created by LOWERCASE n, you can find this song and more on SoundCloud.

013 SXSW PART 3: Internet Activism & Reset The Net

Making things - from gadgets to jam to furniture - is becoming more mainstream. And it may be about to change our economy, according to Chris Anderson, author of "Makers: The New Industrial Revolution," former editor of Wired Magazine, and co-founder & CEO of 3D Robotics and Limor Fried, owner of the electronics hobbyist company AdaFruit.

Why the Maker Movement Matters

Taken from http://craphound.com/?p=5305 to make for easier web playing & sharing.

"There are three iron laws of information age creativity, freedom and business, woven deep into the fabric of the Internet’s design, the functioning of markets, and the global system of regulation and trade agreements.

You can’t attain any kind of sustained commercial, creative success without understanding these laws — but more importantly, the future of freedom itself depends on getting them right."

Information Doesn’t Want to be Free - Cory Doctorow (Dconstruct2014 )

Marcus, a.k.a &#8220;w1n5t0n,&#8221; is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works&#8211;and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school&#8217;s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems. But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they&#8217;re mercilessly interrogated for days. When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself. Available for purchase at: <a href="http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZSearch.woa/wa/advancedSearch?term=Little+Brother&entity=audiobook&at=11l3IH&ct=Little+Brother-DN-1-9780739372869">Apple - Audiobook (Downloadable format)</a><a href="http://www.qksrv.net/click-2665379-10273919?url=http://www.audible.com/search?advsearchKeywords=Little+Brother+Cory+Doctorow&source_code=COMA0213WS031709&SID=Little+Brother-DN-1-9780739372869">Audible - Audiobook (Downloadable format)</a><a href="http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2665379-11117375?SID=Little+Brother-DN-1-9780739372869&url=http://www.audiobooks.com/search/book/Little+Brother">audiobooks.com - Audiobook (Downloadable format)</a><a href="http://www.downpour.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=Little+Brother">downpour - Audiobook (Downloadable format)</a><a href="http://www.qksrv.net/click-2665379-10273919?SID=Little+Brother-DN-1-9780739372869&url=http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/search/book/Little+Brother">eMusic - Audiobook (Downloadable format)</a>

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, read by Kirby Heyborne

Cory Doctorow is one of my all time most favorite science fiction writers. So it is no surprise I had so much fun interviewing him.

I don’t know how he does it, but Cory is one of those rare individuals who can juggle successfully being a father, an avid reader, a blogger, an activist, a journalist and a prolific science fiction writer, all at once.

It is for this reason that I was persistent in chasing Cory for over 2 years so that I can finally get him on Singularity 1 on 1. And it was totally worth it: Doctorow is indeed a very dynamic, eloquent, passionate, challenging and fun interlocutor.

During our conversation Cory covers a wide variety of topics such as: how Star Wars inspired him to become a science fiction writer; Cory’s initial jobs as a bookstore seller, Greenpeace activist, web developer, entrepreneur and director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; the intimate relationship between being a science fiction writer, a blogger and an activist; the motivation and goals behind his work; what science fiction is about and what it is good and bad at doing; Doctorow’s take on the technological singularity as a “progressive apocalypse”; his “militant atheism” and technology activism.

Some of my favorite quotes that I will take away from this interview with Cory are:

“Science fiction is very good at predicting the present.”

[…]

“Evolution is not perfection. Evolution is suitability.”

[…]

“We have failed to appreciate the gravitas of the internet and continue to regulate it as if it is a glorified video on demand service. And as we do this, we put everything that we do on the internet – which is everything – in jeopardy.”

Cory Doctorow: The Singularity Is A Progressive Apocalypse

"Printcrime" by Cory Doctorow. Audiobook translated into swedish and recorded by Magnus Edlund. Released under CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0. Original work under CC-BY-NC-SA 2.5. Available at http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_Printcrime.html

Cory Doctorow, "Printcrime" (swedish fan-reading)

Note: I started recording about  3 minutes into the talk! The intro was about how this isn't a talk about copyright. More info here: http://wankyplannerblog.wordpress.com/2012/05/03/google-firestarters-cory-doctorow-and-general-purpose-computing/

About the coming war on general purpose computing

Google Firestarters - Cory Doctorow

The war against computer freedom will just keep escalating, Doctorow contends.  The copyright wars, net neutrality, and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) were early samples of what is to come.  Victories in those battles were temporary.  Conflict in the decades ahead will feature ever higher stakes, more convoluted issues, and far more powerful technology.  The debate is about how civilization decides to conduct itself and in whose interests.

“Cory Doctorow is one of the great context-setters of our generation,” says Tim O’Reilly.  Co-editor of the acclaimed blog “Boing Boing,” Doctorow writes contemporary science fiction blending contextual insight with journalistic depth.  His recent books include " For the Win"; " Makers"; and " Little Brother".

Long Now and the Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/ bring Cory Doctorow to San Francisco for a glimpse into the future of computing and the increasing fight for control over our freedom both online and offline.

"The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer" was given on July 31, 02012 as part of Long Now's Seminar series. The series was started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the world's leading thinkers. The Seminars take place in San Francisco and are curated and hosted by Stewart Brand. To follow the talks, you can:

Subscribe to our podcasts: http://longnow.org/seminars/podcast
Explore the full series: http://longnow.org/seminars
More ideas on long-term thinking: http://blog.longnow.org

The Long Now Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to fostering long-term thinking and responsibility. Our projects include a 10,000 Year Clock, endangered language preservation, thousand year+ data storage, and Long Bets, an arena for accountable predictions. 

Become a Long Now member to support this series, join our community, and connect with our ongoing work to explore and deepen long-term thinking: http://longnow.org/membership

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/longnow
Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/longnow
Subscribe to our channel: https://www.youtube.com/longnow

Seminars About Long-term Thinking

Support this Series

Cory Doctorow - The Coming Century of War Against Your Computer

Chris Anderson’s book THE LONG TAIL chronicled how the Web revolutionized and democratized distribution.  His new book MAKERS shows how the same thing is happening to manufacturing, with even wider consequences, and this time the leading revolutionaries are the young of the world.  Anderson himself left his job as editor of Wired magazine to join a 22-year-old from Tijuana in running a typical Makers firm, 3D Robotics, which builds do-it-yourself drones.

Web-based collaboration tools and small-batch technology such as cheap 3D printers, 3D scanners, laser cutters, and assembly robots, Anderson points out, are transforming manufacturing.  Suddenly, large-scale manufacturers are competing not just with each other on multi-year cycles, they are competing with swarms of tiny competitors who can go from invention to innovation to market dominance in a few weeks.  Anybody can play; a great many already are; a great many more are coming.

“Today,“ Anderson writes, “there are nearly a thousand ‘makerspaces‘— shared production facilities— around the world, and they’re growing at an astounding rate: Shanghai alone is building one hundred of them.“

“Open source,” he adds, “is not just an efficient innovation method— it’s a belief system as powerful as democracy or capitalism for its adherents.“

This talk is in partnership with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and we would like to extend a special welcome to the YBCA:YOU members: http://www.ybca.org/ybcayou. 

"The Makers Revolution" was given on February 19, 02013 as part of Long Now's Seminar series. The series was started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking from some of the world's leading thinkers. The Seminars take place in San Francisco and are curated and hosted by Stewart Brand. To follow the talks, you can:

Subscribe to our podcasts: http://longnow.org/seminars/podcast
Explore the full series: http://longnow.org/seminars
More ideas on long-term thinking: http://blog.longnow.org

The Long Now Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to fostering long-term thinking and responsibility. Our projects include a 10,000 Year Clock, endangered language preservation, thousand year+ data storage, and Long Bets, an arena for accountable predictions. 

Become a Long Now member to support this series, join our community, and connect with our ongoing work to explore and deepen long-term thinking: http://longnow.org/membership

Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/longnow
Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/longnow
Subscribe to our channel: https://www.youtube.com/longnow

makers

Dollo Dollo