makers

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

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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

Royal Oats ft. Waldo (prod. Sango)

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

Versões acústicas das músicas da banda tocadas ao vivo ou em sessões.

NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

This collection of 17 tracks intricately fuses together orchestral and electronic elements, leaving quite a distinctive impression. One track, Suborbital Horizon hurtles itself through outer space, eventually colliding to Earth against the cliff face-sound of the track Monolith. Other compositions such as To Go Beyond create their own line of trajectory, taking the listener into undiscovered territory. We suggest listening on your favorite device while standing on a mountain top staring up into space!

All tracks can be edited or tweaked to sync perfectly with your project!

Suborbital Horizon | Simone Ferroni

"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)

Do people of opposing political parties believe in different facts? The mantra at the moment is that they do, because of media echo chambers, motivated reasoning, and ideological blindspots. But a more careful look reveals a different answer, with perhaps even more startling consequences. This week we follow two conservative Republicans who consumed a liberal newsfeed for two weeks, and we look at the empirical and philosophical problem of the way partisanship affects belief in facts. Guest voices include Janalee Tobias, Trent Loos, philosophers Daniel Wodak and Eric Schwitzgebel, and political scientist John G. Bullock. The episode is brought to you by the Great Courses Plus. Sign up for one month free at www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/hiphi.

Season 2, Episode 10: Chamber of Facts (July 24, 2018)

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
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Cory Doctorow on the end of the internet

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