[TriLUG] Thursday at 2pm: Cory Doctorow says, "Pwned!"

[Jon Carnes]

Excellent! Thanks for the write up.

Jon Carnes

On Sun, 2007-03-04 at 16:04, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> Thanks for the posting. I went to the talk at UNC at 2pm and 
> enjoyed it so much that I also went to the talk at Duke at 
> 5pm. I wouldn't have known about it without your posting.
> 
> The audience at the two venues were quite different. It was 
> a hot day (unusual back then but not anymore it seems) and 
> at the UNC talk the audience was mostly (I think undergrad) 
> students, all dressed casually, presumably fitting in with 
> Paul's style. Several of the females had tatooes, which I'm 
> not used to. The Duke talk at 5pm was mostly more formally 
> attired academics and what seemed to me to be older 
> students.
> 
> Cory's talk at UNC was about DRM and the rights we are left 
> with (if any) when we buy music/movies. The talk at Duke was 
> on ubiquitous serveillance in modern society (and the rights 
> we have left).
> 
> Cory is articulate and speaks more quickly than anyone I can 
> think of. Although the speed is unusual in a seminar 
> setting, much of the content he was familiar to the 
> audience, and for this, the delivery style worked well.
> 
> Cory would lead the audience through a set of logical 
> arguments starting from premises that the audience accepted 
> (eg we want to be able to listen to the music we've bought) 
> and arrive at "we want DRM now", the conclusions that the 
> record industry tells us that we're clamouring for. Every 
> few minutes there'd be laughter, not because Cory had said 
> anything funny, but because of the sudden realisation of the 
> rights we're expected to give up, so that the recording 
> industry could make more money.
> 
> Cory is a scifi writer and said that contrary to popular 
> wisdom, scifi writers aren't any better at predicting the 
> future than anyone else; they're only good at predicting the 
> present. eg Jules Verne (which Cory pronounced in the French 
> manner - I didn't know J.V. was French) only described 
> things already present in his society.
> 
> As for DRM, Cory said that all encryption methods are 
> breakable, when the receiver of the message is also the 
> person who mustn't know the content of the message. Security 
> people know this, but have convinced the the entertainment 
> industry to buy their products despite this wrinkle, since 
> no-one else wants them.
> 
> Encryption for the masses only became possible when the EFF 
> took NSA to court over the silencing of an academic who 
> wanted to deliver a paper at a conference describing 
> publically known encryption methods with keys longer than 
> 40bits (the length the USGovt had decided was good enough 
> for its citizen's secrets). At the time cryptography with 
> longer keys was regulated as a munition. It's only because 
> of the EFF suit that ordinary people can now buy over the 
> internet with a credit card and peruse their bank records 
> from home.
> 
> Talking about Apple's DRM on iTunes, Cory describe the iPod 
> as a roach motel for tunes - tunes go in, but never come 
> out. He said that mashes and other music released under 
> licenses which prohibit DRMs (including his own) are DRMed 
> on iTunes anyhow. Asked about Steve Jobs statement that he'd 
> take off DRM if he could, Cory said "He's the biggest 
> shareholder in Disney - do you think he can't tell Disney 
> what to do? Do you think he's quaking in fear of the 
> backlash from recording artists if he takes off the DRM?" As 
> for the entertainment industry's interest in preserving the 
> rights of artists (so that they will make money), Cory noted 
> that 98% (or possibly 90%, didn't get it down fast enough) 
> of artists make less than $600/yr from their recordings.
> 
> The entertainment industry lawyers don't have to catch 
> people transferring files to get them. In a college setting 
> where some people setup indices of shared files, just the 
> act of having an index is prima facie evidence of illegal 
> file sharing.
> 
> He talked about Internet II, and how the designers put 2yrs 
> of work into QoS to give streaming packets (eg video) high 
> priority. They eventually concluded that it was cheaper to 
> add more bandwidth (pull more fiber) than to pay people to 
> fiddle with a bandwidth limited system. I once heard a 
> similar statement from a google sysadmin, who said if you 
> were practicing reasonable disk hygiene (deleting old 
> files), that when a disk filled up, it was cheaper to add 
> another disk, than to spend the time to chase up people and 
> ask them to delete even more of their files.
> 
> The no-fly list, which has grounded people like Senator 
> Edward Kennedy and peace activist Cat Stevens, Cory 
> described as a list of people who are so evil that we can't 
> let them fly under any circumstances, but who aren't evil 
> enough to be arrested.
> 
> Cory talked to a person involved with filtering the internet 
> for child pornography. Cory asked how it could work. The 
> person said
> 
> "Well it doesn't. Child pornographers always can find ways 
> around the filters - they're determined. What we're really 
> doing is stopping ordinary people from accidentally going to 
> a child pornography site."
> 
> Cory said he surfed 9 sigmas outside the rest of the 
> population and he'd never landed on a child pornography site 
> by accident, so who are these filters really for and why are 
> we spending money on them and telling society that they need 
> this protection from the government? Cory noted that you can 
> turn the history on and off in Safari now (he called it 
> something like the "porno switch", but I can't remember what 
> he called it - but Apple has some bland technical name for 
> it).
> 
> Cory described the current internet as coming out of Tim 
> Berners-Lee's efforts to provide technology to allow 
> collaboration. It's worked so well that now people 
> collaborate who've never met each other, who don't even know 
> that they're collaborating, without a central authority on 
> the collaboration, for almost no cost and who would never 
> have thought of collaborating in the past. Apparently at the 
> time, there was a cabal of academics designing a 
> collaborative internet with central authority on each 
> subject. Those people are still remonstrating that Tim 
> jumped the gun on them "If only he'd waited 2yrs, we would 
> have had it working and he could have joined us", they 
> lament. Cory points out that they'd been working for years 
> with no results. (Joe: you do know that Tim's conference 
> paper describing his collaborative working tool, was 
> rejected. Apparently it was of no interest to academics.)
> 
> Cory says the same technology (the internet), through DRM, 
> is being used to restrict your freedom. The entertainment 
> industry will say "how about a license that only allows you 
> to view the movie on one computer, in one particular room, 
> by only one person? Anyone buy that?" (Joe: similar to the 
> original e-book license that Dmitry Sklyarov broke). Well 
> no. "OK how about separate licences for the bedroom and the 
> living room? Anyone buy that?". And so it goes till the 
> industry finds the minimum rights that can be separately 
> licensed.
> 
> Cory said that society is being conditioned to accept 
> surveillance 24*7. In London, where he lives, he's 
> photographed 300 times a day (Joe: people walk around a lot 
> more in other countries). It doesn't make you any safer. A 
> friend of his wife's was murdered on his front doorstep. The 
> cameras didn't prevent the crime - killers don't think about 
> cameras when they're killing someone - they were caught 
> afterwards from pictures on the cameras.
> 
> Cory, being a foreign citizen (Canadian) is fingerprinted 
> every time he enters the country. This program has caught 
> about 1000 people at a cost of $15M/person. Were any 
> terrorists caught? Nope - all the terrorists were let 
> through. The people caught had overstayed their visas or had 
> minor dope convictions in their home country. Was it worth 
> $15M a person to stop them from entering the country, or is 
> it just a program to keep the populace on edge?
> 
> Cory talked about something that has (Joe: or will, not 
> sure) happen in World of Warcraft. To circumvent the Great 
> Wall of China, 10,000 people will logon to the Chinese 
> server and walk around (the game) holding up a sign saying 
> "I'll get a URL for you" (ie one of the blocked URLs). Then 
> the player from the free world would get it and dump the 
> output on some scratchpad in the game for the Chinese person 
> to read.
> 
> Cory's desktop machine(s) all run the Tor (anonymising) 
> router.
> 
> (I didn't intend to write up the talks. It was only about 
> half way through the 2nd talk that I realised this was too 
> interesting for others to miss out on. Much of this posting 
> is from notes scribbled at the end of the last talk and 
> after I got home. I expect I've covered less than half of 
> both talks here.)
> 
> Joe
> -- 
> Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
> jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
> generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
> Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!