Thanks for the heads-up. It is a good way to get more, relevant information quickly.
But given that the link is an hour-and-a-half long, and that article is quite brief, it would be more accurate to say that he's filling in some of the content of his presentation with some-of-up-to-all-of his article. (But the link must have a lot more than what's in the article.)
I may listen to all of the presentation in the near future, on the chance that he will have something fresher and newer to say than things he's already said about his "war on general-purpose computers" thesis.
Now that I have listened to the whole video I still think the article is a great tl;dr;
it includes a non-trivial Q & A session. The thing that stood out for me is a statement my Lessig that society is governed by Code, Laws, Norms and Markets.
Cory Doctorow has been making and refining these points for a while now. If you have read his essays or seen him speak you may have heard some of those paragraphs already.
Thanks for the link. Do you know what he means when he says the "World Wide Web Consortium continues to infect the core standards of the web itself to allow remote control over your computer against your wishes?"
In standard HTML a server sends you some text bits and data streams and your browser chooses what it wants to do with them. Save them, display them on the screen, ignore them, etc. With DRM the browser has to be specifically engineered to do not what you want it to do, but what the person sending the data wants it to do. This is almost always done inside of some kind of 'black box of digital magic', be it software or hardware. If you had control or insight of the black box it is likely you could subvert control of the encrypted media.
Now I won't say that it directly enables control over your browser any more so than Flash does (Only 76 CVE's in 2014), but every black box is a point of attack for hackers.
DRM ensures that browser doesn't always behave the way you want it to behave. You no longer have full control over it, you give a part of it away to 3rd party.
I wish the title were different, since the talk has nothing to do with a broken internet. But the actual topic; computers working for or against their operators, DMCA as a meta-law to be exploited by private enterprise, and DMCA as restraint on public vulnerability disclosure, are all important public discussion.
The key point I heard, and I'll embellish a little further; -- legislators are passing laws like DMCA thinking they are merely trifling with entertainment options, but they are mucking with critical infrastructure, the central mediating artifact of our lives, maybe even the platform for our existence. Tread lightly.
While I would be apt to agree with his conclusion I have trouble with his arguments, which I find sloppy.
Thesis: the high level problem is that general purpose computing (and general purpose manufacturing, like 3d printing) dramatically lowers production and distribution costs in the face of established and ingrained financial and societal structure. This expresses itself in multiple ways in the real world. The author tries to grapple with these but is always so far into specific cases that the root causes remain hidden.
1.) Cost of production and distribution is lowered below profitable margins for several large industries including entertainment and news media.
2.) Regulation of the means of manufacturing chains has been a useful tool for the governance of products, consumers and society (guns, drugs, chemicals).
3.) Lowered costs, where they can be gathered instead of passed to consumers, means high margin profit businesses (Microsoft's business model).
4.) With lower communication costs, 'services' are an emerging (and now very established) model to replace or pair with the 'restricted machine' model.
The problem is that pockets of accumulated Capital, established market leaders (and often entire industries), and conventional mechanisms of regulation are all trying to resist the giant transformational changes that the digital front could represent. They have succeeded for a full generation now and the new generation doesn't understand the terms of the issue.
This is not to say that this is a purely bad thing. These transformations completely upend the world. The US government (or whichever) needs to cope with these dramatic changes - either by softening them or by undergoing radical transformations itself. For example, one might think it's a good thing that guns don't cost $8, can be produced by anyone, or lack serial numbers and other forensic signatures.
To welcome the utopic world that Cory Doctorow (and I) espouse we need to figure out a way to structure society so that $8 anonymous guns don't represent a serious problem. Until there are solutions to that problem it is inevitable that legislation will do everything it can to balance the benefits of general purpose manufacturing with artificially raised costs and barriers to criminalized enterprises. Doctorow recognizes that the 'balanced' solution - 'services' and 'pseudo-general purpose machines' - are a bad deal. But he does not yet recognize that without answers to some difficult societal questions so are the others.
I always cringe when I see a talk or a blog post in tech talking about "fixing" something that is "broken", especially something as complex as the internet. It's just sensationalism. The state of "brokeness" of the internet is totally ill-defined. I would be much more likely to give this talk my time and attention if the topic was more clearly stated in the title.
Comprehensible Examples from the news that show a trend of dangerous and inevitably technically incompetent control and surveillance.
Doctorow is a great speaker, well versed and full of citations and recognises that an educated populace and individual liberty are the true wealth of nations.
You might think such a seemless and high bandwidth delivery is well rehearsed but the same seemingly effortless intersections of facts and culture occurs spontaneously in the Q & A - as a speaker virtuosic.
The crypto wars, the copyright wars, the war for general purpose computing, chilling effects on vulnerability disclosure, drm, de-CSS - these define the limits of electronic possibility.
Freedom is being eroded by totalitarian feature creep - Doctorow is one of the few technological evangelists who realised this very early on.
General purpose computers are so last-cen. Today, we have mobile! The arguments about control today are between the mobile network operators, the mobile device vendors, and governments. Users have little if any control or input to that process. Apple doesn't even allow IOS apps to have programmability.
i.e. You can't run code that isn't compiled in your binary, unless it's JavaScript running in a webview, or unless it's code written by the user in your coding app.
2.7
Apps that download code in any way or form will be rejected
2.8
Apps that install or launch other executable code will be rejected
It's amusing. Any negative mention of Apple takes about an hour to be recognized. Then it gets modded down. The same thing happens on Slashdot, with about the same amount of delay. Then, if the comment is any good, it gets modded up again over the next day or so. Apple's operation seems to have a fixed moderation window.
Lets be clear here, CD is primarily a science fiction writer (feel free to look at info up yourself), not a programmer/engineer (like Richard Stallman), not a researcher (like Michael Geist), not an activist (many many examples we all know) or quite frankly anyone of any relevance. He's the new breed of self-aggrandizing web whore that gets himself shoe horned in "tech" sites or simply via his dumpster blog Boingboing. To stay relevant he takes popular internet news (say gamergate) and takes the most hardlined politically-correct stance on it. A great example of this would be how he recently co-authored a fictional book about a "female gamer". I mean... comon...
For the sake of the internet please ignore this person and support people who make a real difference. (I fully expect to be voted down for this by not brainlessly applauding these hipster heroes)
Cory Doctorow's writing influenced me in an important and personal way, so I can't agree with your assessment. Your tone is hostile and your examples are not specific enough to refute, so there's no point engaging on them. I hope this will serve as reasonable explanation for why I've downvoted your comment.
Anybody who uses computers is relevant to talk about how they are made and legislated. Being a researcher, or any of the other roles you mention, doesn't give you relevance. What gives you relevance is what you say, and saying isn't limited to authority figures. If he needs to STFU, then do you not also need to similarly STFU? Coz what authority or relevance do you have to speak about CD that CD doesn't have to speak about computers? As for refusing to brainlessly applaud, what you're actually doing is brainlessly shouting him down, which is basically the same thing in the opposite direction and not intellectually superior in any way.
> A great example of this would be how he recently co-authored a fictional book about a "female gamer". I mean... comon...
This is so misleading that it could simply be called "wrong." The recently released graphic novel In Real Life is an adaptation of "Anda's Game", which Doctorow wrote in 2004. This far, far predates the issue you claim he co-opted.
