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

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

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
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Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!