Some random, undirected thoughts:
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A question I put at NotCon to Cory Doctorow, who believes the thesis that technologies have politics: in particular that inventions like the printing press and the internet are fundamentally technologies of the liberal enlightenment, and that technologies like `trusted computing' are fundamentally repressive. Anyway:
Technologies may or may not have inbuilt politics. The printing press can be used for printing books, or printing identity cards; `trusted computing' can be used to enforce digital rights management or to secure peer-to-peer networks. If these technologies do have political values, how can we tell ahead of time what they are?
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I also spoke to a couple of people there who were working on (or enthusiasts for) heavily-encrypted, impossible-to-snoop peer-to-peer (`filesharing') applications. A well-known example is FreeNet; there are various others. FreeNet describes itself as,
free software which lets you publish and obtain information on the Internet without fear of censorship. To achieve this freedom, the network is entirely decentralized and publishers and consumers of information are anonymous. Without anonymity there can never be true freedom of speech, and without decentralization the network will be vulnerable to attack.
-- which is a point of view, I suppose. A lot of people who work on this sort of thing have the ambition of making it impossible for record companies to threaten them when they send copies of music to their friends; while, as ever, I must point out that copyright infringement is Bad and Wrong and nobody ought to do it, the idea of giving the RIAA a black eye over their (frankly brutish) tactics is a worthy one.
But I think these people are addressing the wrong problem. If you build a secure, anonymous peer-to-peer network that actually works and is convenient to use, the result will be quiet panic among the Powers That Be, swiftly followed by oppressive regulation. While the advocates of this kind of technology will talk about how useful they are for enabling political free speech, the content industries will claim that they enable piracy and the police will warn about their usefulness to criminals. Peer-to-peer advocates will not win this argument; they will face arguments not about Chinese dissidents speaking freely through the network, but about child pornographers and terrorists distributing photographs of children being raped and bomb-making instructions. Government will run, not walk, to implement yet another technically dumb but crowd-pleasing bit of legislation to allow them to shut the thing down or bug every computer connected to it; and every day they delay doing so, the tabloid newspapers will scream for their blood. And you know what? They might be right, at least in part.
People who want to really irk the record industries -- and I'll remind you that copying music in infringement of copyright is Bad and Wrong and you mustn't do it -- should work not on theoretically sound but politically dangerous systems, but on subverting protocols which are so useful that they won't be regulated away. For instance, in a record-industry fantasy world, laws could force ISPs to prevent their customers from running any servers at all (by dropping incoming packets with the SYN flag set, if you want to know), unless they were licensed by some body which ensured that they weren't doing anything wrong. (I don't think this is likely, even in the United States, but it is possible; if it did happen, it would be justified by the same arguments about enforcement of the criminal law that I describe above.) This would kill all the current peer-to-peer systems, but leave most of the Internet's `killer applications' workable (though much more expensive to run).
But imagine instead building such a network built on email. People expect to be able to email (for instance) large `Power Point' presentations to one another, and what's to say whether a sound embedded in such a file is an infringing copy of a song, or a legitimate sound-effect? While we shouldn't expect email to carry on working in exactly the same way as it has for the last thirty years (though the infrastructure has proved remarkably resilient) I think it's reasonable to expect that there will still be something like email, with more-or-less the same functionality and user interface, for at least that long. And people will rely on it (as they rely on email now) and be very intolerant of interference with it. I had more technical thoughts about this a while ago, which may be of interest to the technically-minded.
- In the unlikely event that you haven't seen it, go and play with They Work For You, Hansard done properly. All praise to Francis and all the other volunteers for a fantastic piece of work, and to mySociety for getting the project going.
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And now I've bored my half-dozen readers to tears with all that technical stuff (and, coincidentally, it was nice to meet some of you face-to-face on Sunday), a political thought. I've just received a piece of election literature from the BNP. On the back of this odious document is a profile of the Unterkartoffelfuhrer who's standing for election here, complete with a picture of his smiling family including two small children. One of the kids is quoted as saying,
My Dad isn't a racist!
Presumably the kid then continued,
He just doesn't like black people or foreigners.
but the BNP didn't see fit to quote this. So there we are: the BNP, a party so hopeless that their election literature is written by six-year-olds.
- And something slightly more trivial. I note that the UK Independence Party are now routinely referred to as `you-kip' in the media. Is this something they endorse, or is it a bit of linguistic viral marketing designed to make them sound silly, like those people who refer to flying saucers as `you-foes'?
Comments
Posted by Roy Badami, Wednesday, 9 June 2004 02:37 (link):
Been there, done that... :-)
Perhaps they are before your time, but do you remember the trickle servers?
It used to be normal practice to fetch large files from the US by means of sending an email request to a trickle server. The server would then queue the request and (subject to bandwidth limits) download the file for you over its expensive transatlantic link. Once it had the file (perhaps a day later) it would send it to you, uuencoded, in 60kB chunks (that being the largest message that e-mail of the day could reliably transport)...
There was a time when email connectivity was the only widespread connectivity (and with a very severe message size limitation at that)... We coped... We could cope again (if we had to)...
-roy
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:25 (link):
I remember ftp-by-mail servers being advertised but I think they were on the way out when I started using the network. I've never heard of trickle servers specifically. Of course, doing peer-to-peer email file retrieval is a bit harder, but even so....
Posted by Tom Steinberg, Wednesday, 9 June 2004 08:46 (link):
Theyworkforyou.com is not a mySociety project. Any overlap between developers, whether alive or dead, is purely coincidental.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:11 (link):
I stand corrected.
Posted by Giles Turnbull, Wednesday, 9 June 2004 09:10 (link):
A couple of years ago, I mentioned the idea of file-sharing-by-email to a few people, and everyone just nodded and looked the other way. I assumed that people considered the very idea beyond stupid, so I stopped mentioning it to anyone.
So I'm glad to see you mention is, Chris. I think you're right. What's to stop someone starting up a service that, rather than sharing files directly, puts the owners of two files in touch with one another? All they then have to do is email the files concerned. When the majority of users are connecting over broadband, few people will object to the passing around of multi-megabyte files via email. (Even though, to those of us who've been using email for a while, the mere idea sounds Bad and Wrong.)
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 11 June 2004 18:31 (link):
Well, a service which puts users in touch with one another is fine, except that if it's centralised it's susceptible to the same legal sanctions as (original) Napster was. If it were peer-to-peer, then (under current law, anyway) only the users can be sued. The record industry is currently doing its best to discover by experience how unpopular a business will become if it sues its own customers.... I agree that sending multi-megabyte files by email is Bad and Wrong (``Your country may be at risk if you do not comply'', as NTK is fond of saying); even more so if by sending them the users are infringing copyright (fx: cries of ``shame!''). But apparently some people do not share our moral compass (fx: cries of ``shocking!'').
(I wonder if we will see restrictions on speech here, such as a prohibition on writing computer viruses or peer-to-peer software? It's just the kind of unworkable proposal that would seem eminently workable to whoever draws up new copyright laws and specifications for DRM systems and whatnot. I'd say it's only a matter of time....)
Posted by Owen Massey, Wednesday, 9 June 2004 12:01 (link):
The BNP leaflet for the London mayoral election blames refugees for increasing house prices. This is a surprising claim for them to make, not only because rundown bed & breakfasts and hostels aren't usually considered gentrification, but because that part of the electorate afraid of immigration very likely welcomes increasing house prices.
Newspapers, and the UK Independence Party themselves, seem undecided as to whether they're 'UKIP' or 'the UKIP'. Dropping the article is the first stage toward acronymisation. The Guardian's interview with Robert Kilroy-Silk yesterday used 'Ukip' throughout, which might well have been designed to annoy him, like old Labourites mispronouncing Peter Mandelson's name 'Mendelson'.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Wednesday, 9 June 2004 12:12 (link):
Well, the Guardian's style guide mandates that,
so it may not be a deliberate attempt to cause offence. I think their style guide is quite wrong on this point, but whatever.I didn't know the detail about Old Labourites calling Mandelson `Mendelson'. My opinion of (some of) Old Labour falls yet further.
Posted by Rufus Pollock, Saturday, 12 June 2004 14:33 (link):
Technology alters the power balance between groups because it affects them differentially. Lowering the cost of information access will usually assist the poorer members of society more than the richer. Just think of Kahle's wonderful bookmobile or take the case of the printing press. The PP lowered the cost of information diffusion. Since these effects are to reduce monopoly control of information one would imagine this would have a predictable 'progressive' result.
Simlarly the internet reduces the cost of information and organization. This benefit has a differential impact where the less organized, less well-off groups gain more than the organized, well-off groups. The internet can go some way to resolving the free-rider issues and principal agent problems that bedevil government.
This doesn't mean that technology isn't a two edged sword and that in most cases it is used for both the good and the bad. Nevertheless in these kinds of cases the overall effect is unambiguous. So take the printing press. Many governments had large bureaucracies dedicated to censorship (see Darnton on France in the 18th C.) and nowadays the Chinese monitor internet access. But the cost of these restrictions grows with new technology and they are less effective than what had previously existed. The French still read lots of banned literature (such as crude satires that mocked the King and his ministers) and the Chinese probably have more access to information than previously. Technology can be a one-edged sword.
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