

Redesiging a Broken Internet: Cory Doctorow [video] - getdavidhiggins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_J_9EFGFR-Y

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JBiserkov
Judging from the first 5 minutes, this Wired article by the same author
contains pretty much the same content in textual form -
[http://www.wired.com/2014/12/government-computer-
security](http://www.wired.com/2014/12/government-computer-security)

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nunyabuizness
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?"

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rst
He's referring to their standard for embedding hooks for DRM into web pages,
the so-called "Encrypted Media Extensions":

[https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-media/](https://w3c.github.io/encrypted-
media/)

~~~
nunyabuizness
I don't understand, doesn't this only apply to DRM content? How does this
enable remote control of your browser?

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pixl97
No, it's about control of your browser.

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.

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nunyabuizness
Ahh gotcha. Thanks.

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zaroth
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.

~~~
jacquesm
> I wish the title were different, since the talk has nothing to do with a
> broken internet.

The rest of your comment sort of negates that first sentence.

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xnull2guest
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_.

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wuliwong
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.

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marlinspire
He is not wrong.

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.

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Animats
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.

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Animats
I see the Apple fan club is on duty.

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.

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Turing_Machine
You claimed that Apple doesn't allow apps to be programmable.

That is objectively wrong. It has nothing to do with "fan clubs".

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xenishiet
Cory Doctorow just needs to STFU and go away.

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)

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rubbingalcohol
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.

