Archive for category English

Some publications

Feb 15

Posted by Smári McCarthy in English, Personal, Publications | No Comments

I’m terribly bad at keeping track of what stuff relating to me goes out there. A few have bubbled up via Twitter links and e-mails over the last few days though, so here are some links and such, mostly just for posterity:

I was looking for the EDRigram version of my Copyright Combinatorics article (I’m plotting something evil), and came across this German translation. Cool! Don’t know who did the translation, but it looks legit.

The (English language) Dutch magazine Design.nl published this nice interview with me on the subject of digital fabrication recently. It was fun to be involved in Premsela’s Me Craft / You Industry symposium, and I’m hoping I’ll have more chances to do stuff directly related to industrialization and craft production soon.

A picture I took at the anti-ACTA protests has been featured on Mashable. It’s actually a really good picture, taken on my brand new Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the most ridiculously expensive piece of hardware I’ve ever bought, but quite a delightful little gizmo nevertheless.

Somebody also pointed out this video, which was taken in Málaga last year at the e-STAS conference. Pretty disheveled – when that was recorded I had been awake for about 36 hours, running from a press conference in Málaga to an interview and giving a talk in Madrid and back to Málaga for another conference. I really shouldn’t do that, but my friend Floren is a slave master when he’s organizing events, and wedged the Madrid thing in the middle of the e-STAS itinerary, much to my dismay. I wonder if I dare tell him I’m in Valencia right now?

I also was quoted in this Venezuelan article on el Tiempo about the “example of Iceland”, an article which, if the machine translation is anything to go on, isn’t really very good. It looks like it just mops up statements – conceptions and misconceptions alike – from a couple of years of media. I don’t remember being contacted by el Tiempo for that quote, so it’s probably trawled from somewhere. Oh well.

As a general pointer, over on the IMMI site Jeff Garland has been doing amazing work keeping track of publications relating to IMMI.

The Napster Moment of Manufacturing

Jan 27

Posted by Smári McCarthy in Copyfight, Development, English, Hardware | No Comments

These are my outline notes from my talk at the Me Craft/You Industry symposium in Enkhuizen, Netherlands, today. The conversation afterwards, at the end, to a large degree revolved around the questions of whether we are ready for a “Napster moment”, whether it will ever come, and whether it’s actually a question of industrial paradigms or economic waveforms. I’m tempted to think that the fact that the symposium is called “Me Craft/You Industry” rather than “Me Kondratiev Wave/You Faddish Harmonic” suggests that this is actually a question of underlying paradigms much rather than simply economic fluctuations.

The topic is craft production and its relationship to industrial production, and by and large humanity consists of people who think that industry is great but it needs more craft, people who think craft is great but it needs more industry, and, in some edge cases – you know who you are – people that think both craft and industry are completely unteneble as production paradigms and we need something different.

There’s a way everybody can come happy out of this, but in order to get there we need to talk about something radically different from manufacturing for a moment and talk about something far more contentious. Then we’ll swing back at it at the end and have a go at centralization, just because we can and because it’ll be fun.

Now. Anybody who grew up in the late 1990′s used Napster, or at least heard of it. You know. The evil file sharing system which allowed lots of people to copy the work of Britney Spears and spread it all over the Internet.

Most of the time, when we look back at Napster, we see it as a failed attempt at liberation of the cultural output of humanity at best and a thoroughly illegal system for violating intellectual monopolies and threatening the hegemony over culture at worst. But regardless of where one stands on filesharing, it’s a fun metaphor that Cory Doctorow pointed out the relevance of: Very rarely do we think of Napster as a system by which a few million teenagers reinvented the music industry over the course of roughly 6 months – the leading edge of the Napster adoption curve – and during that time they built the largest database of human creativity that has ever existed, and they did it for free.

The cultural significance of this is massive. It is hard to imagine the world as it is today without the Napster moment. It turned the tables in many ways, both legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, and wherever you stand on any of those, at least your Internet connection is alarmingly fast now. The advent of Napster and its many successors produced massive upwards pressure towards faster Internet connections, more consumer control over cultural output, and a shift from passive consumption of culture to an active consumer culture. In fact, that variate alone is enough to explain most of the change in the structure of the music industry since then, although they will never admit it. In 1989 Stephan Weiswasser of ABC predicted that “you aren’t going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the Internet.” How wrong he was.

The Napster moment, for music, was simply the democratisation of music – the moment at which it was ripped away from corporate interests and structurally enforced state protectionism and spread around all of the streets.

But the key here is not directly that of cultural liberation, because that had already been going on since the very day that culture became enshackled. However, the technology to record and distribute things like music had been incredibly terrible for a very long time then. Back when wax rollers were used to store music, in order to make 10 copies, the artist needed to perform the music 10 times – the concept of mastering did not exist. Slowly we moved from there to a digital age, but even then, prior to Napster, although it was possible to share files online, but it was difficult and required a lot of technical knowledge. Further, it was subject to scaling constraints – whether it was a musician encoding a song onto a wax roller or an FTP server providing the latest tunes, there was only so many requests they could service. So in that sense, “the Napster moment” is the large-scale democratization of filesharing through P2P technology.

But this isn’t about Music. Metaphor complete. Now let’s think about this in terms of industry, craft, and manufacturing.

The beginning of the Industrial revolution marked the beginning of a process by which the ability to craft and subsist was made economically unviable by massive improvements in productive capacity. This led many farmers, homesteaders and others to relocate to towns and cities, which started to grow. Eventually this led to a disenfranchised urbanized working class which had no control over any productive capacity to speak of. Formerly crucial crafts such as knitting were outcompeted by industrial methods and pushed into the realm of hobbyism, while the new class of industrialists owned more and more, produced more and more, yet contributed less and less to the process themselves. Some of the craftsmen rebelled against this trend in England between 1811 and 1815, but sure enough those of them that didn’t get hung got sent ot Australia.

This trend is still going on. Now that human intervention has been minimized and trivialized in factories, the same is happening in retail. Salespeople are being replaced by artificial autonomous agents. Modern capitalism is an existence whereby humans compete against indefatigable machines on a free market.

But yet, this is changing. A persistant interest in reversing the trend of centralization has slowly pushed the boundaries. Free Software has pushed the boundaries. Increasingly, open manufacturing models are pushing the boundaries.

We currently have the early P2P industrial tools, such as Repraps, laser cutters, CNC mills. We have Fab Labs and hackerspaces, but they’re still somewhat hard to use and they are by no stretch of the imagination widespread or democratized. Hackerspaces and maker labs are still geeky and artsy and hackish, and that’s fine for now, but we still need a Napster moment in manufacturing.

Now, to speculate on what that moment will look like is as impossible as it would have been for Stephan Weiswasser to speculate on Napster in 1989. I’d love to try, though. Despite that we don’t know what that moment will look like, in terms of technology, there are a few things we can assume based on previous examples:

  1. It will suck. It’ll be slow and buggy, it’ll suffer from all sorts of scaling issues, it’ll look like crap, and it won’t actually be very good, but it’ll get better.
  2. It will be good enough. It won’t be pretty but it’ll get the job done and everybody who uses it will have countless suggestions for its improvement. As Vinay Gupta has pointed out, “Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing badly.”
  3. It will have a precipice-adoption curve: massive exponent on the leading edge, mostly by young people, suddenly empowered. The emphasis on young people is important. Most people probably won’t “get it”. I’m sure a lot of the people who attend conferences like this will, but there’s not enough of us. There are however lots of bored kids in suburbs.
  4. It will have a P2P social structure, rather than a hierarchical command-and-control structure as we’re used to from industry. In that sense, it will have more in common with craft production, despite retaining industrial output levels. That factor also means that there will be a much higher dynamic range for production – it is less likely that Sloanist economies of scale will apply.
  5. It will be attacked massively by entrenched interests. The attacks will range from smear campaigns (“You wouldn’t download a chicken sandwich!”) to legal actions based on existing laws to the creation of new draconic legal instruments to protect existing industrial production methods. Historical examples of this include the Frame Breaking and Malicious Damage Acts of 1812 in England, from the historical perspective, whereas the more modern ACTA treaty and things like SOPA.
  6. There will be martyrs. People like Peter Sunde and the other founders of the Pirate Bay, people like Aaron Swartz and Pablo Soto. People who, for one reason or another, the various industries decide to make an example of.

[Note: I ran out of time at the talk-equivalent of here. It's hard to fit a fully formed argument into 10 minutes!]

One foreseeable difference between the Democratization of Industry compared to the Democratization of Culture is the scope of severity. Giving everybody access to all the music in the world changes music but it doesn’t change the world. People still need to eat and have shelter, they still need clothes and other essentials. Therefore, social exclusion from the capacity to use BitTorrent will stifle culture, but it won’t necessarily create a dangerous “societal badlands” situation. In short: poor people will not suffer too much.

However, when the Napster Moment happens for manufactured goods, we’re talking about a rather severe situation where the chasm between rich and poor (or rather, the haves and the have-nots, in terms of access to this technology) grows exponentially forever. In terms of political economy, everybody who has not the ability to download (and eat) the chicken sandwich stands to be eternally disenfranchised.

There are solutions to this problem:

First, we can try to make sure that the technology, when it comes into existence, is of a nature that it is inherently copyable. This is a design feature of RepRap – people are thankfully already thinking this way, and Von Neumann showed some pretty convincing maths that suggested that any Universal Constructor must necessarily be able to construct a Universal Constructor. But more importantly, these devices need to be legally unencumbered so that it is socially and legally possible to replicate the devices.

Second, we can try to give as many people in the world access to the existing technology and the knowledge of how to use it and what to expect in the future, such that when such a technology comes along, they’ll not only be less surprised by it but inherently acclimatised to it.

Which gives us the very weird result that the piracy-oriented file-sharing part of culture may be requisite to social justice in a P2P manufacturing world. There might be lots of other ways, but considering the last few hundred years of history and the fact that we have only managed to come up with craft, industry, and P2P, it’s fairly ovious that in any direction where the result is not an open and free peer-to-peer result there lies madness.

Mosquitoes with Cannons

Jan 22

Posted by Smári McCarthy in Copyfight, English, Politics | 8 Comments

Last week, we won. The Internet, long seen as a mostly harmless collection of kitten aficionados and porn fiends, fought epic battle of self preservation against a substantially better organized enemy, one with much greater experience of that field of battle. But much like Aaron Burr against Alexander Hamilton, crazy random happenstance came into play at the right moment, and the massive dose of overkill didn’t hurt – it was just what the good doctor ordered. Our foe went back to Hollywood, tail between feet, and even admitted in an interview thereafter, in minced words, that they had effectively not bribed politicians sufficiently. It was great. You should’ve been there.

But this silver lining also has an associated cloud, and its shaped like a mushroom. Looking over the forlorn battlefield our only martyr lies rotting: MegaUpload, a vehemently illegal cast member, gutted at the last minute by authorities created to combat corruption and protect civil liberties (seriously). Too bad. So be it.

In the meantime, we’re celebrating. And yet we shouldn’t, because we just made one of the most grievous errors imaginable. On the 18th of January, many netizens protested in various ways. Reddit shut down for a while, Google posted a censorship warning. Khan Academy and TED pulled their weight honorably. Wikipedia went dark for an entire day. A full spin of the globe. Serious measures.

Put into context, this was our trump card, our nuclear deterrent. We just escalated the arms race plenty by putting thermonuclear computational equivalence into play against what amounts to a well funded mafia of global interests. We could’ve been more subtle.

I was one of those who supported Wikipedia’s blackout. After the fact I see that it was wrong, because what we did there was provide Dodd and his cronies (which he needs since he’s not allowed to lobby directly until 2013) with a value estimation of what evil censorship laws such as SOPA and PIPA not passing is worth to us. One day a year. That’s 1/365.25th of the year, in case you’re wondering. That’s about 1/365.25th of our total time currency. Copyright is weaponised time.

What should be understood as generational warfare, where the Internet generation demands the same liberties for creativity as was granted to our great-grandparents, just got reduced to a game where our enemy, a well funded mafia with a fantastically powerful government sponsored protection racket, knows our caliber.

What happens next? Dodd and pals start working on SOPA 2.0 and PIPA 2.0 and DMCA 2.0 and ACTA 2.0 and all the other two-point-ohs, trying to figure out how to sneak it past us, but now they know our currency. How much more powerful do they have to make it for us to cower in fear? Next time, will we need to black out for two days, or three? Thirty, perhaps? Where does it stop?

In the grand scheme of things, SOPA and PIPA are little other than temporary annoyances, like mosquitoes – definitely worth squatting, but not really worth the effort of pulling out your Glock or your launch keys. And while nobody has ever taken down an international mafia with bug spray, that just shows that our methods aren’t toxic enough.

We committed overkill. We won, but too heavily. Now the ground we tread on is radioactive and may itself decay upon further incursions into our realm. What can we do?

I’m not much of a cyberlibertarian, but I have a soft spot for them. They had a few things right, even if suffering from frontier blindness: the overarching belief of those at the frontier of human development is always that they are untouchable. History creeps up on them in their sleep. John Perry Barlow was unequivocal in his righteous demand for sovereignty and independence for Cyberspace, he foresaw that nation states were inherently incapable of existing in a post-territorial communications space. And yet somehow, due to a splendid mix of cronyism, corruption, greed and stealth, we’ve found ourselves in the situation that national interests have strong armed the debate on a field of physical infrastructure and border-theoretical governance.

The Internet is no longer free from incursion from nation states, so anything that can be understood through the delineation of national borders, encapsulated in national interests, or affected through national political processes can affect the Internet directly. Being on the defensive is not going to be a winning strategy. Money just got tight: there’s only so much blackouting we can survive.

So let’s go on the offensive. Instead of having traditional politics interfere with the Internet, it’s time for the Internet to interfere with traditional politics. The various Pirate Parties have moved us part of the way towards establishing a theory of networked information politics, but it’s nowhere near complete. There are a lot of deep fundamental questions that still need to be asked, and a lot of it’s going to require some deep philosophical navel gazing. But I think we can do it.

Not really because I have a problem with the copyright mafia, even though I do. Much more because I’ve been watching meatspace politicians and their bankrupt ideologies take humanity out for too many rodeos. They’ve long since outstayed their welcome, and they must be ousted. Networked politics, information politics, is the way to fix things.

Who else is in favor of aiming our cannons at bigger targets, and quitting with the grapeshot?

A letter to the Congress of the United States

Nov 18

Posted by Smári McCarthy in Copyfight, English, Free speech | Comments off

(I stumbled onto Demand Progress’s campaign page about SOPA/Protect-IP and found myself writing in the little input box. You should too. Anyway, this little rant is what I wrote in the box. It’s a bit whiny, a bit dreamy, a bit silly, but there’s something about it that I like. Perhaps I should write things in little boxes more often.)

I am not your constituent. I am from the Internet, the space was created as a side effect of a military research project that your congress funded. Today, the Internet is the backbone of communications, diplomacy and commerce in the world. It has liberated millions of minds from intellectual starvation and with its help millions of bodies have been liberated from physical serfdom.

What makes the Internet special is its ability to bring information to anybody, anywhere, always, regardless of political opinions and special interests. Information is apolitical, as is the Internet. However, that does not mean that the Internet is used by apolitical people and that the information they share is not meaningful to them.

What we’re facing today is a political threat to the stability of the Internet. It is akin to a declaration of war. Except that the Internet is not a developing nation, it is not a physical place which can be bombed for not complying with specific policy decisions. No. The Internet occupies the same space as you do, it permeates every action that humanity takes now. Destroying the Internet would be destroying mankind’s best ever hope for equality and justice. Destroying the Internet would be destroying the most powerful free market ever seen. It would be destroying the values upon which the United States are founded. Destroying it is suicide.

Don’t commit suicide. Don’t invade the Internet with your silly censorship law. It won’t work, but it will force the denizens of the Internet to militarize more heavily, employ sociociphernetic guerrilla tactics against those who would seek to strip us of our right to communicate. It would force us to fight you, and we don’t want to do that, because the Internet is the brainchild of America. For better or worse, we rather like you guys.

Say no to SOPA and Protect-IP. Then, if you’re up for the challenge, ask us – the Internet – how we would protect the material interests of the creative people in the world. You’ll be surprised.

Occupied with Illegibility

Oct 21

Posted by Smári McCarthy in Collapsonomics, Direct democracy, English, Politics | 2 Comments

Occupy Wall Street is an uprising against a value system, not any particular set of offensive activities. There has been an ongoing critique of these values, but the astute articulation of its flaws has not made its way into the mainstream discussion, any more than the Occupy Wall Street movement itself did until sometime last week.

At that point in time the sit-in “Occupy” protests had spread widely enough and become large enough that it had become awkward not to mention them, an unusual situation for media organizations which have for many years made fairly accurate calls on what aspects of counter-culture could be safely ignored.

The Internet is definitely playing a part in undermining the feigned ignorance of the mainstream media. Citizen journalism, and it’s devious little brother – frantic Tweeters and Facebook denizens – have managed to draw quite a bit of attention to the subject. It’s as if the American media has learned very little from the Arab Spring.

Most of the news commentary regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement has so far been either dismissive, sarcastic, or outright hostile. CNN, CBS, ABC, Fox and the like have reported that “it’s hard to say” what the protesters at Wall Street and elsewhere in the United States want, due to “lack of clear goals” or “coherent list of demands”.

This reading of the situation is entirely understandable, but not because they’re right. It’s because the protesters are speaking in a language which has no meaning to the traditional media.

First off, the protesters are not speaking with a single voice. There are many voices, and they’re not all saying the same thing. Each has its own ideas, its own narrative, its own goals and desires. They are not all being filtered through the lips of one figurehead because the people behind them realise that reductio ad vicarius is not a political mechanism which has been serving them very well. The math on this is simple.

Each person brings 100% of their hopes and dreams to the table. If forced to choose a representative from a small group of potential leaders, there is a small possibility 60% of their opinions, hopes and dreams represented. This then gets further diluted by the process of political negotiations, tactical voting, prioritization and allotted time, and by the time your representative actually gets around to doing anything you’re extremely lucky if what is done manages to account for 1% of your hopes and dreams.

So the people of Occupy Wall Street go the alternative route of individualism – a concept that
has historically, ironically, and surprisingly been championed primarily by politicians claiming to represent the interests of their citizens. This in effect means that there is no automatically relevant interviewee, there is no pundit, there is no talking head. There is no easy distillation.

The lack of easily definable heroes immediately removes the most base of journalistic abstractions. While during the Arab Spring the various news media attempted to make heroes out of characters such as Wael Ghonim and Alaa Abd El Fattah, ultimately they failed to reduce the idea behind the movement to a dramatic tale describing the actions of just a few people. And they failed not due to any lack of heroism enacted by their chosen, but rather because the entire movement was so steeped in heroics that no simplification could do the whole justice.

Secondly, the issues the media are digging at always revolve around the tweaking of control variables. Lower taxes. More welfare. Cheaper health care, better education. Comparatives run amok in a world of superlatives. And in their interviews with the protesters, they ask about these and get faltering responses from people who have been arguing the issue at such an abstract level that these technicalities haven’t even factored into the discourse, at least not in terms of specific goals and solutions.

To assume that the average protester at Wall Street, whose chagrin de jour is with a cleverly engineered financial system which works to disenfranchise the “99%” while bolstering the pockets of a small clique, would have anything specific to say about the Federal income tax policy, is absurd. The correspondents and beltway boomers who make light of the fact that the protesting public doesn’t have canned answers to questions about debt reduction and austerity measures evidently feel they are exposing the Occupy Wall Street movement as a sham, while they are in fact exposing their own imbecility and lack of depth.

Jesse Lagreca is one of the more eloquent and outspoken protesters that has been repeatedly captured by the media for soundbites. There is no question that he is a representative of the commonalities of the Occupy Wall Street movement, but he would undoubtedly be the first to point out that he cannot represent the opinions of all the people there, nor does he possess solutions for all the problems they are facing. He might well be the next El Fattah or Ghonim, but he’s still just a one voice in among a multitude of others.

If the Internet has taught us anything, it’s that complexity cannot be bargained out with force of character. Despite some notable individuals emerging in recent years, the real story lies with the groups that work towards common goals – be it the protesters at Tahrir or Liberty Square, the Indignados in Spain, the Pirate parties, or groups such as Anonymous. All of these are equally illegible to people who are used to subjecting the universe to their world view.

The nomadic blogger Venkatesh Rao explained the recipe for the commonplace worldview quite expertly. First, look at a complex and confusing reality, such as the social dynamics of an old city, or the Occupy Wall Street movement. Then fail to understand all the subtleties of how the complex reality works and attribute that failure to the irrationality of what you are looking at, rather than your own limitations. Having failed thus, come up with an idealized blank-slate vision of what that reality ought to look like and argue that the relative simplicity and platonic orderliness of the vision represents rationality. Then use authoritarian power to impose that vision, by demolishing the old reality if necessary. Now stand back and watch your rational Utopia fail horribly.

The current lay of the world is rather shocking for those who are used to looking at it through goggles of imaginary simplicity. More and more countries are plunging into a seemingly apocalyptic debt crisis. Roughly half of the workforce under the age of 25 are out of work in Spain, while the political dogma of simplicity espouses the “human right to work”, ignoring the fact that economic policies over the last several decades have pushed for more consumption, more production, and less actual progress. All of this has effectively created a subsection of society that cannot work, cannot survive without work, and has no economic leverage to relocate or discover a new occupation. For the young people of this world, innovating their way out of wage slavery is not an option.

Speculative fiction author Neal Stephenson lamented in a recent article the fact that humanity appears to have lost the ability to “Get Big Things Done”, echoing various entrepreneurs who fondly remember the days when humanity had the ability to go to the moon, for example. I for one come from a generation of people who has been entirely uninspired by the human endeavours of my time, and I think it’s time for that to change.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the labor movement has found itself at an all time low. Labor leaders haven’t gotten off their fat surpluses since the Haymarket incident, and even though they claim to represent the views of an increasingly disillusioned workforce, some people are leaving the unions to fend for themselves. The rest, the silent majority fantastically stupefied by hundreds of years of disenfranchisement, are used as an excuse by governments all over the world to dismiss the vocal minority.

The legitimacy of the Occupy movement has been questioned. But how are the criteria for legitimacy set, and by whom? Could it be that the legitimization process has been overrun by the very same ideologies that the Occupy movement is fighting against? To put it differently, the United States’ bid for independence was founded on the idea of no taxation without representation. What, then, is the appropriate form of governance in a world where nobody can be accurately represented?

I want to urge the media to drop their faux rationalism and put away the goggles of legibility, for these ongoing demonstrations will not be understood through the inappropriate application of broken mental models, and failure to understand the issues do not make the issues, or the protesters, go away.

(Thanks to Allison Remy Hall, Samir Allioui, Hélène Marquer and Herbert Snorrason for help framing this discussion and revising drafts of this post)

The Italian Wiretapping Bill

Oct 6

Posted by Smári McCarthy in English, Free speech, Politics, Press freedoms | Comments off

[Warning: I read about this on my cellphone just before stepping on a plane, and wrote it largely on the plane. I didn't have references or resources, nor did I have a chance to talk to various people I'd have liked to. But I'm going to post it like it is anyway, in raw, unedited form. Enjoy. Also note, I am not a lawyer.]

The Italian Wikipedia has started a campaign against a proposed wiretapping law in Italy with the claims that the law, which requires immediate “corrections” pending any complaint from anybody who feels unfairly treated, slandered or libeled, is fundamentally incompatible with the existence of the Italian Wikipedia.

While functionally this is true, that the existence of open knowledge databases, free press and broadly speaking freedom of expression is fundamentally at odds with a law which requires unarbitrated censorship of opinion, creating effectively a distributed thought police, there are various aspects of the analysis provided on the Italian Wikipedia site which seem slightly too poorly researched for people from such a venerable medium. It is noteworthy though that Wikipedia, as a project, has very rarely taken a specific stand with regard to a particular political argument, but highly fitting that they should choose to do so on an issue of a fundamental rights issue like this one.

First off, the claim that the Italian language Wikipedia would need to be shut down. This is not true, as there are millions of Italian speakers outside of Italy who could still use and develop the Italian language Wikipedia if Italy were to go to such extremes. There is a possibility that if such a law were to take effect, there would be a valid reason to block access to Wikipedia from Italy, under the somewhat awkward understanding that access from the country equates to publication in the country – an understanding that the UK has used in libel cases.

However, without having read the proposed Italian law (mostly because I can’t read Italian, but also because I’m on a plane), I do not expect that it contains anything that limits its scope to articles published in the Italian language. If, for example, somebody were to publish a Occitian language newspaper in Piedmont, it would undoubtedly fall under the law. Therefore it’s safe to assume that under this proposed law, any publication would potentially be required to exercise this type of censorship.

So where does that leave the English version of Wikipedia? Or, say, the Pashto version? Is it sufficient for the invocation of the law that somebody in Italy should be able to feel slandered by any given fragment of text? That’s where we come to the next issue, which is jurisdictionality.

Wikipedia is, for better or worse, hosted in the United States. There are a number of proxy caches and database mirrors of various types scattered around the globe, but last time I checked (which was actually a couple of years ago) there were none in Italy. So, can Italian law actually apply to Wikipedia?

There are various answers to this, but the simplest one is that it depends. In Europe, for example, there is a directive on enforcement orders for uncontested claims. It’s unclear how exactly it’d pan out, but it seems that the proposed law doesn’t allow contesting of claims, therefore all claims would by definition be uncontested, and then all EU courts, except those in Denmark, would have a responsibility to enforce court orders that came from Italy based on this. That could effect the proxy caches in France, for example. Denmark and Iceland would be able to reject this under the terms of the Lugano treaty. However, such an action would require that the claim actually be taken to court, which appears to be the thing that this law is designed to try to prevent.

There’s also the question of specific cross-jurisdictional agreements. If, for example, Italy and the United States were to enter into a treaty… well. That’s pure speculation, and could actually amount to anything. Let’s not get lost in fiction.

Apart from that, it would seem that barring any international agreement on the definition of whether laws apply in the country of origin of the communication, or at the receiving end, any actual effects of this law on publications outside of Italy would have to be on a volunteer basis.

Now let’s talk about why even that will never happen.

First, there’s this little thing called the e-Commerce directive (2000/31/EC). It’s the European Union’s more-or-less equivalent for these purposes to §230 of the United States Communications Decency Act. They provide indemnity to Internet hosts that don’t mess with the data being hosted, meaning that unless there’s child pornography, copyright violations, or court orders, more or less that’s it. Too bad. That doesn’t really help things that have print publications… but then again, Wikipedia ain’t. Whole other kettle of fish.

Now. Even in Italy, there is a notion of fundamental rights. These are kind of important, or at least a lot of people seem to think so. The United Nations decided to go for a very broad text that’s nice and powerful but not very enforceable. The Council of Europe on the other hand has a slightly less lofty but much more enforceable human rights convention (ECHR), which has a court. That court doesn’t fuck around when it comes to this kind of thing, although strictly speaking they don’t have the ability to overturn laws, they’re pretty sure to slam this kind of extrajudicial censorship pretty hard.

An organization that does fuck around quite a bit, but has a very nice weapon, is the European Union. In particular, the Treaty of the European Union (TEU), article 7, allows for temporary suspension of a member state from the EU in the case of a reasoned proposal being presented, on the basis of a clear and sustained violation of Human Rights. I can’t remember the exact wording, but I’d say that this bill fits the bill, if you’ll forgive the pun. In fact, if it were to go through, it’d fit the bill even better than the Hungarian Media Law, which several people (including myself) argued earlier this year should’ve been taken on the rounds on TEU art VII. Unfortunately that never happened.

Actually, there’s a historical point there. I’m not going to name people because I didn’t have a chance to check with them, but back in April a group of free speech advocates met in Budapest to discuss the Hungarian Media Law. I wrote about it at the time. Our conclusion was that we needed to put together an action to get TEU article VII invoked against Hungary, because if the kind of totalitarian limitations on free speech were allowed to fester there, the so-called “Orbanization” of Europe would surely continue – it would fester and spread, like totalitarian cancer. Have I mentioned that it sucks to be right?

To be fair, Italy has been on this route for a long time. I have previously written about Legge Alfano and other attempts at establishing similar schemes. They by and large get smacked down in the Italian parliament, or the senate, or in the worst case so far got thwacked by the constitutional court. It’s as if Berlusconi and co don’t get it.

In all likelihood, this isn’t going to get anywhere. It’s going to be yet another annoyance that will further demark the line between the part of the world where free speech is respected, and the part which is controlled by despots. (Both zones are non-contiguous.)

Don’t get me wrong. We do need to fight this, and fight this we will. And we will win.

I’ll refrain from pointing out the irony that the apparently most abhorrent thing about a so-called wiretapping bill is not, in fact, wiretapping.

Copyright Combinatorics – exercises in the banal mathematics of EU policy

Aug 11

Posted by Smári McCarthy in Copyfight, EU, English, Law, Mathematics, Politics | 1 Comment

Although the creation of the single market has been the primary focus of the European Union for decades, it often seems that for every step forward it takes two back. In that respect it’s often rather interesting to look at the mathematics as they play out in the different directives that come out of Brussels.

After a conversation with Joe McNamee from EDRi a couple of months ago, I took a closer look at the exception clauses in the Copyright Directive. The directive outlines 21 different optional exceptions or limitations to the right of reproduction of copyrighted works. Each country implementing the directive can choose to either include or leave out the exception clause. This gives us 2.097.152 different ways to implement the directive.

But it gets better. After the 21 exception clauses for reproduction rights comes an paragraph stating that where the Member States may provide exceptions or limitations for reproduction, they may provide similarly an exception or limitation to the right of distribtuion.

This can be understood in at least two different ways, with radically different results. On the one hand, if you have an exception on reproduction then you may also have the same exception for distribution, or on the other hand, you may apply the same exception independently of each other. The wording suggests the latter, but at the same time it seems slightly absurd to have an “oh by the way you may also” in a directive; there are other cleaner ways to approach this. There is probably some literature that I’m unaware of about which one they mean, but it’s easier to do the math on both cases than it is to navigate through commission and parliament documentation.

The first case is a three step process where each exception can be either “off”, “on for reproduction” or “on for reproduction and distribution”. This means we get three to the power of twenty-one options, totalling 10.460.353.203.

The second case is a four step process where each exception can be ”off”, “on for reproduction”, “on for distribution”, or “on for reproduction and distribution”. This gives us four to the power of twenty-one options, totalling 4.398.046.511.104.

That’s either ten billion or four trillion ways to implement the copyright directive, depending on how you read article 5, paragraph 4.

Take your pick. It doesn’t matter either way. This back-of-envelope analysis doesn’t even touch on the combinatorical implications of different understandings of the details of articles 5.5, 6 and 7 in particular, and in general the rest of the directive, mostly because they’re less directly quantifiable. Let alone does it distinguish between “exception” and “limitation”, which could easily bring the number up significantly.

These kind of figures boggle the mind. They basically mean that a priori there is a one in three hundred and eighty million chance that any two member states come up with the same implementation, taking the slightly better case. How does that serve the ideal of a single market? It looks like internal dissolution about the specifics of the exception clauses, with each country being difficult in its own little way and no political hardheadedness forcing a teneble solution has yielded a completely useless directive in terms of unification.

While it is true that all the member states could in theory decide on the same exceptions, making this headache go away, the fact that they’re all optional suggests that in each case there was at least some strongly for and some strongly against, unless of course that at some point in blind fury somebody got so tired of debating the exceptions that they just lumped all of them together under optional and decided to let the Member States figure it out. To be fair, I can’t say I blame him.

Either way, what this shows is that the EU is not effectively managing to create a single market, and through its policy on intellectual monopolies may even be pushing the markets further apart. I’m going to allow the question of who stands to gain from this state of affairs as an exercise to the reader, but I’m fairly certain it’s neither the general public nor the creators of creative works.

The Cyber-Industrial Complex

Aug 10

Posted by Smári McCarthy in Cryptography, English, Free speech, Privacy, Technology | Comments off

A recent article on the rise of the Cybersecurity-Industrial complex hits spot on in many regard. However, one line in particular struck me as disastrously wrong: “A re-engineered, more secure Internet is likely to be a very different Internet than the open, innovative network we know today. A government that controls information flows is a government that will attack anonymity and constrict free speech.”

This line assumes that a more secure Internet is going to be one with more government control – a grave misunderstanding. For years, technologists at the end of the spectrum which has not been given massive amounts of public money have been crying out for increased security online. The reason for this, they say, is that governments and corporations, not to mention criminals and terrorists, are in fact, on a regular basis, using the lack of structural security to their own ends. Governments attack anonymity and constrict free speech, corporations violate privacy, package people’s identities and sell them off as market research, criminals hijack personal and financial information and use it to extract monetary benefits and get away under borrowed identities, while terrorists, well, it’s not entirely clear what they have to do with cybersecurity at all. Probably not a lot.

What the technologists from the “freedom camp” (for lack of a better name) have been suggesting is that introducing technologies such as IPSec on the substrate of the Internet, as will happen with the adoption of IPv6, and switching communications to encrypted by default, for example by providing verified SSL certificates at no charge and encouraging the use of HTTPS everywhere, and introducing encryption systems like OTR as default on instant messaging systems while supporting the further expansion of anonymity networks such as TOR to increase throughput and availability.

Technologists from that camp have also argued against proprietary software on the basis of it being fundamentally less secure; software that nobody can independently inspect the inner workings of is software which is waiting to be exploited.

The same technologists have argued against the consolidation of telecommunications vendors and monopoly situations on those markets, as these infrastructure provision companies are potential points of failure. An Internet which has thousands of ISPs is more resilient to external force and influence, attack and disruption, than an Internet which has a dozen.

It is entirely true that “a government that controls information flows is a government that will attack anonymity and constrict free speech,” but that’s nothing new. What the Cypherpunks and the Cryptoanarchists have been arguing for decades is that the only way to stop third parties from controlling information flows is to adopt a security by design policy on the Internet: that the network itself be fundamentally resilient to inspection and manipulation.

So why hasn’t this happened?

There are umpteen gazillion reasons why this hasn’t happened, and many of them have to do with the forces who are entirely okay with the Internet not becoming more secure: governments, corporations, and to a lesser extent, criminals. All of these actors of course want their own little pockets of the Internet to be impregnable fortresses of cybersecurity, which is why the nascent Cybersecurity-Industrial Complex is doing so well, but none of them is willing, or perhaps capable, of understanding that security on the Internet is a “all or nothing” kind of thing in many regards, as every insecure node on the network is a potential threat.

A little known conspiracy theory I heard was that the adoption of IPv6 has been intentionally held back by the Tier 1 network providers, who operate the largest backbones of the Internet, at the request of government intelligence agencies such as NSA and GCHQ, who worry that the widespread adoption of IPSec would render them unable to intercept and analyse network traffic on a large scale, as they are known to do. This would be a very sensible thing for them to request, but yet I don’t really believe this theory – it assumes malice where stupidity would suffice. It’s a bit of a stretch to imagine nation states voluntarily putting everybody in the world at risk for the purpose of retaining their ability to spy on their neighbors, while it is entirely possible to understand the non-adoption of IPv6 through the fact that it will cost quite a bit of money to do the switchover – a more or less fixed cost regardless of when it is done – and the money pinching telcos are putting it off as long as they can, ignoring the fact that without the IPv6 switchover the Internet will stop growing soon, which itself will cause economic growth to become even more stifled than it already is.

A harder nut to crack is that of HTTPS. In order for HTTPS to work, people need SSL certificates, which, owing to some strange decisions made at Netscape back in the day, are required to be signed by a ranking organisation in a certificate authority hierarchy. These organisations charge money for people to have the privilege of a signature, and for good measure they choose to let the signatures run out once a year, by default. People who make their own SSL certificates and don’t have them signed will have their users scared senseless with intimidating warning messages which are, more often than not, entirely overstated.

There is a market problem here. Certificate authorities make money from signing certificates, so small websites and companies don’t use them. There’s also an ever so slight overhead cost to running everything through encrypted channels, both in terms of bandwidth and computation power, so large companies try to avoid them, because slight overheads add up very quickly to major operational costs when you’re streaming thousands of terabytes of video every minute, for instance. These two things have turned online security into a kind of boutique luxury service, mostly reserved for banks and e-commerce sites, where people will not stand for anything less.

This particular problem can be solved pretty easily. If domain registrars would start bundling basic level signed certificates with domain leases, small websites could use SSL by default. And if they were all doing it, there would be more pressure on larger companies to stop providing insecure connections, which might eventually get them to suck it up and accept the overhead as a baseline operating cost – it’s not like the companies in question are doing badly, and there’s only a handful of them. I look forward to the time when every “http://” has been replaced with a “https://”.

It’s possible to go on forever; there are so many simple fixes that aren’t being commonly used. The Internet doesn’t have to be an insecure place, and what’s more, increasing Internet security is actually one of the major ways in which we can curtail censorship and protect our rights. But on the other hand, no re-engineering is required. Online security can be improved now, at very little cost, because all of these mechanisms are precisely possible because the Internet is open and innovative.

The fact that governments are upping the antes in cybersecurity and feeding yet another something-industrial complex is appalling. It’s a waste of time, it’s a waste of money, and it’s creating more threats than it’s eliminating. I cackle at the irony of governments trying to hire the most anti-authoritarian bunch of people they can find and tasking them with coming up with a new form of authoritarian control structure, because it simply will not work. The only people they’re going to manage to hire to those ends are people who are too dumb to realize that, or too opportunistic to point it out.

The private enterprise side of this, aptly dubbed the Cybersecurity-Industrial complex in the article, is simply a nefarious new scheme under which self-asserted technology specialists are leveraging public funds to protect states against a threat which does not really exist, and moreover intends to do so by not actually fixing the perceived problem, but rather just make a ton of money off holding back the tide. There is no honor amongst consultants.

A more self-interested man than myself might not write an article like this, because, to be fair, these developments are presenting people with my skill set with an abundance of potential lucrative ventures  as clearly noted by the notable presence of three letter agencies at the DEFCON and Blackhat conferences last week. (Pro tip: if your computer security specialist looks comfortable in a suit and hasn’t told you the things I just did, you’re overpaying him by about 100%). On the other hand, I’d rather have freedom than money, and this militarisation of the Internet is going to make us less free. That said, if there are any governments out there that are interested in paying me absurd amounts of money to tell them how not to destroy the Internet and improve their security while they’re at it, feel free to drop me a line.

Riotous Primality

Aug 9

Posted by Smári McCarthy in English, Politics | Comments off

[This was written last night, while on a bus between Cloughjordan and Dublin, during which time I saw no news from the London riots. Oddly, between the time of writing and now, the first bit of the final "prophecy" came true: people started to clean up the mess.]

The UK government was very quick to adopt a stance of dismissal with regard to the London riots. The word “opportunistic” was used by everybody vaguely related to the government within a short time period, suggesting that it was coordinated as an effort to cast doubt on the action. As I noted on Twitter when I noticed this, this stance is either incredibly naïve, or intentionally dismissive of an act of political expression.

Although I prefer non-violent expression myself, the propaganda of the deed shall not be discounted. Some of the rioters are clearly moving with a strong and well understood political motive. The murder of a Tottenham man at the hands of the UK police was not the fuel for this rage, it was merely the spark that ignited it – the powderkegs had been stacked high over many years of increasing financial and social tensions and bad government policy.

The “Big Society” project was aptly noted by Dougald Hine as the beginning of the end, the point at which both government and market raised white flags and turned social management over to the general public. The same general public as has been progressively disenfranchised by the government and the market since time immemorial, more so since the industrial revolution than ever before.

When you line up a growing sense of procarity, massive government welfare cuts, including the recent privatisation of certain aspects of the healthcare system and the massive raising of school tuition fees, and increased signs of imminent societal collapse, you put a lot of tension on people. If those people had sufficient political freedom to act, they would still need a fair amount of self-actualization to do so. Putting tension on disenfrancised people who have no infrastructural capacity to resolve their problems and have been weened onto the state and the market as their first and last resort will only cause them to lash out when they feel threatened.

Add a little bit of random police violence, and the sense of threat becomes real. Boom.

For the great majority of the rioters, their actions – such as looting – are not direct manifestations of political will, but they are not opportunistic attempts to maximize gain from a chaotic situation either. Rather, they are a primal and instinctive reaction to the sense of imminent and unsurmountable danger. If you expect that you’re going to go through rough times, you will use every method at your disposal to ensure your survival during those times – if that means that you adopt a barbaric hunter-gatherer stance, so be it. If the most valuable thing to gather appears to be flatscreen TVs, fair enough. It’s not as if people had sat down and thought this through.

I can identify a couple of different groups here. There are the hunter-gatherers, who act out on poorly understood impulses for self-preservation. There are the politically aware and actively engaged, who consider their actions to be necessary evils for the betterment of society. There are the bystanders, who are being unnecessarily limbic and stifle their outrage, hiding it behind manners and tradition. There are those who are exerting the force.

The most dangerous are the force-wielders, as they are operating on the basis of legitimacy they no longer have, by virtue of having raised the white flag of the Big Society and forgot to turn in their guns.

The second most dangerous are the bystanders. These people appear on the face of it to be in the ethical right, but through their sheepish beliefs in the stability of the status quo, they risk misconstruing idleness for rigteousness. States are failing, markets are failing, everything we are used to is coming to an end, and when that happens, I don’t want anybody near me who isn’t willing to act out of self-preservation, because those people are going to threaten my ability to preserve myself.

The least dangerous are the hunter-gatherers. Why? They’ll snap out of it. They’ll loot for a while, and when there is no more looting, they will sit down and try to figure it out. And then they’ll start fixing things. At that point in time it’s people like me, the politically aware and actively engaged, who are going to be explaining the new theory of society to them. It’s at that point in time that we become the most dangerous people in this particular dramatis personae, and we should then prophylactically be put against the wall, lest some from our ranks suggest repeating the same mistaken control structures.

The Industrialization of the Internet

Aug 8

Posted by Smári McCarthy in English, Politics, Technology | Comments off

My talk at GoOpen 2011, on the FSCONS track. Finally got it edited and uploaded.

This is really a work in progress in many ways, but we’ve got alarming amounts of documentation written up on the subject; however, this is just the analytical model for a bigger project. More fun soon.