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Well put! You've identified the next major battle to take place here in the states. Big Business vs. the people via control of hardware. And the funny thing is
Well put! You've identified the next major battle to take place here in the states. Big Business vs. the people via control of hardware. And the funny thing is we're going to see most Americans running into the open arms of Big Business under the guise of "Security and safety", "Business has the right to lock down their hardware ... don't limit business", and, of course, "open systems open the door to terrorists."
You've perfectly identified the battle, but, sadly, I suspect the war has already been lost.
You've perfectly identified the battle, but, sadly,
I suspect the war has already been lost.
No way! We're FINALLY seeing an uptick in the open hardware front. Open hardware like the Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards, as well as a ton of new IoT startups (like Spark and their Photon), and the bevy of open sensors (like Grove's) are drastically lowering the barrier to entry for hardware tinkering and even garage-style production. Just check out Seeedstudio's online shop to see how many different hackable hardware options we now have.
For $20 you can buy a WiFi "kit" that you can plug an array of $10-20 sensors onto. That opens up A LOT of doors for people to either create budget hardware products to sell, or for inexperienced home users to piece devices together. If wifi/gps/gsm chips and sensors can be plugged together like Legos, and if software can be "beamed" to it from their Phone, then you now have a perfect breeding ground for cheap, open hardware products available to the masses.
I look on to the next 5 years with nervous excitement; I myself have even begun planning a cheap cloud storage device using nothing but an RPi, external hardrives, and a few parts from Newegg that I can assemble in a couple minutes. That's an open replacement for Apple's TimeCapsule that anyone could put together in 10 minutes if a kit of the parts were sold to them.
A slight nit-pick: If the end-user is required to use a third-party hosted service to make the gear work then it's not really open hardware.
Yea I totally agree. What I described requires no third-party hosted service, though. In my particular example of the cloud storage device, I use Pulse for file sync and GPG/rsync to upload archives to Amazon Glacier. None of that is closed source or involving any third-party.
> Open hardware like the Raspberry Pi
You can't even boot the raspberry pi without running closed software.
That seems pretty far from "open hardware". True that likely any similar project requires closed source drivers for things like the EC/embedded controller, 3D acceleration, and maybe the 802.11 chip, but at least you can choose to boot and use the system without support for the closed devices.
GP said "we're finally seeing an uptick" and your rebuttal is that everything is not perfect.
Please stop. This mindset is actively harmful. There's no "giant leap", it's all small steps.
> You can't even boot the raspberry pi without running closed software.
I thought that this was no longer necessary[1], but after searching around I'm not sure if this means it is possible to boot without the blob. Does anyone know if this is the case?
[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/ http://www.raspberrypi.org/a-birthday-present-from-broadcom/
> Open hardware like the Raspberry Pi
You mean "like Olimex A20 Olinuxino which has the same form factor of the Raspberry Pi but unlike the latter is open hardware and runs on open source software only", right?
https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A20-OLinuXino-MICRO https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A20-OLinuXino-MICRO
The battle is quite a bit broader than that - this is the battle of people that are just now figuring out the full implications of "Turing Complete", and how no, you cannot make an "applicance" that runs all the useful software but none of the software that you find distasteful.
In case anybody hasn't seen Doctorow's amazing talks on this subject, well... you should. He gets right to the heart of what will be the biggest "disruption" in social structures since the industrial revolution.
His first talk that he gave at 28C3, "The Coming War on General Computation"[1], received a lot of press, but the 2nd talk given about a year later at DEFCON 20, "Beyond the War on General Purpose Computing: What's Inside the Box?"[2], didn't seem to get as much notoriety. This is really unfortunate, because the 2nd talk is far more important: it extends the problem into a lot of other areas of "normal life". DRM in movies is generally only "annoying". DRM in some medical device you rely on is a very different situation.
This suggests that we need to start winning against stuff like DRM and the MPAA trying to censor websites. While movies are really not that important, setting precedent is important, or it will be a lot harder to fight the real problems later on.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqkU1y0AYc
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nypRYpVKc5Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nypRYpVKc5Y
I hadn't seen the secondtalk, thank you! HN, please share this essay and links with your network! Educate!
Is the second one seems to be the same that he held at Google.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI
He gave the same talk at several locations (not just DEFCON and Google) - I linked the DEFCON 20 version because I think it is slightly better in a couple places, due to the security-focused audience. I believe they are largely the same, with only a couple minor differences.
> And the funny thing is we're going to see most Americans running into the open arms of Big Business under the guise of "Security and safety",
A few more hacks like the recent Sony one, and they might be running away soon!
I generally agree, but I hate to be one of the only people on HN who ever brings this up:
If there is no way to restrict piracy, and if piracy is generally normalized and socially acceptable, then how on Earth to artists, musicians, journalists, authors, etc. ever get paid for anything?
This has some pretty severe and dystopian secondary consequences. It doesn't mean that nobody will pay to have information created. It just means that the customer will not be the reader/viewer/consumer of that information. Instead, the customer will be advertisers, propagandists, governments, religious factions, special interest groups, etc. Content will never be created for primary reasons ("for the art," journalistic integrity, etc.) but for secondary reasons (marketing, state propaganda).
This is really a variation of the whole "free is a lie" theme. I really encourage people to watch this talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldhHkVjLe7A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldhHkVjLe7A
If Facebook and Google being free means you are the product rather than the customer, then the same thing applies to books, movies, music, etc.
What I really keep trying to get people to grasp here is that piracy is disempowering. If you're not paying, you don't matter. Nothing will be made for you, with your interests or enjoyment in mind. Instead it will be made for whomever is paying, and will play to their interests, not yours.
Nothing is free. You either pay for things, or things pay for you.
On the hardware front, I fail to see how we can possibly create an alternative hardware/OS ecosystem that empowers the user if users are not willing to pay for it. Innovation, production, and capital follows the money. If users aren't willing to pay for a platform that empowers them, someone else will instead drive the future of computing by paying for a platform that disempowers the consumer. I think this is exactly what we're seeing.
Why are we working on new distribution channels like The Pirate Bay?
Because we categorically reject the notion that corrupt, law-breaking middlemen who abuse the artist's right to be paid and abuse or refuse service to the customer -- I mean the MPAA, RIAA, etc. -- are a better alternative or economic model for a digital age than the free sharing of bits which is what the internet (and before that, usenet, and before that, sneakernet) has always been.
We categorically reject the notion that we need state-sponsored controlled locked-down DRM ecosystems where hackers are thrown in jail for sending an HTTP request to an open server and cell phone unlocking is illegal, just so that the MPAA can continue to exist.
The free as in zero dollars alternative _is_ what is happening to software: the price of an operating system is being driven to zero dollars.
We celebrate this as the liberation of technology from the monopolistic, predatory, illegal activities that happened 20 years ago.
We applaud the brilliant, profitable companies that are not hostile to free software (as in freedom).
We hope more companies will learn how to do something like Github, The Linux Foundation, or Amazon EC2.
Meanwhile, you can question the magic. It might not make sense to you, but it makes sense to John Perry Barlow:
https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html
Why aren't you championing Actors Guilds, Authors fighting against Amazon's policies and fees, or even the fight against DRM?
> TPB doesn't connect musician to audience -- it distances musician from audience even more than the record companies ever did! Piracy is the ultimate in passive consumerism. It's consumerism so passive there isn't even a twice-removed economic connection. There's no connection at all. You -- the viewer or listener -- might as well not even exist.
The connection is the same as always have been, you view their film/listened to their music/etc, and hopefully liked it. By that metric, borrowing a book from a friend also doesn't count. This coupling of money and art is a disservice to both those things.
> On TPB, Popcorn Time, and any number of these other things, I don't even see a way to pay the artists if I want to.
This is so wrong. Things don't work like that. Say I watch the latest blockbuster, or the latest Game of Thrones episode. Who do I pay?
I agree with the premise of judging based on both action and context, power and relationship. I agree that hackers aren't the nerd-revenge underdogs (if we ever really were). I agree that we have power to do good, and we mostly piss it away trying to impress each other.
But I disagree that RIAA and MPAA are totally losing - they still have direct lines to power through the government and its regulative and, ultimately, judicial and military power.
There are more than 2 sides. There is not "the man" vs. "the underdog". It's less chess and more hungry hippos. Yes, we should build something better (for the market, for the world, for the commons) than TPB. But the regulative status quo disallows those things. TPB is a mushroom colony. What you want is a tilled field.
The government does not serve RIAA well, but it also salts the earth where we might grow internet-aware markets. TPB is a compromise solution, and better than nothing.
What we build is not in a vacuum.
Let's get started cultivating the field, plowing under the existing regulation which is defunct and self-serving, erecting new fences where boundaries represent newly-reasonable compromises, advantages, and common sense.
Category error. 'Hackers' are not a homogenous group; you and ~sounds are not the same 'we'. In particular, the ones who have 'won' are not necessarily the same as those still exploring the potential of a free-all-information world.
In the early 90s, both Bill Gates and Oracle Corporation expressed strong doubts or outright opposition to the idea of software patents. Later they 'won' and came to use software patents as competitive weapons.
Had 'hackers', at that point of the ascension of Microsoft and Oracle, 'won' – meaning the only gracious move would be to agree that the software-patent regime was good for them? No, the 'hacker' category had broadened, and many of the people doing the most interesting work still justifiably despised software patents.
Hackers and artists are creating systems for direct creative compensation, to replace the outdated idea of criminalizing digital reproduction.
Others, who are not necessarily the same people who could (technically or socially) sell out for the "four houses and a private jet" you dangle, still prefer to build other radically uncensorable systems. Don't adopt them into your royal "we".
Great comment. Fascinating thoughts, and well said. Can't upvote it enough.
> "Steal this book" is punk, but "steal all the books" is tyranny
Just wow. I'd like to add some thoughts so that my comment isn't just a well deserved kudos that adds nothing to the conversation:
Hackers and hacker culture aren't actually as all powerful as you make them out to be. Most of the people on hn don't have four houses and a private jet or the power to crash corporate systems single handedly. We do have disproportionately more power than we did 30 years ago and the imbalance is growing. But we still don't have the most important thing that any would be revolutionary can have: Public support.
I was watching a documentary on Che Guevara the other day and I noticed how well things went for him in Cuba contrasted with how poorly they went in Bolivia. The difference was that the people were behind him in the former and hunting him in the latter. If hackers make the MPAA out to be the enemy, geezers that we need to hack circles around, then they will never win. Most people aren't upset with the MPAA or the RIAA, they don't see them as villains to be defeated. Everyone likes to get free stuff, but not enough to stand up and fight. Most of the people I know happily pay whatever price itunes asks for music or movies or any digital content. Granted most of the people I know are professionals with enough disposable income to pay for an album or kindle book without a second thought. And until they get pissed off with something that the various entertainment industries do, there will be no support for the freedom of information cause. The revolution will not be televised, or downloaded, because it won't exist.
This is the general problem with the freedom of information movement, you can't rally people to fight against someone who isn't actually oppressing them. No one I know has a problem with even DRM, it generally never occurs to them to copy media and send it to someone else. Heck, most of them aren't even aware of TPB at all. It's always good to see people fighting for what they believe in, but unless the majority of people can be convinced to join the fight the battles will be long, hard and potentially pointless.
I was just arguing that hackers, hacker culture, and programmers/hackers as a socioeconomic class are far more powerful than artists as a socioeconomic class.
They're also arguably more powerful than the RIAA, MPAA, and even governments-- in this particular domain. Sure they can be arrested one by one and sites can be taken down one by one, but overall the hackers are winning and the old stalwarts are losing.
Look up the difference in average income between a musician and a programmer. Who's "punk" now?
I'd also like to point out that Apple is far more valuable than any record company, and Google is practically the gloved hand of the U.S. State Department. The technology industry -- which opposes strong copyrights for a number of reasons -- has far more political "juice" these days than ailing record companies.
It's hard to accept that hackers are a tyrannical controller when they don't actually have any control over musicians and artists. It's less "this tyrant is forcing me to make stuff and then taking it from me, help, my human rights" and more "if I keep hitting myself in the face, maybe you'll learn! Ow! Ow!".
Everyone taking all the music they listen to for free hasn't, in reality, stopped new music creation. Therefore your argument must have some major flaws.
Perhaps artists don't unionise and go on strike, because they're afraid it would make clear the same thing the pirate bay makes clear - that the real market value of entertainment content is approximately $0.
Yeah "we want free stuff" ... but how have you managed to turn that into "people who want free stuff ... want to pay for stuff"?