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QUOTE from Cory Doctorow's talk to Microsoft's Research group about DRM : Raise your hand if you're thinking something like, "But DRM doesn't have to be proof against smart attackers, only average individuals! It's like a speedbump!" Put your hand down. This is a fallacy for two reasons: one technical, and one social. They're both bad for society, though.
Here's the technical reason: I don't need to be a cracker to break your DRM. I only need to know how to search Google, or Kazaa, or any of the other general-purpose search tools for the cleartext that someone smarter than me has extracted. ....
Here's the social reason that DRM fails: keeping an honest user honest is like keeping a tall user tall. DRM vendors tell us that their technology is meant to be proof against average users, not organized criminal gangs like the Ukranian pirates who stamp out millions of high-quality counterfeits. It's not meant to be proof against sophisticated college kids. It's not meant to be proof against anyone who knows how to edit her registry, or hold down the shift key at the right moment, or use a search engine. At the end of the day, the user DRM is meant to defend against is the most unsophisticated and least capable among us.
Wonderful article! Full text can be found at : http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

Many publishers are distributing advanced reading copies to blurbers, chain-buyers and reviewers in this format. I find it very convenient since it let me carry around a dozen copies of the book in the months before it was coming out to give to reviewers and blurbers I met in my travels.

By contrast, the traditional system for ARCs (still in use in the majority of cases) is to print and bind a softcover facilime of the edition for advance distribution to the trade. These "proofs" or "bound galleys" cost more than the hardcover to print (on a per-unit basis) and are in perpetually short supply -- it's heartbreaking to get an inquiry from a major newspaper or magazine for a review copy of your book before it's printed and to find out that all the ARCs have been distributed and there's no budget to print more. The low cost and nonexistent setup charges for printing galleys laid out like the PDFs I'm distributing means that your editor's assistant can just print off and staple together another galley whenever there's a demand.

Many publishers are distributing advanced reading copies to blurbers, chain-buyers and reviewers in this format. I find it very convenient since it let me carry around a dozen copies of the book in the months before it was coming out to give to reviewers and blurbers I met in my travels.

By contrast, the traditional system for ARCs (still in use in the majority of cases) is to print and bind a softcover facilime of the edition for advance distribution to the trade. These "proofs" or "bound galleys" cost more than the hardcover to print (on a per-unit basis) and are in perpetually short supply -- it's heartbreaking to get an inquiry from a major newspaper or magazine for a review copy of your book before it's printed and to find out that all the ARCs have been distributed and there's no budget to print more. The low cost and nonexistent setup charges for printing galleys laid out like the PDFs I'm distributing means that your editor's assistant can just print off and staple together another galley whenever there's a demand.

DRM

The worst technology idea since the electrified nipple-clamp is "Digital Rights Management," a suite of voodoo products that are supposed to control what you do with information after you lawfully acquire it. When you buy a DVD abroad and can't watch it at home because it's from the wrong "region," that's DRM. When you buy a CD and it won't rip on your computer, that's DRM. When you buy an iTune and you can't loan it to a friend, that's DRM.

DRM doesn't work. Every file ever released with DRM locks on it is currently available for free download on the Internet. You don't need any special skills to break DRM these days: you just have to know how to search Google for the name of the work you're seeking.

No customer wants DRM. No one woke up this morning and said, "Damn, I wish there was a way to do less with my books, movies and music."

DRM can't control copying, but it can control competition. Apple can threaten to sue Real for making Realmedia players for the iPod on the grounds that Real had to break Apple DRM to accomplish this. The cartel that runs licensing for DVDs can block every new feature in DVDs in order to preserve its cushy business model (why is it that all you can do with a DVD you bought ten years ago is watch it, exactly what you could do with it then -- when you can take a CD you bought a decade ago and turn it into a ringtone, an MP3, karaoke, a mashup, or a file that you send to a friend?).

DRM is used to silence and even jail researchers who expose its flaws, thanks to laws like the US DMCA and Europe's EUCD.

In case there's any doubt: I hate DRM. There is no DRM on this book. None of the books you get from this site have DRM on them. If you get a DRMed ebook, I urge you to break the locks off it and convert it to something sensible like a text file.

If you want to read more about DRM, here's a talk I gave to Microsoft on the subject:

and here's a paper I wrote for the International Telecommunications Union about DRM and the developing world:

I'm surprised that no-one's actually tried something like this before. What with the prevalence of radios that can adjust themselves to noise conditions, it seems that it would be fairly obvious to build one that could listen to the frequency (or frequencies) it wanted to transmit on and intelligently avoid stomping on other, old-fashioned signals in the vicinity. It's interesting, 'cause I just got done reading about something like this in this rather weird, but oddly compelling book.

If you absolutely must deal with circuit city, pay cash. I made the mistake of getting their "free" credit card when I bought a computer there. They screwed up my account, and then spent a year harrassing me by phone about it. My go.to/circuitcitysux page is no longer on line, but I one point I had this all fully documented.
I did end up learning a lot about my rights as a consumer.
---
As to buying online, consider this option: don't.
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
I've bought a couple books from amazon, to encourage the authors, and i still get christmas cards from a politician who i gave a dollar to,
but I've transitioned to a post-scarcity economy.
I have enough stuff. There is cornocopia of free stuff online. If it isn't free online, I can probably do without it. You can augment that with a library card, and by participating in a tool cooperative. Tool coops aren't always called that; yours might call itself a church or a neighborhod association or uncle fred.
If I felt a need for more random stuff, dumpster diving is more fun than golf. Here's a free copy of cory doctorow's latest book about dumpster diving: http://www.craphound.com/someone.
The american assumption that we need more stuff to keep up with the joneses is one reason asia is kicking our asses. Lower overhead.
By not buying online, you can resist impulse buys. I got this computer for $100 + tax from a local computer recycling nonprofit, virtualscavengers. Occasionally I'll get a good cup of coffee downtown, or have a drink at a local club, but that's more about renting space. I'm mostly out of the money economy, because i don't need more stuff, so i don't need a traditional job, which frees up a big block of time to waste on slashdot and suchlike.
My approach is only one strategy, and has some disadvantages too, but you can incorporate it incrementally into your lifestyle. We are moving to a post-scarcity economy, like it or not. Stuff matters, but not like it used to.

Reading your post reminded me of a passage from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. Emphasis is added.

And it clicked for me. He was a missionary--one of those fringe-dwellers who act as emissary from the Bitchun Society to the benighted corners of the world where, for whatever reasons, they want to die, starve, and choke on petrochem waste. It's amazing that these communities survive more than a generation; in the Bitchun Society proper, we usually outlive our detractors. The missionaries don't have such a high success rate--you have to be awfully convincing to get through to a culture that's already successfully resisted nearly a century's worth of propaganda--but when you convert a whole village, you accrue all the Whuffie they have to give. More often, missionaries end up getting refreshed from a backup after they aren't heard from for a decade or so. I'd never met one in the flesh before.

Whuffie

An analogy would be releasing a copyrighted book on the internet and claiming nobody got hurt becaue the original autor still has a copy. That, however, ignores that his sales went down so you have harmed him by depriving him of income. You can't possibly hope to convince people that software piracy does not hurt anybody.

Did the author's sales really go down? Can you prove it? If that's true, why are some authors offering up their books for free on the Internet in the hopes of increasing sales?

The author of the software had the software before, and had it afterwards. He/she was deprived of nothing except an opportunity, and even that is debatable. It could easily result in increased sales and increased publicity.

Mens Rei actually means "guilty mind", and it really measures the degree to which you intended to hurt someone. If you hurt someone "negligently", i.e. you didn't mean to hurt anybody, but someone was hurt by your actions, then that's the weakest form of "Mens Rei" recognized under the law. If you did something in order to hurt a particular person/entity, then that's the strongest form recognized.

If you copy an MP3 and thereby infringe on the IP rights to the songs owned by Britney Spears' record company with the intention of hurting their bottom line, that would be purposeful infringement. If you copy the MP3 because you want to listen to the song, but are absolutely convinced that it will do nothing to hurt their bottom line, then that's either reckless or negligent. The whole "Mens Rei" thing is a distraction though. The real issue should be whether a given level of copyright infringment hurts or helps the copyright holder, and whether or not that IP should exist in the first place.

Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

How is the "Progress of Science and Useful Arts" promoted by Britney Spears songs? Should a sound recording even be protected? It's neither a writing nor a discovery.

Songs would exist without copyright. Look at how much stuff is available under "Creative Commons" licenses! Look how much music (and other creative work) was made before these things were copyrighted. Maybe it's true that a certain level of IP protection is useful to the general public, but what is that level?

As for the author being harmed by unauthorized copies of their work being shared without their permission, that isn't the issue. What if there was a law that said "All black people must work for white people without pay". Black people refusing to do that would cost white people... but does that mean that the black people are wrong to refuse, or that the law was wrong?

Go on, you know you want to see it again :-)

Because selling it gets the author some money.

And selling paper copies while distributing it online under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 doesn't? Try telling that to Cory Doctorow, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Some people will pay a premium for a professionally bound paper copy.

...so there could also be a strict rule that all AI systems must speak only in natural language, even to each other.

It sounds to me more like a plot device, then something that we will actually do.

Robots most likely will be controlled by remote intelligences, and I'm having a hard time imagining that we won't want to let the communicate over the Internet.

We might try to limit how "creative" they get in their solutions to problems, but, ...

On a different note:

I don't really believe in slavery. I am happy that our children will be smarter than us.

We will self-augment, for a time, but eventually, we may just have to hand it to them, our beloved. Or beceome them.

By that time, we should be used to treating the intelligences as partners, friends. They'll have served us so well, we will have good memories of our times with them.

Cory Doctorow wrote a neat story: I, Robot. If you have the time, you might want to check it out.

Cory Doctorow explained it very nicely (in his talk to the Microsoft Research group to be found here):

Cryptography - secret writing - is the practice of keeping secrets. It involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an attacker [...]. We usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol. [A few explanations of cipher, ciphertext and key] In DRM, the attacker is *also the recipient*. It's not Alice and Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. So Alice has to provide Bob - the attacker - with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext. Hilarity ensues.

DRM systems are usually broken in minutes, sometimes days. Rarely, months. It's not because the people who think them up are stupid. It's not because the people who break them are smart. It's not because there's a flaw in the algorithms. At the end of the day, all DRM systems share a common vulnerability: they provide their attackers with ciphertext, the cipher and the key. At this point, the secret isn't a secret anymore.

Be careful with your terms. DRM means *AA and Microsoft trust your computer i.e. they manage your rights, while in the OSS world, trusted computing means you can trust your own machine.

Trusted computing is used for things like making sure malware and rootkits can't take over your own machine, and that trojans haven't been introduced into the software you've downloaded, while DRM is used to make sure you can't rip a copy of a DVD you own.

OSS people already are working on trusted computing, see Trusted Gentoo. There are almost certainly others. OSS trusted computing won't implement a DRM solution that respects fair use, because no one in their right mind would install it. Additionally, the entire concept behind DRM is flawed. Cory Doctorow has an excellent talk on the subject.

A better solution than having a system that "protects content owners", is offering a solution that users want. Most users are honest. iTunes has demonstrated that many people will pay to download their music over the internet. Yet in the years between Napster and iTunes, millions of songs were downloaded off the internet, and CD sales went up. Why does iTunes need DRM? I can already download any music I want for free over the internet, with no DRM, and at higher quality.

Trusted computing is an excellent example of the differences between OSS and proprietary systems. The important question is: who gets to trust the box sitting next to you?

Development of this very idea is a plot point in Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow. He has a turnpike waive the toll for any driver hosting more than 20K songs (details may be approximate). Apparently, science is now catching up with SF in less than 2 years - nice!

Er... I forgot to add that Eastern Standard Tribe, like most of Doctorow's novels, can be downloaded for free. However, I generally find the dead-tree version a lot more easy-going on the eyes- and a lot more portable, too :)

... Cryptography - secret writing - is the practice of keeping secrets. It involves three parties: a sender, a receiver and an attacker [...]. We usually call these people Alice, Bob and Carol. [... A few explanations of cipher, ciphertext and key] In DRM, the attacker is *also the recipient*. It's not Alice and Bob and Carol, it's just Alice and Bob. So Alice has to provide Bob - the attacker - with the key, the cipher and the ciphertext. Hilarity ensues.

...in his book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It's a great, short read. Freely downloadable from http://www.craphound.com/down/.

Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" for a real look at benefits, problems and misuses inherent in a system like this.

Available on-line at: http://craphound.com/down

If natural selection really works(and I think it does) then people with moral misgivings about this technology will refuse to accept medical help from stem cells and will have a higher mortality rate than godless heathens.

"What George Lucas may have seen as eternal in his "Star Wars" blockbusters, science fiction writers have tended to see as antique"

It started out 30 years behind," said Ursula K. Le Guin. "Science fiction was doing all sorts of thinking and literary experiments on a totally different plane. 'Star Wars' was just sort of fun."

"It takes these very stock metaphors of empire in space and monstrously bad people and wonderfully good people and plays out a bunch of stock operatic themes in space suits," she said. "You can do it with cowboy suits as well."

If truth be told, sci-fi writers say, their work and "Star Wars" never had much in common.

Like science itself, science fiction has evolved since the days of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the end of World War II, the genre has shifted its focus from space and time travel to more complex speculations on how the future, whatever its shape, will affect the individual.

That shift has only accelerated in recent years, as biotech and genetic engineering have moved to center stage in science and captured writers' imaginations, and as the lines between science fiction and other genres begin to blur. . . .

One problem with "Star Wars," science fiction writers say, is that it is not, ultimately, concerned with science, but rather with a timeless vision of good and evil. . . .

The literature is filled with writing by Greg Benford, the 'how to empathize with ordinary deathless people' writer Greg Egan, Ken Macleod, Richard Morgan, Ian Banks, Cory Doctorow , or Charlie Stross. Movies haven't made it past the 70's (Bladerunner, the Matrix) other than perhaps 'Eternal Sunshine' (similar to a few 80's stories), and T.V. shows have only tentatively reached the 80's or early 90's (some Outer Limits and Twighlight Zone episodes). With Star Wars and Star Trek out of the way perhaps there'll be more room for the average media SF to catch up to at least the 80's.

"Would a writer make that investment if he knew that anyone at all would be free to copy his work without compensation?"

Cory Doctorow (Speaking to MSFT about DRM)

... I speak from experience. Because I buy a new Powerbook every ten months, and because I always order the new models the day they're announced, I get a lot of lemons from Apple. That means that I hit Apple's three-iTunes-authorized-computers limit pretty early on and found myself unable to play the hundreds of dollars' worth of iTunes songs I'd bought because one of my authorized machines was a lemon that Apple had broken up for parts, one was in the shop getting fixed by Apple, and one was my mom's computer, 3,000 miles away in Toronto.

If I had been a less good customer for Apple's hardware, I would have been fine. If I had been a less enthusiastic evangelist for Apple's products -- if I hadn't shown my mom how iTunes Music Store worked -- I would have been fine. If I hadn't bought so much iTunes music that burning it to CD and re-ripping it and re-keying all my metadata was too daunting a task to consider, I would have been fine.

As it was Apple rewarded my trust, evangelism and out-of-control spending by treating me like a crook and locking me out of my own music, at a time when my Powerbook was in the shop -- i.e., at a time when I was hardly disposed to feel charitable to Apple.

I'm an edge case here, but I'm a *leading edge* case. If Apple succeeds in its business plans, it will only be a matter of time until even average customers have upgraded enough hardware and bought enough music to end up where I am.

Here's what I'm here to convince you of:
1. That DRM systems don't work
2. That DRM systems are bad for society
3. That DRM systems are bad for business
4. That DRM systems are bad for artists
5. That DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

Cory Doctorow's recent novel Eastern Standard Tribe (see http://www.craphound.com/est/) talks about similar-sounding peer-to-peer networks among automobiles, where among other things cars on the system can share or request local traffic information among one another. One of the interesting background ideas in the story is the development of toll system for peer-to-peer music sharing along the highways.

Is anyone aware of any other books or short stories that included or discussed applying this or other sorts of technology to optimize utilization of transportation systems?

I've been interested in this idea for a long time, and especially now since I find myself fighting DC traffic every day on the way from Virginia to Capitol Hill....

Mod parent up - informative.
Open source is socialism on the jesus model - let's share - instead of the stalin/roosevelt model.
Those of us who are anarchists tend to avoid the A word, and talk instead of post-scarcity economics brought on by the open source revolution.
Cory Doctorow (of boingboing and eff) has a novel on these themes, down and out in the magic kingdom, free online at www.craphound.com/down. link

Wikipedia and google are open source info.
blogs have opensourced journalism.
So far there is little progress in opensourcing textbooks and schools - but that will happen.
As the open source movement starts to provide, free, what we used to think we needed governments for. Perhaps the state will wither away.
In soviet russia, government forks you.
In soviet new jersey, same.

A somewhat similar music service idea is discussed in Doctrow's newest book Eastern Standard Tribe. Good read, and an interesting idea for sure...

The book can be downloaded free, although I elected to purchase a signed copy to support his work...

A somewhat similar music service idea is discussed in Doctrow's newest book Eastern Standard Tribe. Good read, and an interesting idea for sure...

The book can be downloaded free, although I elected to purchase a signed copy to support his work...

A somewhat similar music service idea is discussed in Doctrow's newest book Eastern Standard Tribe. Good read, and an interesting idea for sure...

The book can be downloaded free, although I elected to purchase a signed copy to support his work...

Cory Doctorow:

Eastern Standard Tribe (CC)
A Place So Foreign (and eight more) (CC)
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (CC)

Lawrence Lessig:

Free Culture

Tech and science books:

Version Control with Subversion (CC)
An open source math book
Light and Matter, a series of physics texts by Ben Crowell

Lists:
The Assayer is a place to find and review open books.

Cory Doctorow:

Eastern Standard Tribe (CC)
A Place So Foreign (and eight more) (CC)
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (CC)

Lawrence Lessig:

Free Culture

Tech and science books:

Version Control with Subversion (CC)
An open source math book
Light and Matter, a series of physics texts by Ben Crowell

Lists:
The Assayer is a place to find and review open books.

Cory Doctorow:

Eastern Standard Tribe (CC)
A Place So Foreign (and eight more) (CC)
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (CC)

Lawrence Lessig:

Free Culture

Tech and science books:

Version Control with Subversion (CC)
An open source math book
Light and Matter, a series of physics texts by Ben Crowell

Lists:
The Assayer is a place to find and review open books.

And here Cory Doctorow of the EFF tries to convince Microsoft to create and release their own VLC-like player... A really amazing read.

You can also get ebooks for GBA. e.g. Cory Doctorow's

All of these applications are a bit hamstrung by running in GBA mode though - DS native versions would have a better screen and processor. I hope DS hacking takes off like it did on GBA.

I already use programs like TiBR to read textfile novels on my Treo 600. It's a little scrunched, but I don't really notice it; things are probably considerably better on the Treo 650.

Project Gutenberg has plenty of textfile novels ripe for reading. Cory Doctorow's stuff is also pretty good. I read his Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom entirely on my cell.

Another handy resource is the University of Virginia Library's Etext Center, which has 1800 freely-available eBooks.

No thanks. I'll pick smart over happy any day.

http://craphound.com/est/

How about Cory Doctorow's exellent novelDown and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is currently one of the finalists for this year's Nebula Award for Best Novel?

It would be great if it won the Nebula Award, then even more people would get some exposure to the Creative Commons.

No, you've completely missed my point. Are you even responding to the post above you? Its not "wheww, 128kbps is great, OMG" at all... I've
never use iTMS, and I never buy hype. Heck, you've bought the hype that you need a RAID. For what? your music?

My point really coalesces at the bottom. DRM and controlling "content" is just a last scramble for table scraps using an old business model. A business model that was built around analog media that travelled household to household packaged in cardboard and plastic.

all that's irrelevant now. This is the business model used by untalented people to make money off of the talented. That's why I'm againt intellectual property. Instead we could switch to a whuffie based economy. where the talented would again prosper.

I wrote this "spam form" in December 2003. The form appears on Cory Doctorow's site and is occasionally attributed to him but it was originally written by me.

The general form of a "checklist" response is really old. I first saw such a form on USENET more than ten years ago. It originally appeared in in this rec.humor.funny post from December 1994 whose author claims to have gotten it from a VAX conferencing system. The general idea of a standardized checklist for blowing someone off is probably even older than that.

I got tired of explaining to people why their cockeyed spam solutions wouldn't work, so I wrote this particular one about spam one evening and posted it here and here. I'm surprised it took off, actually. Now in every thread about spam I do a search for "technical legislative vigilante" to see if it's reappeared and it's there half the time. I only wish I had included a little dig for challenge-response schemes!

The part at the end about burning your house down is there because someone in the original thread proposed a solution to spam that was so abysmally bad that the poster was suspected to be a spammer himself- hence the "( )spammers could easily use it to harvest email addresses" item.

Judging from Google searches, spam researchers seem to have mixed feelings about it. The form wears out its welcome all the time but keeps reappearing. Some like it and use it a lot to quickly dispatch stupid ideas from the peanut gallery. Others hate the form because it gets presented to them all the time when they present their proposals. It has actually appeared in a number of anti-spam research papers. One group of researchers, when proposing their solution, actually prepared a preemptive response to refute each form item.

I think you're absolutely right. Cory Doctorow (of EFF fame) gave a great talk at microsoft about why this kind of hardware dongle CAN'T work. It's the best explanation I've heard yet. To paraphrase, (poorly) your client and your attacker are the same person. The client needs the key to view the information. Therefore, the client has the key (even if try to hide it in hardware) needed to break your encryption. CSS is a perfect example of this. Here's a link to Cory's talk. Excellent reading. http://www.craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

"I'd like to get this story from a source that's not named "Boing Boing" and doesn't use words like "sez" in their articles. Even Fox News would be a better source of information. Maybe."

This seems to get brought up pretty much any time boingboing is mentioned on slashdot. boingboing.net is a blog run by Cory Doctorow, a science-fiction author, journalist, and activist. He's active in the EFF and the Creative Commons movement. He tends to get covered by slashdot a lot.

What?! No whuffie?

One night, I noticed that some (but not all) of the images on BoingBoing were not loading. Just for kicks, I right-clicked one of the broken images, and saw that the url led here. Sure enough, I tried going there and got "Forbidden Category 'Adult/Mature Content.'"

Cory's short-story must be prophetic unless slashdot is posting old news which seems unlikely...

When I read the first few posts, my first thought was that TFA must a fictional, deriative work based on the short-story.

BTW Cory is a http://boingboing.net/ poster boy. Read his other shit at http://craphound.com/

The moderation on the parent comment
Moderation -1
30% Troll
30% Flamebait
30% Underrated

is the reason I don't take Slashdot seriously anymore. Apart from the questionable arithmetic, I think Clay Shirky said it best:

WR Byat did group theory with nuerotics -- discovered that neurotics were working as a group to defeat therapy. He couldn't resolve whether this was a group activity or individual activity. ...
How Byat defined the behaviours that defeated the therapy: ...
* Vilification of external enemies... Creates cohesion. Members who are most paranoid are best at identifying enemies.
* Veneration of a religious symbol. Go into a Tolkein newsgroup and diss Two Towers -- see what happens. Even though it's supposed to be about discussing Tolkein, they'll just flame you, because you're interfering with the religious text.

How does it feel to become exactly what you claim to hate? Of course I'm not expecting sincere answers here, just rude one-liners and snappy comebacks.

Sorry to respond to my own message, but..

After reading the full letter to American Airlines, this issue takes on new meaning. This information was attempted to be gathered in the UK, and thus would be subject to UK privacy laws. Also, this was supposedly to fufill a mystery TSA regulation that is not consistently applied. This issue is not at all about customs, this came up upon checking in, while still in the UK. I'm now curious to see AA's response.

-molo

At the very bottom of the article, there's a link called "Link" that takes you to the full text. That is the general format of articles on boing boing. In this case, it's also the same as the second link in the story submission.

Cory Doctorow kind of addressed this in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom - "in the Bitchun Society proper (after death has been "cured"), we usually outlive our detractors.

This sure sounds like one of the ideas in _Eastern Standard Tribe_ (available for free download). Because of the ways that cars interact (moving around and so forth), something like a P2P system makes sense.

This sounds a lot like the Car-to-Car peer network used for music trading along the Mass Pike in Eastern Standard Tribe Great book and definitely worth the download.