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Clay Shirky: RIAA Succeeds Where Cypherpunks Fail
scubacuda writes "Clay Shirky has an interesting take on encryption: 'The RIAA is succeeding where the Cypherpunks failed, convincing users to trade a broad but penetrable privacy for unbreakable anonymity under their personal control. In contrast to the Cypherpunks "eat your peas" approach, touting encryption as a first-order service users should work to embrace, encryption is now becoming a background feature of collaborative workspaces. Because encryption is becoming something that must run in the background, there is now an incentive to make its adoption as easy and transparent to the user as possible. It's too early to say how widely casual encryption use will spread, but it isn't too early to see that the shift is both profound and irreversible.'"
The Cypherpunks never went around suing people (that is, actually costing them money) who weren't using encryption to mask their illegal activities. The RIAA is.
Real world practicality will always be a much better motivator than abstract idealism.
Before I read the article, I'll just point out that the Cypherpunks' "eat your peas" approach actually gives the users control over how their anonymity and security takes place. Sure it gives you more responsibility -- you have to buy the locks yourself -- but it also gives you control over how it happens. You basically only have to trust the person who made the lock, but you can have the blueprints so that you know it works.
RIAA-style privacy is basically a Housing Company telling you that they'll take care of everything, and that you don't need to worry because you're probably safe. Note, of course, that the RIAA companies are the types whose security has been foiled by such stunning feats of ingenuity as writing on a CD with a magic marker, or an algorithm written by a 16-year-old that can be implemented using as much space as fits on the side of a pencil.
What the RIAA gets people to adopt is the style of "no-brainer" security people are used to when they get their lockers broken into at the gym, as opposed to asking us to take some frickin' responsibility for ourselves as the Cypherpunks would urge.
from the article:
to a first approximation, every PC owner under the age of 35 is now a felon.
This may or may not be an exaggeration, I have no idea, but Shirky makes a good point. When the vast majority of a society is violating a certain law, it is a sign that the law, not the society needs to change.
At this time, it seems that the RIAA is winning, and we are moving inexorably towards a world where large corporations control what people do with there computers. However, because there is so little popular respect at the moment for copyright law, it follows that eventually those laws will change.
Over the next 5-10 years, I predict that many laws will be completely rewritten to better accommodate the changes that the internet has brought upon society. Many of these changes will be for the better, and the end result will almost certainly be a more free and open society. Unfortunately, democracies are slow to act, so there will be years more of legal confusions and abuses of power before things finally straighten out.
Let's make a difference
Encryption is good, as long as the people using it are good. When people use encryption to hurt other people, it becomes a serious liability.
Well, DUH, it's a tool, nothing more.
You can say the same about cars, knives, guns and just about anything else.
I do not like hiden encryption. I like to know everything is working and not get to confortable. Don't want to be cought ignoring that lock icon on your browser these days.
I'll even risk my Karma on it. The Slashdot communioty needs to be able to point out ways for the /. editors to improve. Making sure that there is a link in the blurb to the story mentioned in the blurb is sorta important. Don't ya think? Perhaps mr Coward, was a bit terse in his language, but honestly there are quite a few posts already that ask for the real link. So if it takes a few sarcastic, but on topic, barbs to motivate them, so be it. There is no better motivation than sarcasam. Except perhaps for a well written piece on the need for sarcasam. ;)
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The RIAA has blunders at least twice. First it shutdown Napster 'way late (because it wasn't easy), now it is harassing KaZaa users with even less success. The next incarnation will be even tougher. They ought to be putting their energies into a paradigm shift like iPod. Or maybe even running their business competantly, with decent A&R budgets and better terms for musicians and customers since their distribution monopoly has faded.
Encryption, like all technology, is amoral.
Good and evil come from people. This is ultimatly where most legislation fails at stopping evil. You legislate away the technology that evil uses in the hopes of stopping it. However, evil rarely follows laws. So the laws are draconian to compensate for evil not following thems. The end result is that good does not benifit from said technology while evil thumbs thier nose at good.
Encryption will be used for evil, regardless. If you do not outlaw it then the playing field will be level.
Abstract idealism often tells the future. The Cypherpunks can once again send up a resounding "told ya so!"
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Not really. There's been several explosions of various file/disk encryption products. Your handheld device isn't a Somebody(Something?) until it's got at least a dozen "encrypted" personal information storage widgets for it.
The problem is that encryption is 90% snake oil. Usually it's written by someone who thinks they know encrpytion- and encryption isn't, to coin the phrase, like a hand grenade; close doesn't count. Zimmerman is famous for his saying that "anyone who claims to have unbreakable encryption doesn't"(apologies for paraphrasing).
Encryption also does little when physical security can't be controlled; Dallas Semi had the right idea with their iButtons, which brought reasonably secure key storage to the masses(if opened, for example, it erased itself) but it's gone pretty much nowhere; you just don't see them in widespread use(unlike, say, a proximity card or magswipe). I suspect even USB keys now vastly outnumber iButton devices.
All the encryption in the world won't do you any good if you can't store the keys securely...and these days, all it takes is a janitor with a CDROM with linux that 'phones home' and sends back choice tidbits...or an ipod.....or a USB hard drive..or a USB memory key...or a blank CDR, since so many machines come with CD burners now...
Please help metamoderate.
This is not the problem!!!!
The problem is not people intercepting your mp3s - the problem is sharing an mp3 with a guy working for the RIAA or in my case the CRIA and they get your IP and then they go to your ISP in an attempt to get you booted off the net, exactly as happened to me.
For instance - on Sourceforge there is a sooperencypted IRC project for safe sharing.
Useless.
All the RIAA spies have to do is go on the net, get that software, join the queue for mp3s then rat you out exactly as specified above.
What we NEED is a way to share files in such a manner as the receiver has no idea what your IP is.
This is not going to be easy. (And please don't mention Freenet ok?)
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
Encryption, like all technology, is amoral.
Technologies like weaponised anthrax?
Well, yes. Anthrax in the hands of the "good guys" will be used to do research on how to prevent fatalities in the event that one of the "bad guys" tries to use it.
Get it?
A weapon can be considered technology, and it is still amoral.
A Weapon and/or technology, can only be put to use by people for thier own purpose, good or evil.
"Outlaw guns and only outlaws will have guns", etc... Look how well outlawing guns in Washington, DC has worked.
Weaponised anthrax could be put to good use, such as using it to find an antidote to protect people from it.
Saying that using encryption is good doesn't change the fact that regular people see no use for encrypting everything.
People will send their CC numbers through regular email! How can we get people to use encryption? Transparency, transparency, transparency.
If I send, "agoij(*UOLHa^&&%alhkAHI3%&%&jdha8tFHD98ht4Fls 8" to Mom she'll delete it. If I send it, and she reads, "Buy me an iPod for Christmas", she'll still delete it, but at least she got the message with no labor on her side.
Until encryption is enabled by default, and is transparent to the user, clueless users will rule the way you communicate. Sadly, this puts much of the onus on Microsoft, which won't do anything until there is a huge! public backlash - then come out with a easily broken implementation of it. :(
Encryption use isn't about privacy, it's about necessity. When the great unwashed (wait, that's Linux users ;) - when the masses are FORCED to use it, that's when it will get used.
Apple could do what MS can't - have an 'Encrypt for OS X users' checkbox on their mail app. Then with some 'return receipt' automagically encrypt messages to other OS X users. (I'm not a programmer, can you tell?).
To sum up, users want to be safe, secure, and anonymous, but they don't want to do anything to make it happen. 'Eat what you get, and use what you have" is the pervasive attitude.
Encryption will be used for evil, regardless. If you do not outlaw it then the playing field will be level. Who says we want a level playing field? We're not playing D&D here -- this is real life and there is no great balnce between Good and Evil that has to be preserved. Evil for lack of a better term is always bad and society depends on those doing evil to not be on even ground with the law in order to protect the rights we all hold dear. So yes -- encryption is amoral, but that just means that the forces of good need to be that much better at it. The problem is that evil is almost always better motivated because in our society no good deed goes unpunished. Generic Sig -- compare and save!
Sigs are for losers.
This is not going to be easy. (And please don't mention Freenet ok?)
Because it's got kiddie porn? Well, sorry, but you can't pick and choose anonymity. If there are logs the police can use to tell who shared that, the RIAA can subpoena the same logs to that show you shared mp3s. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
Another thing is that Freenet is dead slow, in a CPU and memory-hungry Java-implementation, and in general not that great. But it's likely to improve...
The only other alternative I see that is pseudoanonymous is having a set of trusted friends, routing not only requests but also the data over it. That way, no part of the chain knows more than where it's coming from and where it's going Bob simply routed a connection between John and Bill. John doesn't know about Bill, Bill doesn't know about John. Bob doesn't know if the chain starts with John or ends with Bill or anything. Of course, this would also be a lot slower than direct P2P as is the norm today.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The RIAA isn't responsible for making encryption commonly deployed; sending credit card numbers to websites is. The pattern is essentially the same, however. The cryptographers work on stuff, the security people say you really need to use encryption, but people generally don't actually do anything about it until something of value to them is stolen, at which point encryption becomes widely used and transparent. A few years go by, and everybody forgets that what they're using is encryption.
Now people talk about how they expect encryption to get outlawed. I think Amazon's $19B market cap which depends directly on encryption and eBay's $38B which essentially requires it (not to mention all of the companies which do some of their business online) will prevent this. Then there are VPNs, telecommuting, overseas content outsourcing, and so forth. Encryption is, at this point, something the US economy depends significantly on, and it's not going to get outlawed any time soon.
Well, you do (for one), or at least you would if you thought things through.
Almost no one whom you'd consider to be "Evil" considers themselves to be evil. And they would likely tag some people as "Evil" even if you would disagree with their assessment. And almost no one would agree with you on what is good and what is evil completely. To do that, they'd have to be you.
Which means that if the world were to function by your own self-centered definition of good and evil, you'd be all alone.
Nature itself doesn't have a concept of good or evil. Which means regardless of wether we'd each want a level playing field, it's ultimately a level playing field on which we must play.
Now "society" is just one of the teams on this playing field; a big team, I'd admit, and one you're likely so familiar with as to believe that no others exist, but it's just a team nonetheless. As you point out, your society has created your society's laws and has it's own interest in seeing that people on any other team are placed at a disadvantage. After all, it has to protect those "rights" which your society holds so dearly.
Is it possible that members of some other society might have their own values, profess their own beliefs, and institute their own laws to protect the rights they hold so dear? Some of these might conflict with the values, beliefs, and laws of your society; does that make them "Evil"?
Only a troll would believe so.
Yet even at this point, we're making a judgment call saying that one kind of "society" can be more "good" than another in a way that a "non-society" could never approach. That's a widely held belief, but there's still a lot of time left on the clock. Maybe Douglas Adams was right and some day we'll decide that even the trees were a bad idea, and we should have all stayed in the oceans..."
If you continue to insist that the playing field be tipped selfishly in your favor, then you must admit that, over time, more and more people will become aligned against you in their own self interest. Each time you exclude someone by calling them (or their team/society) "Evil" you build a greater force which sees you the same way. And the stronger you hold your beliefs, the more motivate they are to hold theirs.
I could not possibly have said it better myself.
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
without reading I see one issue, sure encryption IN the background is proceeding, especially that which you have no control over, and while it serves the surface function it leaves the user FURTHER under the control of a 'gatekeeper'.
The time for user implemented crypto came and went, PGP had potential to put the public good ahead of corporate and government interests.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
putting the genie back in the bottle.
it's expression alone indicates the likelyhood of success.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I had to read the /. write-up about three times to workout what it was going on about. Couldn't have just said "RIAA ativities over the last year or so may have finally brought encryption and privacy concerns to the attention of the masses. Interesting article here"? I think that's what it's trying to say.