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Aboriginal Archive Uses New DRM
ianare writes "An application that gives fresh new meaning to 'digital rights management' has been pioneered by Aboriginal Australians. It relies on a user's profile to control access to a multimedia archive. The need to create profiles based on a user's name, age, sex and standing within their community comes from traditions over what can and cannot be viewed. For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families. These requirements threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a traditional sense, but also about how people would access it depending on their gender, their relationship to other people, and where they were situated."
Please, consider linking to the original source, huh?
cheers
superstition mumbo-jumba gets in the way or progress.
Look, your rules don't allow you to do what can be done with a computer? fine, don't loko at a computer.
really, the days of secret ceremonies are coming to and end.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Aboriginal is considered a highly offensive term by some. The correct phrase is "spear chucking wogs"
If TFA (which went 'splat' on me when I tried to reach it) is implying that the files need DRM to solve what is essentially an administration problem (user & group permissions), then something's fscked. Otherwise, methinks the summary is more than just a little misleading, no?
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
"Images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families."
Grandma died, time to take down her picture and burn it.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
This doesn't sound like DRM. It sounds like access control.
They are nigger-roos.
So this is simply a website with user management. Not everybody is allowed to see everything. This is different from DRM as Microsoft advocates it, where people would not be able to save these pages and images unencrypted onto their machines. Because, you know, they might mail them to somebody of the opposite sex!
It's highly unlikely that this website really relies on complicated DRM schemes (which would require Vista).
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
It seems obvious that people could just register fake accounts with different details just to access info their real profile won't give them access to.
That was my reaction, but they call it a "website that's not online". However, from the sounds of it, the users probably don't own the computers, so I would still call it access control.
If it is DRM, itt appears to have a major advantage of most systems: the users want it to enforce its rules.
Straight down to -1 I'm sure, but if they're going to be that silly and discriminatory, let their culture rot.
I am trolling
Nude erotic rubenesque mammaries? SIGN ME UP!
The Aboriginal Tribes would not use such technology if it violated their deep-rooted traditions, and furthermore would see it as 'evil'. So for them to adopt new technology, they must not be offended by it.
Before complaining about DRM, RTFA and spend a bit of time thinking why this was done. The culture in question has a complicated set of rules about who can and cannot see certain images, rituals, etc. The anthropologist wanted to show them to the larger world without violating the rules of the culture that produced them. But wasn't the only reason: the restrictions also allows you the visitor to better understand the culture. Why? You might think that the best way to experience that culture to be shown all of it at once, but you should consider that men who live in this culture never get to see certain things. Think of it as a simulation of a culture. Use it to reflect on the assumptions you make about who is entitled to what information.
Now instead of getting random users to see goatse, users will be trying to get specific people to view a pic of their now-dead grandma hosted on flickr.
Most of the traditions we have in a non-network-connected world were created and exist because of barriers that now have much less meaning. While I commend them for holding their traditions, it seems a bit misplaced.
First off, people online are going to make friends and connections based on personalities and interests, not physical proximity to their tribal members - very quickly people will be trading accounts and passing information around outside the system. Worse, putting such complex access restrictions in place make it a tempting target for insiders to divulge secrets or for other data breaches and access attacks.
Given your comment, I'm wondering...
Can't they respect their own traditions without imposing technologically enforced access controls? What do they do when someone uses hard-copy information, or, to take an example from the article, a man viewing woman's rituals?
What is the point of building an access control system like this?
-- Terry
Alright troll, I'll bite.
/. because it constitutes a complex and useful method of regulating user access to the archive based on the users characteristics.
You're kidding, right? The material concerned was created by the Aboriginal people, is chiefly of concern to them, and in no way impacts on anyone who doesn't use the service. WhoTF do you think you are to tell them that what they hold sacred is "superstition mumbo-jumba", or that "the days of secret ceremonies are coming to and end"!?
This is news on
resist. unlearn. defy.
A file that can be viewed by your friend can be emailed to you. Simple userland permissions is trying to replicate.
DRM will only let the person whose profile is signed in view the image, whether it's emailed or whatever. It's a very different thing.
I always go into the Dreamtime and become a female Roo when I want to access information about female rituals.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Archivists typically have to respect the rules of the communities they serve regarding access to materials. Sometimes that means, say, putting a bunch of somebody's steamy love letters under lock and key until all of the named parties have died off. Other times it means managing intellectual property rights. And sometimes you run into cases like this one, where the cultural rules regarding the material are more involved.
I still think my favorite example was a living history project - the researchers involved had been recording traditional stories. One of them was an explanatory myth about why it snows. The problem was that there was a strong tradition requiring that the story be told only when there is snow on the ground. There's a doozy of an access control problem, unless you take the cheap way out and declare that there is always snow on the ground somewhere.
http://www.peppermintgrove.org/wesley/
Learn what Aboriginals are really like. No, I'm not racist. I'm a realist.
These kinds of taboos against men and women seeing one another, against talking about the dead, etc. are very common in the aboriginal cultures of Australia, and they take them very seriously. The Warlpiri language, for example, has a sort of sub-language called the avoidance register, used when people of certain familial relations need to talk to each other (a woman and son-in-law, for example) - the grammar's mostly the same, but the words are dramatically simplified, and often replaced with generic terms. And such phenomena occur in other cultural/language groups too - I believe there's something like it in Zulu.
It seems odd to you, but it's also how they want to live. They're free to leave where they live (and many do), and those that stay want to live the traditional way.
links to a malicious site
When I said traditional way, I didn't mean in terms of the technology they live with, but in terms of the traditional ways in which people interact - culture. And I believe it was perfectly clean from what I wrote that's what I meant.
Apparently you're an idiot, though.
Note to the primitives: y'all lost. Suck it. Suck. It. Hard.
This isn't flamebait, merely an expression of one man's frustration from having to deal with the pathetic primitives that can't accept the fact that the world has evolved past the sillier forms of supernaturalism.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
This was mentioned weeks ago on Wendy's Legal Blog ( i have it on RSS feed ), she actually had a talk to the creator of the site. http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2008/01/11/mukurtu-contextual-archiving-digital-restrictions-done-right.html
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
More controls on something not nearly so interesting or lucrative that the artists can afford to do it.
It'll only make people like myself care less about Aboriginal art (if that's possible). If not for the historical significance I'd already have zero appreciate or care about it.
Way to go promoting your culture.
anything but primitive. Often westerners (including me) upon seeing these people just see someone who lives a primitive and alien lifestyle. Over the years my whole view of the environment and our relationship with the land and each other has been completely been revised thanks to the knowledge gained gained from these true Australians. When western settlers first visited Australia all they saw were trees and bushes and no agriculture. The reality is far different in fact the Aborigines have for thousands of years been cultivating the land, food is everywhere but a westerner would starve unless shown the food they were standing on. Using fire management and spreading seeds (selection) Australian aborigines created a traveling smorgasboard that spanned thousands of miles. To have such a complex agricultural system (that puts western agricultural methods to shame in an environmental comparison) one must also have a very complex social system based on respect not just for the living but the dead. Many of you who eat your plastic food and live your broken sitcom social lives will sit back and laugh at such a people but the reality is they are laughing at us but are to honorable to tell us. If your after more info go watch a documentary series called "The Bush Tucker Man", well worth watching and a real eye opener.
Dead-grandma goatse!
If it is simply a website with user management, and no actual DRM, then, well...
Think about every non-DRM'd song you've ever bought...
Yep. Case in point. People who have bought that song have access to it. People who haven't, don't. Access control -- but it's un-DRM'd.
However, complicated DRM schemes do not require Vista.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Precisely, this is why some TV programs over here warn aboriginal and torres straight islanders that "this program may contain images of deceased persons".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Regarding the term DRM, it does not really apply to this in the sense of embedding permissions within a file, and only allowing 'approved' devices for opening (i.e. music DRM like aacs/wma). It is an access permissions system using PHP/MySQL, similar to many others in use on the web or internally. However I felt the application was novel and interesting enough to warrant discussion, and as BBC used the term DRM kept I it as well (also this is
info from here: Technical Specifications
Environment
MySQL server and PHP scripting language on a Web server (Apache, e.g.)
Platform
All supported (XP, OS X, etc). Note, CD Burning from the browser requires OS X and certain file permissions.
Examples
The archive runs locally on an iMac in a MAMP package (Mac OSX, Apache, MySQL, PHP), or on a Windows PC running XAMPP.
The package will also run in core Web server environments.
Sure, it's not completely fair to judge the validity of beliefs if we're not Aboriginal or have much knowledge of them, mind you, that doesn't stop most Slashdotters from bagging out Christianity despite not knowing shit about it beyond some rhetoric about spaghetti monsters and abortion clinics being blown up. Hell, I've even read someone on slashdot being modded to +5 for blaming the holocaust on Christianity even though the Nazis killed Dietrich Bonhoeffer, chased out Karl Barth and kept the young John Paul II in hiding. The upper Nazi echelon was trying to bring back the Germanic gods/rituals to combat the Jewish origins of Christianity, but still on Slashdot you can tie Christianity to this genocide and nobody will bat an eyelid. Scientology is a constant target of ridicule of course because it was made up by some dude to make money. However Scientology is now exclusively the domain of people who really believe in it (including that nutter Miscavage) but we have no problems with laughing at those people simply because we know how the religion was founded. Now a bunch of people are bursting to trot out the old party line "information wants to be free" applied to these Aboriginal beliefs and suddenly there is the call to let them be.
Totally invalid comparison. Sexual congress is widely understood and documented, you can pick up a book on sexual tips and tricks with all the information you need from a book store. Likewise with the human body, there are anatomical textbooks showing what you're body looks like inside and out. This is about certain knowledge that in aboriginal culture is completely occluded from certain members of society which does not have a parallel in western society. That doesn't make it either wrong or right.
Personally, I don't have a problem with this system, but I also don't have a problem with certain churches not allowing female ministers, Jews and Muslims mutilating their sons' wangs and other stuff that isn't ever going to affect me. If you do care about equality and freedom of information in these societies I don't see why you shouldn't get a chance to whine about it on slashdot.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Would this be compairable to putting DRM on porn to keep youngsters out of places they shouldn't be? I mean, both acts of restriction would be based off of social beliefs and ethics. The only difference is what they are doing is a lot more elaborite.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
The company I work for developed a web based knowledge repository like this back in 2001 for Galiwinku in the Northern Territory. Unfortunately the project derailed, I'm not sure why (being only a lowly developer and all), but was probably due to funding reconsiderations or somesuch. We had a working system which covered the different groups, sexes, groups within the sexes, age, location, and a few other things I can't recall now and can't check back up on because the development site is all written in the Yolgnu language. It was an amazing amount of data to work with though, and one thing I didnt see mentioned yet, is that it isn't JUST about limiting who has access to what, it also defines what aspect you are presented with regarding a given item - eg: a given plant may have one story attached to it in relation to a women's group from wherever, but a totally different one for male elders elsewhere. So it's not just about keeping people out, it's as much to ensure individuals receive the right information for their affiliations complex as they may be. Most painful access level components I've ever worked on.. ever..
Have you never encountered a single sex school, either? They're restricted on traditional, but silly grounds. Educational institutes exist that bar my entry based on gender, I fail to see how this is different, except that it comes from a culture that you aren't totally immersed in, so you can see the seemingly silly restrictions. I promise you that when it's boiling hot, and you're going to work in a suit and tie, your cultural norms look fucking ridiculous to any Aboriginal still living a traditional life.
In that case, of course, no one ever claimed that Jews in New York were a poor sub-stratum. Given the problems confronted by the [insert PC word here] communities in Australia, however, if technology and funding is used for museum keeping, that seems decadent when the life expectancy is tens of years below the mean, alcoholism is rife and unemployment is sky-high. Let me guess: money from the tribes is being spent by white developers to produce an artefact for a museum mostly visited by whites.
ian
I think we should be highly critical of Aboriginal cultural norms, morals, taboos and mores. There is no need for all this defensiveness, trying to protect Aboriginal traditions. The key point that I make though is that this applies to every culture, including our own, we need to be critical of all of them. My Western culture often insists that men should wear ties and hot suits during summer, that public nudity is an outrage and many many other very other questionable ideas.
Much of our tradition, culture and norms have simply been uncritically and unconsciously inherited by us. Is this an intelligent manner by which to derive ways by which to live our collective lives? Do we not value analysis, examination, reasoning and questioning? Are they not likely to help us to create better systems which are more suited to human nature, potential and fulfillment in general?
It's a lot easier to see what may be inherited superstition and idiocy in other cultures, simply because we have not bee exposed to them from birth. For example I have little doubt that female circumcision is, when taken as a whole, overall inherently negative as regards human beings and their general nature. So I say abolish it.
We need to examine out cultures and traditions and norms, we need to put them under the microscope and decide if they really are worthwhile, and in this way we can intelligently and consciously shape the systems we live by, so that they may best fit the human species.The alternative is to continue to try to shoehorn us all into ill-fitting poorly designed systems inherited from an often ignorant past.
I think we should be highly critical of cultural norms, morals, taboos and mores. There is no need for all this defensiveness, trying to protect Aboriginal traditions. The key point that I make though is that this applies to every culture, including our own, we need to be critical of all of them. My Western culture often insists that men should wear ties and hot suits during summer, that public nudity is an outrage and many many other very other questionable ideas.
Much of our tradition, culture and norms have simply been uncritically and unconsciously inherited by us. Is this an intelligent manner by which to derive ways by which to live our collective lives? Do we not value analysis, examination, reasoning and questioning? Are they not likely to help us to create better systems which are more suited to human nature, potential and fulfillment in general?
It's a lot easier to see what may be inherited superstition and idiocy in other cultures, simply because we have not bee exposed to them from birth. For example I have little doubt that female circumcision is, when taken as a whole, overall inherently negative as regards human beings and their general nature. So I say abolish it.
We need to examine out cultures and traditions and norms, we need to put them under the microscope and decide if they really are worthwhile, and in this way we can intelligently and consciously shape the systems we live by, so that they may best fit the human species, instead of trying to shoehorn us all into ill-fitting poorly designed systems inhereted from an often ignorant past.
I think what we're really missing here is that Australian aboriginals have strict and complex kinship systems, their rituals are often secret, and they still have this scar from anthropologists exposing their secrets.
So this system works for them. It may look stupid to a westerner (TM) since usually when we do stuff like "women can't do X, men can't do Y" we're just discriminating. This in to exactly the case here, as it's more to do with secret rituals you're not supposed to know.
Do I like it? Not really. Still, it works for them.
(By the way, I may be a bit wrong, but you get the point)
o hai
So this is a control system much like a lot of content on then Internet that can only be viewed by a select group or subscriber? Or the education system/club where one must met certain requirements before one is allowed in? Maybe even the corporate sector holding onto their IP rights after all many of these rituals are live giving much like pharmaceuticals or doctoring..
No one elected some anthropologist and gave him/her the Godlike power to decide which aspects of Aboriginal culture are rigidly enforced. Culture is a dynamic process. It should not be fossilized with rigidly enforced rules about what is and is not permissible. Are Aboriginals not to be allowed to dissent? To be non-conformist? This kind of DRM/censorship should be thrown on the scrapheap with all the rest. It disenfranchises the ordinary people and puts their welfare into the hands of some supposedly benign protector. Total bullshit! Of course the Aboriginal elders support this - they are conservatives and resist change - what about the rising new generation? I worked with Aboriginal people in the 90's in central Australia - its about time this kind of paternalist crap was consigned to the trash...
When he came back for a visit, many years later, he revealed that he had never taken out Australian citizenship. When we asked why he explained something on the lines of "Australians are wonderful people, but the country is run by a load of white complete bastards who treat them like shit, and I refuse to vote for them."
The other replies to the parent have many misconceptions. First, it wasn't the First Australians who grew the population beyond what a hunter gatherer lifestyle could maintain. Second, what makes you think that the First Australians were particularly poor before the white man came? There is considerable anthropological evidence that, until the invention of modern sewage systems, starting in the mid-19th century, many hunter gatherers were on average taller, stronger and longer lived than Western city dwellers. It is wrong, unfair, and shows lack of historical perspective to compare their standard of living now with the standard of living of white Australians now.
If people want to hold on to their traditional societies, despite oppression, that should tell us something about our modern society that perhaps some of us don't want to hear.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
There is no difference between this so-called 'DRM' and the privacy options in Facebook, where I can choose who can and can't view my own personal 'rituals' with some pretty fine granularity, likely to get even finer as time progresses -- in fact it looks like aboriginals have one-upped Facebook and pushed the envelope -- I'm feeling envious.
Oh hi, it is you again... you seem to be a real expert on DRM and the DMCA and the world wide versions of such.
You confidently corrected me earlier, stating that Canada had a DMCA like law. Now I know Canada is very much under attack by us(the USA), but I am still waiting to hear what this law is... I don't think Canada knows it exists. Maybe WE passed a law that made it illegal for them to rip movies?
As I replied earlier
'I am waiting excitedly to hear from you explaining the "DMCA like" law that Canada has adopted.
Anyway, I still stand by my assertion "most people on the world live outside the US, and for most of those it is LEGAL to rip a movie".
Even if we assume(pretend?) that Canada and the EU were under a DMCA, most of the people in the world would still be unaffected. The west has very little population.'