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Lockdown: The Coming War on General-Purpose Computing

Cory Doctorow has an exceptional essay on the legislative and political battles that start with copyright but don’t end there.

One Comment

  1. Industry Collaboration
    If the Powers-that-be can’t nail down the population with internet control, and their software can’t beat the wealth of available FOSS software, then they will simply choke off the supply of hardware.

    I’ve perceived a troublesome (to me) trend in the hardware world lately, it all seems to boil down to pushing citizens into handing control of their general computing devices over to centralized control. “The Cloud” is what they’re calling it, but all this is, is a reversion back to the days like when mini-computers ran all the tasks centrally & dumb terminals (the things we’re being sold) slaved into them. The latest crop of tablets all come with just enough CPU power & (soon-to-be digitally locked) flash drive space to hold an OS+web browser. Everything else is expected to be accessed through a centrally controlled system, and that access is via the internet. So, with a locked-down low-capacity CPU and no personal hard drive space, you must have an internet connection. But, if you do not conform to the rules that groups like Big Media are making, then your internet access will be cut off. Now you are left with a worthless device and an inability to get at any of your personal data, all of which is expected to be stored online. How does an animator render his work without access to CPUs potent enough to do the math? How does a musician mix a 5.1 audio track for a DVD release of her album? How does a confectionery owner balance his books without access to his spreadsheets?

    There is also the element of access to your personal data by others – corporate types, legal types, and malicious types. If your media collection is stored in a server in Minnesota, there is nothing stopping anyone who “suspects you of copyright infringement ” from going through your files (unlike now, where gaining access to your domicile requires more than a hunch). You are now dependent on someone else’s security diligence to keep the black hats from copying all your personal data, or worse, from using your (probably rented) drive space to distribute their malice.

    We have new digital lock provisions, which, if understand properly, would mean that I am also not allowed to unlock, say, my now-worthless tablet(s) in order to harness its/their aggregate computing power. We have developments such as the quantum computers which, IIRC, are expected to be in the order of ten thousand times the processing capacity of current CPUs. Given their way, I believe the industry megalomaniacs would have such computing power centralized. Joe the Animator wants to render a scene? Well, he can render it in The Cloud on a bank of centrally located systems, and his work will be checked to be certain it conforms to “the rules”, and he’ll be charged what we think we can extract from him, and he’ll be charged for all the bandwidth to move that data. Software which promotes independent creativity is easily accessible now, much if it requires pretty hot systems. Compile a new piece of software, mix audio/video streams, manipulate images, ray tracing, number crunching for your preferred charitable pursuit (cancer/SETI/etc)… all of these benefit from personal high-performance general computing. The ability to switch between various tasks, as your needs change, makes such a device a necessity of modern living.

    So, if the demand for high-performance general computing ability is growing steadily, you would expect that a competitive market would continue to respond to this demand. Yet, it would appear that limiting hardware capacity and exerting control over the general market seems to be the preferred approach. Is anyone in the industry going to compete with this ethic? I doubt it, and given the cost of building a fabricating plant, I do not foresee any new players jumping in to compete with the establishment. So long as the general industry is working as a collective toward a common goal, citizens will be hard-pressed to keep from being steam-rolled by them. It would take government intervention (unlikely), new home-built technology (speculative), or mass rejection by the general population (slow, reactionary) to defeat such a monstrous movement of economic momentum & mass.

    IMHO, shifting general computing out of the home and into the corporate collective is a failure of the market; it’s a group within the market exerting control over niches which are no longer competitive *and* no longer serving the market needs. If this market shift is pushed through, it should probably be addressed by government as a market failure and be forcibly reorganized into a crown corp, or something paralleling a crown corp.