Computing Subversive's Bill Of Rights

Have you ever been told by an employer or academic institution that you MUST only use a specific hardware, operating system, or software solution? The reasons given are manifold and sometimes even appear rational and reasonable. Justifications that I have heard are: "We only want to support one system." "It is not allowed to use unsupported systems." "We cannot pay for support for any other system." "We don't know how to administer and support that system." "We don't know how secure the operating system that you want to use is." "There is no vendor contract or support for that software." "It might be spyware/malware/freeware/open-source." "It must be approved first." "We have an exclusive contract with a company that only provides their craptastic solution and the contract doesn't allow us to use other systems."

Even though the people carrying out the policy decisions of your company have every reason to suspect that your unsupported solution may be more secure, robust, or proficient than what they are using, they don't defend you. They only care that their costs 'appear' low or that there is an appearance that things are 'secure'. They want to legally protect themselves from you and the threat you pose by being a user of computing resources. You don't pass go. You don't collect $200. You are stuck with the shit you are given or you have to go through a painstaking process of proving one exception at a time that you have adequately prostrated yourself in the eyes of the policy managers. Then you might be able to use your unsupported system.

I am one of these subversives. I am a delinquent in the eyes of the policy mandate-ers with their cheeky pocketbooks, corn-fed contractors, and indignant securitizing homogeneity enforcers. I have been successful at using my choice of hardware, software, and operating system. I am able to do this because I am tenacious and because I demand that the computer systems that I use be flawless to the tasks that I have at hand. I am extremely proficient at my job and my use of computing systems. I outright refuse to accept any force-fed least-common-denominator solution.

My company has numerous policies setup to stop me. They want me to use any Microsoft supported version of Microsoft Windows and I have to always, always spend extra time justifying why each hardware purchase is not using the cheapest available solution. I abandoned the Microsoft Windows playground during my sophomore year as an EE student shortly after discovering the unnerving stupidity of Microsoft's basic design principles. I then immersed myself in world of Linux distros and command shell environments. I started my first post-graduate job expecting to use the most customized, specialized, and secure computer systems on the planet. And...I then quickly discovered that I was expected to throw away all of my hard-boiled Unix experience and to use a child's toy.

Ok. So you get that I am bitter. I get more bitter every time I am expected to justify myself. This happens every few months. Some new policy is born that has more or less ambiguous language that says I must not use what I am using. It will be taken away unless I can justify its use. Further, that I am not allowed to justify its use using an argument of personal preference or efficiency. And it doesn't matter that nothing has changed on my end. That the same justifications apply. I jump through the paper hoops of fire and navigate the gauntlet. I didn't choose to play a game of "hot lava" today, but am hop-skipping over imaginary flames nonetheless.  I can never guarantee that my efforts will be successful. I could end up with barbecued feet and an empty tool bag full of Fisher Price toys and a Dilbert etch-a-sketch to replace my sophisticated arsenal of computing tools.

I think that the problem is, however, far deeper than my unrest and unease. The problem is one of a large institution making a definitive choice of a specific implementation of a computer system, when, by definition each of these Turing machines is fully capable of emulating the others. The difference being in user familiarity, in implementation and user interface details, in their level of proprietary or open design, in their methods for product testing and making guarantees. Sure, I understand that an organization has needs, and when it needs one, an organization should acquire a large petaflop computing system and use it for boiling eggs or performing network and computing security tasks. But in respect to 'personal' computing, an organization doesn't use these, individuals use personal computers. I use personal computers. I might access mainframes, but my daily tasks are done right here in Sunnyland. And in Sunnyland I need a computing system built to the oddities of my brain, my experiences, and my tasks.

Even if the organizational organism itself uses a personal computer, it shouldn't ever specify one for you. Clearly you will use a personal computer in a very different way than an organization organism. You have hands! It would be slightly better if it were your office-mate or next door neighbor telling you what software you should run or what type of computer you have to buy. But even this is complete nonsense. Just because you sit in the same cubicle or live on the same street gives someone no insight into your cognitive abilities and peculiarities. If I've got a different driving style than you and am most efficient using a 6-speed manual transmission, I should damn well be able to..no..I should have the right to choose a the manual over any automatic.

So, you are reading this and being a business owner, or policy enforcer, you think that I am out of my fucking mind. If you let your employees drive whatever computing vehicle they wanted, you would not be able to afford the cost! You wouldn't be able to guarantee computer security! So, yeah, I'm not talking about cost. If you want to put a restriction on how much I am allowed to spend, do it, but if I am a expert and expect the best tools I will either quit my job or purchase them for myself. If I am expected to perform at my peak performance within the bounds of a budget I must still be able to choose the computing environment that fits my specific needs. And if you are smart you won't use cost limiting as a method to get me to use a pre-chosen solution. Clearly, if you are doing this, you've missed the point.

And as for the 'security' arguments...If you are only doing security on the host level...you've lost. If you want secure personal computers, the only way to do this is to educate your population! You don't tell your scientists that they can't use a hammer because they might smash their fingers! Just teach them how to hit the nails without damaging themselves, their tools, or their colleagues. So you don't have that type of security expertise in house? Pay for external security firms to educate them for you. You'll will be better off doing this instead of trying to keep up with the incredibly fast-paced world of software.

The proposal that I am taking my sweet time in getting to is this: A Bill Of Rights guaranteeing an individual free choice of human-machine interface. Give the individual the inalienable right to choose for themselves the type(s) of computing environment(s) that work best for their tasks. I am sure that this is the right approach. Our organizations, if they are mandating a specific environment, do not have your best interests at heart. Your health and cognitive proficiencies are being used against you. They are wasting you. They are throwing away tens of thousands of your precious life hours in order to fulfill some pre-ordained requirement created by financiers of big-business or big-government. I do not have the time to have my life wasted so blithely. I should have the right to work as proficiently and efficiently as I know how. The real screwed up part of this is, we are currently the minority. Most computer users don't care about computing environments because they don't know enough about their computing environments to give a damn. So when a bunch of don't cares are thrown on a balance scale against individuals organization make up any damn thing they choose and throw away their most proficient computing resources. Us!

I don't expect such a computing subversive's bill of rights to be mandated for all companies, except in the particular case when that company is the U.S. Government. As a taxpayers and employees we must repair this problem or risk everything by steeping our best and brightest in the mud of mediocrity. Just think this: if you were an Olympic runner, would you be able to perform if forced to run in flip-flops? Just remember, in respect to human-machine-interface, your flip-flops may just be my rocket-boots.

Some related examples of writing on computing consumer rights. Note that all of these are concerned with consumer rights in respect to product quality. These are necessary protections but I believe are related to basic product guarantees rather than providing users with the ability to choose HMI specifics.

• Are You 'Visioning' Your Company's Future?, Global Future Report
• Computer Owners' Bill of Rights, GreatBrook
• Computer User's Bill of Rights, CUBOR Project
• Computer User's Bill of Rights, Usability Institute
• A Geek Bill Of Rights, Newsweek
• Cloud Computing Bill of Rights
• A COMPUTER USER'S MANIFESTO, Business Week

I believe that for any of these usability and accessibility guidelines to make a difference, first and foremost, a user of a computing system must be able to choose an optimal solution for their individual characteristics.

The Fallacy of Free Music

Free from fees, free from taxes, free from licensing, and we are free from protection. This is the state of digital consumer media. Because we demand nothing but freedom from these things we demand nothing.

I don't really know a whole lot about copyright and there are thousands of sources of information on copyright and so many rants on copyright and DRM that there are rants about the rants, but I think that the answer to this whole mess is pretty simple and the consequences for the future, fairly dire.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (pdf summary) does not protect the rights of consumers. It protects the rights of copyright holders when and if they are able to file lawsuits against you for infringement. It protects your service provider by limiting their liability in regards to acts that you as their customer commit. But the DMCA does not do anything to protect the consumer and does nothing to provide proper incentives for consumers to respect the letter of the law in copyright. The very shallow thinking of counter-DMCA initiatives such as the Digital Media Consumers' Rights Act do little more than create exceptions to the mess created by the DMCA, really just bringing us back to a state where sanity is just over the horizon instead of where it is today: somewhere deep within the labyrinth of the legal system. And surely, even if you have never downloaded a song from the internet or the Pirate Bay you are still in the labyrinth because all of your music and movies are belong to someone else.

Beyond the scope of the DMCA, there are things for which consumers should be seeking protection. For example, when my material copy of a compact disk is damaged, I should retain the rights implicit in my original purchase; a license to make use of the licensed content. I should be able to retain access to the content of such media independent of any physical form. I think that my copyright; that is, my right to a copy upon purchase, should be protected. The double-speak of the copyright world would have us believe that we are purchasing a revocable license to limited use of the content, but that this ephemeral license is also tied to a physical media. It is encrypted to prevent my fair use. So smart consumers crack the encryption so that we can store our DVDs on our computers or listen to our copy-protected CD music on our iPods (or vice-versa). I would argue that if the license is ephemeral, it is logically independent of the media on which it is stored. And if my CD collection is stolen, lost, or otherwise destroyed, my license is not destroyed, but perhaps just proof that I had a license to begin with. This is even more true in today's world of digital content where I can't physically touch the tangible form of the media.

I think that if there are copyright laws to protect the copyright holder, there should certainly be complimentary law that guarantees certain rights to consumers. Isn't that license that I am purchasing just a contract anyway? How about someone write a better contract and give me good sound reasons to hold true to the contract.

I'm not even sure what is truly a copyright violation. Just ask yourself. If you watch a film on DVD with some friends, how many friends does it take for it to be a 'public presentation'? Is it infringement to show a Halloween flick at a party with 15 people present? How about 30?  50? What if everyone is invited? Do you feel like you are violating copyright when you are downloading music for which have already purchased a license? Are those individuals that are providing you with this download service violating copyright? According to the law, it is probably "yes" in both cases. Should this be the case? Probably not. If the media conglomerates want to retain control of their music, then they need to let us do the controlling. As a metaphor drawn out to ridiculous lengths: How does any person or group think that they can drive all of our cars all at once given that we are all going in different directions, at different speeds, to different destinations, and will make different stops on the way. I don't want to be confounded by the DRM "encryption circus". I don't want DRM. The real copyright violators will copy whatever they want anyway. Why don't we do something to take away their incentive to copy instead of our fair use rights to the media? It just hurts the consumer and gives us less for more. We pay more for music and films today in part because of the extra special secret sauce of DRM. It doesn't do anything for me but cause me physical pain and make me angry.

To elucidate a bit: I just recently had video produced for a conference. The production team did a good job and keeping things absolutely simple, they didn't do anything extra or charge me anything extra. Their process was to go directly from DV to DVD. This would be fine if I thought DVD was an adequate distribution mechanism, but it isn't. I wanted AVI or QuickTime, hell, anything web-ready, which absolutely excludes DVD. With 6 DVDs representing about 13 hours of video in hand, I was faced with the completely stupid situation of having to extract and decrypt DVDs for which I own the copyright. Huh? So yeah, I'm a geek, this should be simple, but settings be damned, it takes an awful lot of trial & error trying to make sure that everything is ripping and decrypted properly and that the re-encoding process doesn't screw things up. It took me nearly two weeks of trial and error to find the right software and the right software configuration to get things into the right format without any horrendous glitches. I'd even done this before with DVD movies that I own, and I'm tech savvy. Sometimes it seems painless, but most of the time it is like sawing off one of your own limbs. Like I said, DVD encryption and format settings be damned.

Before you start pointing me in the direction of the newest and greatest wiz-bang DVD extraction tool 1, just ask: Why the hell was it encrypted to begin with? Encrypted? Never-mind that the production team has a broken process. They are just going along with the industry and using the de facto standard. The de facto standard is to go through superfluous steps which take incredible amounts of extra work to make the content as difficult to copy as possible. WTF? If we continue down this path there will be nothing left of the present when the future finally arrives. It will all be lost to the noise of arbitrary encryption schemes that only ever really served to make things temporary, fragile, and disposable in the face of time.

Oh, sure, we'll have über-geeks and super smart software that knows about gobs of DRM and media encryption/encoding/decoding schemes, but should our technological resources really be so caught up in just decrypting and decoding the present (or worse, the past)? Why will the future of media suck if we continue? Because encryption will always be broken, new methods will always need to be developed, and before we know it we will just have a huge retarded trash heap of media rights management technology that requires media players and computers smarter than people just to figure out how to pull a dead rabbit out of the very convoluted hat. I don't want that.


So what do we do? Fuck it. Drop DRM entirely and completely. Artists should produce art because they enjoy producing it. My home stereo output is definitely not a live performance and it shouldn't cost anything close, especially when the media is for all intents and purposes, intangible.

If you put control back in my hands, I'll do what I think is right. I just bought the new Radiohead album, which is being sold with exactly this model. I paid what I thought it was worth to download the album. Less than what I would have paid on iTunes, but far more than free. Just think, because people pay what they think it is worth, or what they think that they can pay, there is no market for pirating it. That option was not available before. This is a really good idea and it doesn't require any computer geniuses to figure out how to implement or big, dumb, greedy companies to try to cajole me into thinking it is OK. It is better than OK. It makes sense where current digital music pricing and DRM are senseless.

One might also turn to Copyleft or Creative Commons and release your original works into the public domain, or use the Creative Commons license tools, draft your own license, and distribute it yourself. This has worked for me so far, as I have produced only 2-3 original compositions per year. And since I'm not in it for the money, please, download my music. It will make me happy knowing that someone else is listening to it and enjoying it. Which brings me back to the point I was trying to make before losing myself in the agonies of DRM. Why do we listen to music? Why do we make music? Why do we communicate?

I like good music. I enjoy making art. And I like good ideas. And I'm really not convinced that wealth creates better art. I don't think that there is any correlation at all. And I'm absolutely certain that DRM is a dumb idea. If you can convince me otherwise, I'll buy you dinner where I'll provide you with an encryption key for viewing my next blog post.