Thoughts on the New Counterculture

What ever happened to the 60s counterculture, anyway?

This is taken from a rant on Facebook, and since I doubt anyone who doesn't know me on Facebook so much as glances at this blog I hope you'll forgive my repetition.

I think what happened is they matured enough to understand that if they waited 20, 30, 40 years they could pull off a gradual revolution, insinuate themselves in public thought and politics quietly. They were cooking frogs. The problem is their communist ideal was loudly dying all over the world while they were trying to push it over here. Communism is entirely discredited, it's been proven to not only be a bad idea, but to have monstrous consequences. We don't have to talk about theory anymore, we have fact and evidence, 60 million people dead to man-made famine and government mass murder.

These other guys who have insinuated themselves on the right, former yuppies and the counter-counterculture - 60s & 70s new conservatives - have an entirely different outlook. They look back at Italy and Germany and they say to themselves, "if they'd just got this one thing right, or not done that other thing, we'd all be speaking German right now". They're wrong of course - a thorough view of the Third Reich shows us that it was facing systemic collapse from the inside. Even if you set aside the obvious evil of any totalitarian regime it's plain to see that they're all doomed to failure. If you doubt that, go ahead and show me the last nation that achieved totalitarianism and lasted more than a few decades. The problem is it's not so obvious because people's view of that piece of history is murky at best, so it can sound seductive. It can even be talked about openly in the right circles, and it's basically taboo to call people on it and point out what their social-economic model is based on because any time the word "Nazi" is used in a sentence it's automatically deemed hyperbole. They're the real danger, not the Marxists, but I digress.

From my perspective though, and a lot of old hippies learn this the hard way as they're trying to chill with the younger crowd, is that the new counterculture is not socialist. We're not all about peace and love and understanding. We share some ideas about civil liberty with the hippies, but we also believe in personal and economic freedom. The new counterculture is libertarian at a fundamental level. Sometimes we're lead to believe this or that is a socialist ideal; the anti-copyright people for instance. That's not socialism though, that's about the individual - I have the right to do what I want with my hardware and my property. More importantly I have privacy, and if I have that copycrime is unenforceable. Copyright is inherently collectivist, as it asserts the right for one to control the behavior of many for the supposed benefit of "all", which in the collectivist context always means the ones doing the controlling.

So where are we going? We're too cynical from 20+ years of pervasive advertising and pop culture to fall too deeply in love with dear leaders like Obama, that's why the youth counterculture is dumping him like a hot potato. We're also not stupid enough to be contrarian and destructive for its own sake like the punks and stoners from the last couple decades. A lot of us get subverted and reprogrammed in college by liberal professors but at our core we understand what we are - anti-authoritarian, independent, self-interested. We're all about doing unto ourselves, about personal choice, about looking out for number one and getting the hell out of the way of other people's lives. Not because we were taught that way, but because we were taught the opposite - peace, love, sharing, that we are put on this earth to serve and care for one another. I guess that's the shitty thing about moving your culture into the mainstream, you start being the Man that everyone else is trying to stick it to.

Permalink and Comments

Twitter XSS Exploit Patched

According to an article over at Mashable a potential XSS exploit was found and reported by a Twitter user earlier today. Twitter has already patched the vulnerability, but it illustrates how vigilant we have to be as developers. Never, ever, ever forget to sanitize all user input. It's not just your security on the line, it's your users' security, and that leaves you with a heaping pile of liability.

It's easy to overlook XSS if you don't have a comprehensive XSS filter between you and all user input. These exploits exist on myriad sites, so do serious SQL injection vulnerabilities which have enabled massive credit card fraud and other exploitation (in a recent case, SQL injection was used to capture over 150 million credit card numbers from banks and retail chains). The sad thing is they're not even difficult to do - anyone who knows a little SQL and/or Javascript can write an exploit quickly. Check out http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html for some good starting info on doing penetration testing on your site (and no worries about the link, believe me when I say anyone looking to hack your site already knows it).

Permalink and Comments

The Truth about Jammie Thomas-Rassert and Copyright Law

The gist is that the Obama administration officials with the U.S. Department of Justice ruled last Friday that the $1.92M USD fine against music-downloader Jammie Thomas-Rassert is perfectly legal. If you haven't been following this case, Jammie was found guilty of illegal copying of two albums. I aim to answer several questions here: what does copyright violation have to do with stealing, what are the political and historical roots of copyright law, what are the comparative consequences of copyright violation and other crime, and what should be done as individuals about this problem. I'll try to reply with links if anything here is challenged.

I originally wrote this as a comment on an article at Inside Tech, but it was so long I doubt anyone is going to read it in that format.

She did not steal anything, first off. At common law, larceny is "the tresspassory taking and carrying away of the personal property of another with the intent to permanently deprive". That is theft. Two major elements are missing here: "carrying away" and "intent to permanently deprive". The former implies that the victim has lost something, the latter that the defendant has intent not only to gain, but to deprive the victim.

Let's get this straight: copyright violation is copying something without permission. It is not stealing, any propaganda from the IP industry notwithstanding. By any legal or rational convention, the two acts are only vaguely related. Copying without permission is against the law for entirely different reasons than theft/larceny, the elements of the legal definition are entirely different, and in a really bullshit twist, modern copyright law puts burden of proof of participation, intent, and damages on the defendant - meaning you are essentially guilty until proven innocent, which is against all legal precedent and principled thinking. All the prosecution has to prove is that a computer on your network offered to share the file(s) in question to at least one other person at least one time. Or more specifically, a node (computer, router, modem, etc) had the same internet address as your modem at about the same time, which is physically impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt anyway because of the way network technology works. That's a point that requires its own article to discuss.

Now let's talk political theory. What is copyright, exactly? Is file sharing communism? Let's examine that idea. Copyright is a state-granted monopoly on the ability to reproduce an intellectual work. That means that the state is backing up the copyright holder's claim with force. This is not a feature of laissez-faire capitalism, which holds that the state may not interfere with economic activity except to prevent exchange coerced through fraud or force. This is also not a feature of Marxism, in which the state owns all goods and property and distributes it to the public. We can reason from there that file sharing is also not Marxist, since file sharers do not propose a state which owns copyrighted works and distributes it to them for free. So if copyright law is not capitalist, and it's not Marxist, what is it?

State-granted monopoly is a feature elsewhere exclusive to medieval European feudalism, imperial mercantilism, and Mussolini's national socialism. In European feudalism, the king authorized or turned a blind eye to use of force, including assassination, in order to protect guild secrets. In mercantilism during the colonial era, for instance with Imperial Britain, one company, e.g. East India Trading Company, is granted exclusive authority over a market sector. In Mussolini's brand of socialism, which he said should be called corporatism, the state awards monopolies to favored corporations and competition is thought to be destructive. Mussolini's socialism was, you may recall, later adopted by national socialists in Germany, leading many to fairly call this fascist economic policy. I'm not calling the RIAA Hitler here for the sake of demonizing them (they do that enough on their own), just setting the record straight on political theory and history. Still the most accurate anti-filesharing propaganda poster would read, "Every time you illegally download an MP3, you're fighting SOCIALISM."

As Inside Tech reports, Jammie would have been fined around $1,000 for stealing the two albums from a store and actually depriving it of profits, vs. $1.92 million to copy them. Just to put this in perspective, you'd have to steal anywhere between 10 and 100 automobiles to get a similar penalty to sharing 2 albums on the internet. As a car thief, you'd actually profit, but as a copyright violator, you're paying out of pocket to do promotion and distribution for the recording artist. Before you dispute that, all independent studies show illegal copying has a neutral or positive effect on sales, while on the flip side the recording industry has been shown to have blatantly and knowingly lied to congress multiple times concerning their projected damages from copyright violation. In all fairness, maybe they should be paying you the going rate for album promotion.

Edit: as an aside, courts have been holding that debts incurred from copyright violation judgments cannot be discharged by bankruptcy. Since the debt holder in court judgments may use liens and petition the sheriff to recover their losses, that means if you get stuck with one of these massive judgments the offended party owns you for all intents and purposes for the rest of your life. Comparatively, if you had stolen a CD you'd spend a few weeks to a few months in prison, pay a small fine, and within a year or two recover a normal life.

What are we going to do about these egregious miscarriages of justice? We need to protest these laws by refusing to recognize them, and being politically active against them. Along with activism, the best thing to do is to practice civil disobedience. Fight back. Fight harder, fight smarter. If you are a file sharer, or otherwise engaged in any civil disobedience or political dissent, it is imperative that you understand data security. The three biggest things you can learn about to reduce your risk are: onion routing, deniable encryption, and public key cryptography. Please see the linked articles for explanations, I'm not going to repeat it here. The gist is that they will respectively grant you almost impenetrable anonymity, unbreakable file security and deniability and highly secure data exchange. Note that in the U.S. your 5th amendment rights against self incrimination mean you don't have to give up your encryption keys and passwords, but in Britain the law may compel you to do so. Also beware of key loggers, radio frequency emission interception (picking up the electronic signatures of your keystrokes remotely using sensitive EMF bugs) and other forms of "black-bag cryptography" where keys are simply stolen. Otherwise it is impossible even for government intelligence agencies to break strong asymmetric encryption at the moment.

As a citizen in a representative democracy you have not only a right but a duty to stand up to injustice, especially when perpetrated by the state. If you can somehow come away from all this thinking justice is being done in these copyright violation cases, please pray to whatever deity you believe in to save your sorry soul. Otherwise, you need to understand and apply all these concepts at a bare minimum if you're going to be serious about this. Do that, and we have a good chance of winning the fight, even if Obama and the Tories turn our respective countries into socialist police states. What are you waiting for? Get off your ass, get secure, and then get LOUD!

Permalink and Comments

Ponzi Scheme? Try protection racket.

In reply to http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/climate_change/time-to-end-the-multigenerational-ponzi-scheme

There's a simple reason why there has been no market solution to pollution. At the dawn of industrialism, wherein real libertarian capitalism was transformed into corporatism, the industrialists influenced governments to place a moratorium on liability for pollution. That means people, as individuals or as a class, cannot seek legal damages due to the actions of polluters in a meaningful fashion. If an industrialist built a factory down the street from my house, covering me in soot, filling the air with stench and ultimately giving my whole family lung cancer I could not sue him for damages to the value of my property or my health.

Thus polluters were given free reign to destroy public health and local environmental quality, and unknown to the people of the time to eventually set us on the path to global catastrophe. If this hadn't happened he cost of operating a gross polluting industry after legal liability would be ruinous, and thus they would not get built and would not exist and we would not be having this conversation. From the onset they would have been forced to innovate in ways that reduced pollution and used energy more efficiently, or to give up on their industrial pursuits. That was seen as a problem to be avoided at the time of course. Clean technology existed at the time; renewable energy and the chemistry necessary to burn fuel cleanly or else capture the pollution predates the industrial revolution. It's only taken the past 200 years to make that technology efficient enough to profitable when the alternative, gross environmental destruction, is protected from liability.

Note what happened here was that the state got in bed with industrialists to *bar* the natural, decentralized, market-driven solution, in this case legal liability, in order to support the desires of the few over the needs of the many. This is *not* capitalism. This is not what free-market capitalism would have engendered, because in free-market capitalism the state may not insulate a private company from liability for damages they caused.

Subsequent efforts at government intervention, such as the creation of the EPA, failed and continue to fail because we place the power in a handful of authority figures to sort out the mess and make the right decisions. Even with the best intentions the regulators act on flawed information force-fed to them by lobbyists who are working, secretly or openly, on the behalf of the industry that is ostensibly to be regulated. The outcome is that regulations favor the interests of the most successful lobbying group, always to the detriment of the competition, the public, and the environment.

So my solution is not the government; the government keeps screwing it up. First they created the problem through regulation on liability, then they deepened it by attempting to address it with more regulation and doing so poorly. I say get the government out of the way and start dividing up the liability. Let's add up the number of cars, factories, cigarettes, and other air polluters in, say, the city of Los Angeles and hold their creators proportionately liable against the costs inflicted on the public in terms of medicine, property devaluation, and the constant cleaning necessary to remove the soot and grime and repair the physical damage. The government doesn't need to help here, it just needs to leave the court system open to handle all the class-action lawsuits. It can spend all that EPA money on hiring new judges to handle the cases instead. Forget carbon taxes and cap-and-trade; forget clean energy incentives. Legal liability is far more terrifying and far more effective at keeping industry in line.

Permalink and Comments

OnLive - Gaming on the Cloud

So I saw this one coming about 12 years ago. Really, anyone who understands Moore's Law and economies of scale should have. At the time everyone I tried to explain this to thought I was crazy - remember, this was the age of the 28.8, nobody could conceive of full speed high-res streaming video and virtually no latency. OnLive, if you haven't heard, is a gaming service wherein all the demanding parts of the game are managed on the cloud; A.I, graphics, everything is done by remote servers which stream the audio and video to you over the internet. This means virtually any PC or television in a home with a high-bandwidth internet connection can play any game any time, no special hardware required.

I don't know if the timing is right, but I believe that within 10 years this will be the gold standard for all rich media services. Think about it: if you're a gamer you probably spend on average 300-500 dollars per year on hardware between console upgrades and gaming hardware for your PC. Given the rapid depreciation rate of that hardware and the fact that you only use it 10-20% of the time it spends in your house, this just doesn't make any sense. That's not to mention the hassle of upgrades, patches, driver updates, operating system issues, viruses, and the competing needs of other members of the household. If you were just renting time on the same hardware pro-rated by the hour you'd cut your hardware costs to 30-100 dollars per year and probably save a good 100 or more hours in headaches. That is exactly the value proposition that is going to make OnLive, or a service like it, wildly successful in the next decade.

There are a few implications to this that should be considered. One is the fact that the standard 250gb/month bandwidth cap that the major ISPs have been claiming is more than sufficient for the foreseeable future is right out the door. Without revealing the math, this service alone is going to require around 200gb/month for your average gamer. Innovations like this are also going to drive consumer demand for network neutrality, as nobody wants to be stuck with the internet provider who isn't getting payed off by their rich media service of choice for preferred bandwidth. Imagine for instance moving from one town to another and finding out that your ISP doesn't consider OnLive a 'preferred' service and thus doesn't allow it to run on their full advertised bandwidth. This is a situation where the power is going to end up in the hands of the consumer, who will demand maximum choice with minimum hassle.

We'll see how it plays out. I wish OnLive and everyone like them the best of luck; I'll definitely be a customer.

Permalink and Comments

Spending Our Future

I came across this at Reason Magazine. It shows by comparison how the spending programs of the past year add up to the largest spending in United States history, greater even than the Iraq War, the New Deal, or World War II. Pretty crazy stuff.

Permalink and Comments

Everybody Should own a Copy of the Anarchist Cookbook

I think you, and everybody you know, should make a point to find and read a recent edition of the Anarchist Cookbook, cover to cover. No, wait, hear me out. I don't say this because I think we should all be prepared at any moment to become violent revolutionaries. I say it because I think it's important to know how easy it is to make a weapon, and then to contemplate a much deeper point that is implied by this fact. Why, exactly, don't people do it?

If you don't know what the Anarchist Cookbook is, it's a collection of recipes for making everything from hacking tools to working guns to bombs out of household items. The original Anarchist Cookbook was a physical book written in 1971 as a protest against the Vietnam War (you can read more about it in the Anarchist Cookbook Wikipedia entry). Sometime in the more recent past it found its way onto bulletin board systems, then to IRC, FTP archives, p2p, and intermittently the world wide web. From there it evolved into a sort of wiki project before there was such a thing as a wiki; contributors added their own recipes and the best made it into highly circulated releases that are still easy to find today. Some, if not most, of the recipes are unreliable or more dangerous to you than they are to your hypothetical victim.

I think it's important for everyone to read this book for a very simple reason. The Anarchist Cookbook illustrates how easy it is to create deadly weapons out of common materials. Your average radio-detonated IED, for instance, carries around a 15 dollar material cost. For less than the price of a ticket and a bag of popcorn anyone could easily kill or harm every attendee in the theater. It doesn't take a genius to make weapons, either. It might require a good high school education to design some of these devices but any literate 5 year old could easily follow the directions. Furthermore it's impossible to prevent or even provide reasonable restrictions on creating them. You'd have to take away people's rights to clean their homes, bleach their laundry, open their garage doors from afar, scrub their dishes, change the oil and break fluid in their cars, fertilize their gardens, etc. without licensing from authorities for the appropriate materials. Obviously that's not a world any of us wants to live in.

Now step back for a moment and consider the view of the world as presented to us by the government and the media. One in which we are surrounded on every side by dangerous criminals and terrorists. People from whom we need protection by paramilitary police forces, no-warrant wiretapping, and restrictions on the purchase of any conventional weapon, not to mention a third of the entire global budget for military spending here in the U.S. The question posed to us then is: why don't massive terrorist attacks happen every day? Why are there not mad bombers slaughtering innocent people in every small town across the world? Why do we not don full body armor and CBRN protection gear every morning before checking the mail? Plainly it is not because it is difficult to cause death and destruction, a skill mankind perfected in the bronze age and hasn't really improved on since.

Could it be, perhaps, that human beings are not as stupid, violent and dangerous as we are lead to believe? Could it be that despite the availability of the raw materials and pertinent information to cause mass murder there are just not that many motivated murderers? Could it be that we are safe not because of massive government intervention, who are powerless to protect us from our own household items and the looming danger of the terrorist weapon warehouse known as "Home Depot", but because there are just very few people who have the desire to hurt others? Maybe we don't need all this "protection", all this anxiety, after all. Maybe safety is impossible but danger is highly improbable and that's the simple equation that describes risk in our daily lives.

Permalink and Comments