Digital Citizen

I’ve just seen the 2-disc DVD of “An Unreasonable Man“, the documentary about Ralph Nader, and it’s well worth seeing. One of the reasons this documentary is so important is because Nader’s work is highlighted and his adversaries get so much screen time yet pose such poor arguments to explain why Nader is simultaneously not important enough to be in political debates and the scapegoat for Democratic Party electoral failure; you hear their arguments in their own words and you can see their points destroyed (if you couldn’t immediately spot the holes in the arguments). It is genuinely difficult for some people to acknowledge that Nader’s ego is not the issue and that his work is what progressive politics should resemble.

Also eviscerated is the Democratic Party; unless the progressives and the Left stop voting for Democrats, the Democrats will continue to believe that they’ll have “nowhere to go” (as Lawrence O’Donnell, who worked in the Democratic Party, said) and behave accordingly. The scene (edited out of the movie but included in the extras on the first DVD) about the Congressional Black Caucus was particularly illuminating in that nobody from the CBC challenges what Nader and Nader campaign leader Theresa Amato say about their meeting with the CBC, so we can see how much the CBC colludes with the Democrats in keeping the voters around 50%. Joshua Frank has more on “The Demise of the Congressional Black Caucus”.

Nader takes the power of public discussion on TV seriously—on the second DVD there is a clip where he says candidates for public elective office who get their money exclusively from public funding will get free TV time. If you have never worked on a campaign, you should know that media buys are the top expenditure. Making this policy a matter of license acquisition will essentially force TV stations to do this. As Robert McChesney has said, a TV broadcast license in the US is virtually a license to print money. American TV airwaves are publicly owned. We should be charging them rent. Telling them to give ballot-qualified candidates free, uninterrupted, prime-time TV time is perfectly going easy on them.

The movie also gives considerable time to people who supported his work in the past and disagree with his runs for president in recent years. The interesting thing about them are the rationales they use to explain away the distance between their claimed political beliefs (which all match Nader’s) and how they behave. They recognize that nobody else talks about these issues at all (no challenge to the established parties, “weak beer” as Phil Donahue says in a clip on the second disc), yet they are compelled to distance themselves from Nader (including Public Citizen, the organization Nader founded, in a particularly shameful display where Public Citizen tries to convince us that merely saying “Ralph Nader, founder” is supporting his candidacy). I take away from this how intolerant some are of losing a race, how much they demand predictability and orderliness in elections (no matter how much this conflicts with Democracy), and how many people buy into what Barry Commoner, a third party candidate in 1980, was asked by a reporter: “Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate or are you just interested in the issues?”.

One wonders how much more worse the two corporate parties and their supporters believe things can become.

Tristan Rhodes describes the pitch and allure of the open source movement perfectly and simultaneously (perhaps inadvertently) describes why that pitch has so little allure to those who frame the issue in terms of price:

What is the main benefit of open source?

The short answer is that open source reduces the cost of software. It is widely accepted that software is a necessary cost of doing business in today’s environment. Therefore, it is beneficial for companies to find ways to acquire software that minimizes that cost.

If price is chiefly important, there’s no reason to favor “open source” software over an illicit copy of a proprietary program that performs better. Some proprietors exploit this weakness and offer their software at low or no cost. There’s no way to teach people to favor fundamentally important issues such as building and defending community. It’s a great example of knowing the cost of something and not its value.

The philosophy of the younger open source movement is an inadequate response to the older free software movement; the ethics the open source movement never discuss keep coming up (any discussion of digital management restrictions (DRM), the recent update Microsoft pushed on Windows users without the the user’s consent are recent examples). An ethical approach to computing is critically important in the short and long run. As a result of not stressing free software freedoms for their own sake, one learns how to lose those freedoms. This issue is explored more deeply in the essay “Why “Open Source” misses the point of Free Software” (an updated version of the older essay “Why “Free Software” is better than “Open Source”“):

The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program which is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users’ freedom. How will free software activists and open source enthusiasts react to that?

A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, “I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?” This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.

The free software activist will say, “Your program is very attractive, but not at the price of my freedom. So I have to do without it. Instead I will support a project to develop a free replacement.” If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.

She likes the largest multinational corporations and disfavors the smaller ones. Cory Doctorow on Marybeth Peters is illuminating:

Marybeth Peters, the US Register of Copyrights, has come out in favor of the controversial 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, saying “it did what it was supposed to do.” The DMCA makes it possible to sue companies that make music, video and ebook players that play back DRM file-formats without permission, giving Apple the right to sue Real for making its own music player to run on the iPod. This aspect of the DMCA is a form of “private law,” allowing companies to attach any conditions they want to their offerings, and criminalizing competition that gives you a better deal.

The DMCA also makes it possible to censor the Internet by sending “takedown notices” to web-hosting companies alleging that some of their content infringes copyright. This system has been widely abused — Diebold used it in an attempt to silence critics who’d published a whistleblower memo that showed that the company had supplied faulty voting machines in US elections; the Church of Scientology uses it to silence their critics; serial troll Michael Crook used it against websites that criticized him, and the Science Fiction Writers of America recently sent a notice that resulted in the removal of dozens of non-infringing works and works by authors whose copyright they don’t represent, including my own novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and a list of good sf books for junior high students. Andrew Burt, the Science Fiction Writers of America VP who sent out the list, has since characterized it as containing only three errors because only three people complained — but most people who receive DMCA takedown orders assume that they must be infringers and do not complain.

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Democracy Now! made a typical error when describing the latest Microsoft antitrust violation fine. Here’s how DN! put it on today’s show:

In business news, Microsoft has lost an anti-trust appeal before Europe”s second highest court and has been ordered to pay a record $690 million fine for abusing its dominance in computer operator systems. The court upheld a 2004 antitrust ruling from the European Commission.

Amy Goodman (audio, high-quality audio, video, and transcript)

But DN! doesn’t put that figure in perspective. Without understanding how much money that is to Microsoft, this figure is left to be interpreted in the context of the reader’s pocketbook. Such an interpretation will not accurately convey what a slap on the wrist this really is.

In late 2005 Gervase Markham, a free software hacker who works for Mozilla, placed the 2004 Microsoft €497 million fine in a larger context—In 2003, they made £14 million a day from Windows client operating system licences alone.. This doesn’t include any other Microsoft activity (such as hardware, documentation, or their other proprietary software such as Microsoft Office) all of which benefit from their illegal and anti-competitive activities.

According to the XE.com currency converter £14 million a day is roughly $28 million a day (as of 2007-09-17), so Microsoft’s latest fine of $690 million is worth about 24 days of Microsoft Windows OS licenses at their 2003 level. Microsoft has delayed this for so long they’ve made enough money to cover this fine many times over. Suddenly the new fine doesn’t sound that large unless you are naive enough to believe that a month’s worth of money from only one of Microsoft’s many lucrative activities will effect substantive change in Microsoft’s behavior.

And the kicker is that Microsoft is only a symptom of the real problem with software proprietors. All software proprietors are monopolists who would behave similarly if given the chance.

The latest change to iPod software that rendered the audio listening device less interoperable has been broken. This isn’t the first time iPod and iTunes-related algorithms were broken and it won’t be the last.

Read more about the news or download a local copy of the public domain source code that implements the new hashing algorithm.

Here’s a sample of what people are saying about the latest break:

Really the only “correct” solution is for folks to stop using Apple products.

Ian Monroe

screw you and your pathetic failed attempt to use your ridiculously trendy device to lock its owners into your sorry excuse for music playing software.

i know you’re afraid of the linux desktop eating away at your precious niche market, but at least you could play fair.

Ryan Lortie

Although we -the Linux community- can choose not to buy iPods, many other people will. And it is our goal to make Linux a viable modern computing platform that allows people to use all of their existing devices.

Breaking the hash is not really a long-term solution, as they can keep making the process harder every time. The long-term solution is for iPods to have a standard interface that third parties can communicate with.

This probably should be compounded to the EU’s findings on Apple’s anti-trust practices to ensure open access to a popular device.

Miguel de Icaza

Background

Apple has changed the way iPods work so that only Apple’s software can successfully manipulate the songs on an iPod. Until the new arrangement is reverse-engineered, Apple has locked in iPod users into their software, transforming a more useful general-purpose audio listening and file carrying device to something that chiefly obeys Apple’s wishes.

Lennart Poettering is a free software hacker, author of important software including Avahi (which helps computers connect to each other and discover services) and PulseAudio (which allows computers to play multiple sounds simultaneously, even sending audio over networks to be heard somewhere else). He is quite familiar with the relevant protocols Apple uses to allow iTunes to share files and send audio around the network. These aren’t the kinds of programs one uses directly but they’re quite necessary for any modern system.

Analysis

Poettering’s analysis of Apple’s latest move is quite apt. There’s more on this issue from Boing Boing and Hubert Figuiere, another free software hacker.

At one point, Poettering concludes to use a technically inferior protocol to do the job DAAP does because DAAP is not an open protocol and UPnP is an open protocol:

I believe that DAAP is the superior protocol in comparison to UPnP MediaServer. (Not really surprising, since I wrote most of Avahi, which is a free implementation of mDNS/DNS-SD (”Zeroconf”), the (open) Apple technology that is the basis for DAAP.) However, due to the closedness of DAAP I would recommend everyone to favour UPnP MediaServer over DAAP. It’s a pity.

Apple did the right thing with the mDNS/DNS-SD protocol (which allows computers to see what services they offer and help make it easier for ordinary users to connect computers together on a local network). Apple allows everyone to use mDNS/DNS-SD and encourage broad acceptance by publishing complete specs under a license that encourages implementation, allow an Apple employee to help with technical questions, and build valuable programs and devices which use the protocol.

But make no mistake, if Apple were a more popular consumer electronics company they would treat you no better than they could get away with. Best not to become dependent on them.

Update

A little over a day after this news broke, Apple’s latest exclusion scheme has been broken.

Today is Software Freedom Day, a day when we celebrate the freedom of free software for its own sake, relishing in the community we’ve built around sharing and treating each other as partners. Free software is software that respects the user’s freedom to run, share, inspect, and modify the program for any purpose at any time. You don’t have to do these things, they’re permissions not commands, but (like freedom of speech) you miss the freedoms when they’re absent. The price of the software is not the central issue despite that the freedom to share the software means you can often get free software for free (yes, English uses the same word for both price and permission). You never know when you’ll need the freedoms of free software, so it’s good to have these freedoms all the time for all of your software.

So here’s hoping you’ll install and use more free software! What programs could you use? There are too many free software programs to mention them all, but you can visit the FSF/UNESCO Free Software Directory or try these favorites of mine (which happen to be on my computer as I type this):

• Firefox & Thunderbird—a great web browser and email program. If you’re distributing modified versions of these programs you’ll probably be more interested in working with the IceWeasel and IceDove derivatives which don’t carry Mozilla’s restrictive trademark license or the non-free crash reporter program “Talkback” (one can easily uninstall this from Firefox and Thunderbird as well by going to the Tools menu and picking Add-ons then finding the Talkback add-on and clicking its “Uninstall” button and restarting Firefox or Thunderbird).
• The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program)—my preferred bitmap image editing program
• Inkscape—my preferred vector image editing program
• BZFlag—a great shoot-em-up tank game you can play online or solo
• VideoLAN Client—a nice all-in-one media player
• Rhythmbox—a fairly simple audio player you can use to share music as well
• gNewSense GNU/Linux—a free software operating system
• Fedora GNU/Linux—a free software operating system (tends to carry more up-to-date software than gNewSense)
• K3B—CD/DVD burning and copying software
• Frozen Bubble—a very addictive game you can play over a network or solo. I hear an operating system release was delayed due to the developers getting hooked on this game.

More and more people recognize that the Democrats are no opposition party.

It’s outrageous. One word, it’s outrageous. And I rarely use that word, because it’s such [hyperbole]. And the Democrats didn’t join, the Democrats led, because — let’s be very clear. The House leader and the Senate leader, Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid, could have stopped that legislation from happening. They were the ones who handled the calendar of Congress. As the party in power, they could have stopped it from being enacted. And let’s be very clear that it’s not just joining or being complicit. It’s leading, of sorts, I guess. And further, this FISA fix and this change further even more greatly guts the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero on today’s Democracy Now! regarding the Democratic support for legalizing spying by American telecommunication corporations (audio, video, transcript)

More on this issue from:

• Marjorie Cohn—the new law requires telephone companies to collect data and turn it over to the federal government. It also grants immunity against lawsuits to these companies, many of which are currently defendants in civil cases. and her recent DN! interview
• Dave Lindorff—Make no mistake: the Democrats did not have to pass this latest piece of legislation, loosing the NSA spies on us all. They had the power to kill that bill in its tracks. Instead, they succumbed to the President’s empty threat to label them all “soft on terror” if they didn’t give him what he wanted: a blank check. They caved, just as they did when they had the power to end the war in Iraq last April by cutting off funding for it, and instead, voted to fund it in full.

However I should note that, unlike Lindorff, I do not believe that “The Democrats in this Congress are a bunch of spineless cowards”. I believe this kind of agreement comes doing precisely what their parties are designed to do—benefit their paymasters. Perhaps Lindorff and I don’t really disagree on this point. Lindorff’s “The Case for Impeachment”, raises another point of shame for the party in power and the progressive Left: who is holding the Democratic candidates feet to the fire on impeachment?