20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with #ChrisAnderson, who was then the editor in chief of @WIRED. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing *Wired* reviews of #DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:
https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill
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I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity - it was about good reviewing practice. *Wired* was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:
https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/
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I proposed that all *Wired* endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:
> WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE.
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> BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.
*Wired* didn't take me up on this suggestion.
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But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've *already paid for* is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:
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Since its founding in the 1930s, Hewlett-Packard has been synonymous with innovation, and many's the engineer who had cause to praise its workhorse oscillators, minicomputers, servers, and PCs. But since the turn of this century, the company's changed its name to HP and its focus to sleazy ways to...
Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a *felony*. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.
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This is the root of all the #RightToRepair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech.
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The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable #McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war
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Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the #OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in #NEWAG #Impuls *locomotives*. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:
https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/111528162905209453
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Attached: 1 image I can finally reveal some research I've been involved with over the past year or so. We (@[email protected], @[email protected] and I) have reverse engineered the PLC code of NEWAG Impuls EMUs. These trains were locking up for arbitrary reasons after being serviced at third-party workshops. The manufacturer argued that this was because of malpractice by these workshops, and that they should be serviced by them instead of third parties. 1/4
Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU #CopyrightDirective, including #Article6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the #ChaosCommunicationsCongress in Hamburg this month - Germany is also a party to the #EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real - but so is the threat to conferences that host them:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/
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20 years ago, Chris told me it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument - then and now - was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z - and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.
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But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they *invite* both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remote, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded *inevitably* results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so.
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The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for better people in the meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to shit:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification
But even if everyone at the table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to *external* actors's demands to use it.
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Back in 2022, #Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include #Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "#SoftwareAsAService" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process
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Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who *can* know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future.
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Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.
These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe *chose* to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its *customers* paid for that choice.
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Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is *Adobe's* fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.
This keeps happening and it's *gonna* keep happening. Last week, #Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") #Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever.
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They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit - when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).
Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome #DavidZaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery.
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Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money *cancelling completed movies and TV shows* and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them. Imagine putting years of your life into making a program - showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night.
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Only to have this absolute *turd* of a man *delete* the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!
But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet.
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Thanks to Sony's awful choices, Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies - and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your table.
The point here - the point I made 20 years ago to Chris - is that *this is the foreseeable, inevitable result* of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this *today*? Absolute flaming garbage.
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Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit *knew what they were doing* and *they did it anyway*. *Fuck* them. Sideways. With a *brick*.
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