As a nerd, I sometimes forget that topics that are familiar and important in my world do not always carry the same level of interest (or outrage) among non-nerds. This is sometimes awkward, since I have friends and colleagues on each end of the playground.

For those who are not already aware, DRM is an acronym for Digital Rights Management – the entertainment industry’s latest term for copy-protection. DRM does for digital content (music, movies, games) what syphilis does for dating.

Anyone already familiar with the history of DRM as it relates to copyright (and can easily name each Star Wars film in which Boba Fett appears), can skip over the “DRM” section and proceed straight to the spectacular boner that Sony pulled, under the “Sony” section.

DRM

The whole DRM issue revolves around the right to “fair use” of digital content on one side, and the protection of copyright on the other. In Universal City Studios v. Sony Corporation of America (the “Betamax” case), The Supremes ruled that the recording of broadcast television for the purpose of time-shifting was not copyright infringement but, instead, fair use. This interpretation has since been expanded to include activities like making personal backups of purchased content. This decision plus the doctrine of first sale (which says that one can sell or give away a copyrighted work that was legally purchased) give consumers some rights when it comes to digital content.

However, two important developments occurred that, in combination, have record label and movie studio executives freaking up one side of the board room and down the other:

1. Media formats that can be copied without degradation
2. The emergence of file sharing networks such as Napster, Grokster, Gnutella, LimeWire and BitTorrent

We are no longer talking about Jim recording The Eagles Greatest Hits from vinyl to cassette and then giving it to Dave. Now anyone with a computer and some time can obtain high quality copies of music and video for free.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have responded in two important ways to this situation – legislation and DRM.

Legislation: In 1998, they purchased a law from Congress called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), that criminalizes attempts to circumvent copy-protection, but is so broadly worded that I am technically breaking the law by trying to guess one of my own passwords. With the DMCA in place, the RIAA and MPAA are trying out a novel business model – suing their customers.

DRM: Through proprietary hardware and software, various companies in the business of selling copyrighted content are attempting to place restrictions on how the content can be used, e.g., limiting the number of times a purchaser can play the content or make a copy, interfering with an individual’s ability to move content from one device to another, etc. The stated reason for these restrictions is to combat piracy. In reality, DRM does nothing to prevent piracy, due to:

1. Shoddy implementation
2. The nature of digital media (as Bruce Schneier puts it, “Bits are inherently copyable, easily and repeatedly.”)

All it takes is for one clever individual to strip the DRM from a given digital file and make it available online. That file can then be downloaded by as many individuals as care to do so. The **AAs are attempting to impose physical rules on a digital realm, with predictable results. Whenever the latest scheme doesn’t work, they fall back to litigation.

The only way to make DRM effective would require such sweeping, draconian, backward changes to the entire digital media distribution/consumption model as to make one ask the question, “What problem are we trying to solve again, and why?” So, of course, that’s the legislation the **AAs tried to purchase next. The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), was draft legislation that would criminalize any technology that didn’t have DRM implemented that was capable of reading digital content. This means DRM built into the hardware of every television, PC, DVD/CD player, satellite radio receiver, game console, etc. The legislation is dead, for now, but special interests have very deep pockets and longevity on their side.

DRM is a barrier to what digital consumers want – interoperability. People want to use the content that they paid for however they want, and the doctrine of first sale says that this is okay. Unfortunately, if that content includes DRM, exercising your rights makes you a criminal, on account of the DMCA. It’s true, some people don’t care that their purchased content has DRM, because it hasn’t gotten in their way. Yet. When it does – they have a hard drive crash and lose every song they bought from a particular online provider because they cannot restore a unique key, or they decide on a different brand of portable player and cannot port their collection to it, or they hit the restricted number of copies on a given song – they will most likely change their tune.

As to piracy, some argue that DRM pushes more people to break the law. There are people who purchase a song online, then download the same song via a file sharing application so they can have a DRM-free copy in the format of their choice. In many ways, the RIAA created this situation and now they’re trying to sue the genie back in the bottle. The technology to sell online music was available for years before iTunes opened its doors. Why? Because the RIAA resisted, and continues to resist, the new distribution model. Motivated purely by greed and control, the RIAA wants to keep things the way they’ve always been. Smart organizations adapt to and capitalize on changing markets. Not the RIAA, though. If the RIAA had been in the buggy whip business circa 1900, their profits would still be thriving because they would have successfully lobbied to get a kickback on every gallon of gas sold, the way they do today with blank, recordable media.

Piracy is a legitimate problem, but it’s mostly a physical one, i.e., the illegal distribution of CDs and DVDs in overseas markets. The figures that the RIAA quotes for losses due to online piracy are grossly inflated. For one thing, they reason that every song downloaded via a free file-sharing application would have otherwise been purchased. And not just the song, the whole CD. In addition, their figures conveniently fail to factor in their own reduction in new releases over the same period, or the state of the economy. Online music piracy is simply not the boogeyman that the RIAA dresses it up to be; it’s a specter that they use to their advantage. The RIAA record labels are not about to go out of business because of piracy.

Sony

Sony (remember Sony from the Betamax ruling?), is now a major player in music and movies. In recent news, they placed DRM software on at least 19 CD releases, with disastrous results. When a consumer attempts to play one of these CDs on hus computer, hu is greeted with an End User License Agreement (EULA) which, among the incomprehensible snarl of legalese common to all EULAs, includes language which states:

“…this CD will automatically install a small proprietary software program (the ‘SOFTWARE’) onto YOUR COMPUTER. The SOFTWARE is intended to protect the audio files embodied on the CD, and it may also facilitate your use of the DIGITAL CONTENT. Once installed, the SOFTWARE will reside on YOUR COMPUTER until removed or deleted.”

What the EULA doesn’t state is that the SOFTWARE is a rootkit (malicious software which cloaks its presence) which will bugger up your machine if you attempt to remove it without Sony’s help, and provides writers of trojan horses and viruses with a ready-made mechanism for cloaking themselves. In Sony’s eyes, these must be acceptable tradeoffs to prevent you from making more than three copies of the Neil Diamond CD you just bought.

Sony is already facing six, count ’em, six separate lawsuits in the fallout of this invasive, ill-conceived DRM tactic. They’re in full damage control mode, but remain strangely unapologetic. They insist that the software poses no threat, despite three “in the wild” trojans having already been identified as exploiting the security hole created by their software.

There is a movement on Slashdot to popularize the phrase “Infected with DRM” to characterize more accurately what companies like Sony are doing, as opposed to what EULA language like “facilitate your use of the DIGITAL CONTENT,” does to illuminate the issue.

In a way, I am grateful for what Sony has done. By making a move so clearly lacking in foresight and which so clearly places its own interests ahead of its customers, Sony has created a furor which might well reach people who hadn’t previously given one thought to DRM or how it affects them. I think I’ll get Sony something nice this Christmas. I know! Foot bullets. I hear they’re running low.

My friend Grady is doing something really important. Kashmir is in a world of hurt right now after sustaining a 7.6 magnitude earthquake on October 8th. 73,000 dead, 3 million homeless, and things are going to get worse before they get better. It’s already snowing in parts of Kashmir, and full winter is right around the corner.

International response to the disaster has been tepid at best. The U.N. is something like 80% short of its target monetary goal. Personal donations to relief organizations are low as well. After the Tsunami and Katrina, I think that a lot of people are simply exhausted, charitably and emotionally.

Grady, who has a personal connection with the Kashmir region, has put up kashmircare.org in an attempt to mobilize as much support as possible for CARE, a wholly worthwhile organization who is well-equipped to give the sort of aid that is needed most. Please visit kashmircare.org, read about what’s going on, and consider helping.

Thank you.

What kind of crank would I be if I didn’t publish a rant about Daylight Saving Time (DST)? My (four) readers have come to hold me to certain standards.

I’m a sucker for idioms, colloquialisms, turns of phrase, the whole megillah. I use them in daily speech, because the good ones are colorful and richly descriptive. Coming across a new one is like receiving a little present.

A relatively recent subgenre of this little pasttime of mine is collecting that rare and beautiful gem, the mixed metaphor. Most of the ones I’ve collected are from work, which is not surprising, considering the sheer volume of metaphors that spew from any gathering of corporate types. Here are a few of my favorites:

Wanda Worker, faced with a looming deadline, confided that she was “behind the gun.” I can think of worse alternatives.

In a project kickoff meeting, Gil Golfshirt expressed the desire to “get the ball off on the right foot.” Wow. I…wow.

Perhaps Gil was trying to avoid the fate of his co-worker Steve Stockoptions who was recently “thrown to the lambs.” It was the cuddliest massacre ever.

According to Connie Cubedweller, obvious to all, “The writing is on the table.” And the food is on the wall.

Leaving no turn unstoned, Tom Toomuchcraponhisbelt encouraged others to “rattle the bushes” for solutions. Beating the cages would disturb their occupants, who are trying to work.

Last, my current personal favorite:

Polly Professional, responding to a little reflective listening on my part, shared, “MrPikes, your head is totally in my shoes.” I apologized.

I heard each one of these. A colleague of mine, who shares in my amusement, claims to have heard someone refer to “low-flying fruit,” but I wasn’t there. A good thing, I guess. Taking a guava to the head is not my idea of a good time.

I am becoming increasingly fascinated with the eroding barrier between the Internet (have you seen what all they got on that Internet?) and Real Life.

Here are a few of my favorite examples:

• Enterprising Slashdotters signed up Alan Ralsky (Millionaire Spam King) for thousands of mail order catalogues, etc., specifying his home address. Soon Ralsky was receiving hundreds of pounds of junk mail every day – quite helpless to extricate his legitimate mail from it.
• Eduardo Kac, the artist responsible for the creation of Alba, set up an art exhibit named “Genesis” featuring a petri dish containing bacteria with modified DNA sitting under an ultraviolet light that turned on whenever a visitor to Kac’s web site clicked a button.
• The ACCESS Project – Here is my friend Gokmop’s summary of this traveling art piece:

  ACCESS is a public art installation that applies web, computer, sound and lighting technologies in which web users track individuals in public spaces with a unique robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system. The robotic spotlight automatically follows the tracked individuals while the acoustic beam projects audio that only they can hear. The tracked individuals do not know who is tracking them or why they are being tracked, nor are they aware of being the only persons among the public hearing the sound. The web users do not know that their actions trigger sound towards the target. In effect, both the tracker and the tracked are in a paradoxical communication loop. The ACCESS spotlight system travels from one undisclosed public space to another. The exact location of the public space is revealed only after ACCESS moves to its next location.

• Teledildonics – My new favorite word. Teledildonics puts us one step closer to the holodeck (and the collapse of human civilization). With devices like the Sinulator, users can control a sex toy via the Internet. Just the thing for when your spouse is out of town on business. However, some people subscribe to a service in which the Sinulator is manipulated by complete strangers. Holy crap.

I have a very clear memory of the day I first heard about the Internet. It was 1995 and a co-worker was talking about “surfing the web”. In the intervening 10 years, for me, the Internet has gone from being a novel way to acquire porn to an ever-present resource (for porn) that is as much a part of my day as eating, sleeping, or looking at porn. Though I am not a Mac person, I think back to when I first saw Apple’s short movie entitled Knowledge Navigator. I cannot help but marvel at how much the Internet has become part of our lives, and how much there is still left to do.

So I’m out here in Portland, OR visiting my pal Jake. He owns and operates a swell camera shop called Blue Moon Camera and Machine. I was in the back office working on the computer. Just as I went to minimize the shop’s email software, a familiar address jumped out at me. I did a double take. What was going on? Why was one of my web development clients emailing Blue Moon?

Jake came into the office and I asked him about the message. He opened it up and said that my client had read a recent newspaper article on the resurgent popularity of typewriters, in which Jake was quoted. This had prompted my client to look up Blue Moon, and email the shop with a question about wide angle lenses.

That’s it. My client had no idea that Jake and I were old friends, let alone that I was currently out in Portland.

Jake set about replying to the message, and we agreed that we should take the opportunity to bake my client’s noodle. Jake replied to the lens question, then closed by mentioning that I was at present standing behind him (behind Jake, not my client, although that certainly would have been creepier, especially if it had turned out to be true).

This happy coincidence got me thinking about coincidences in general, especially of the mystical convergence variety. We have all heard stories about someone obeying a strong compulsion not to board a plane, then seeing on the news that the plane crashed with no survivors. Or a person dreaming of someone not thought of for years, only to find out the next morning that the person dreamed of had just died unexpectedly.

The improbability of two such events occurring in close proximity naturally makes the mind attempt to relate the events. Douglas Adams wrote about this. I’m paraphrasing because my library is some 3,000 miles away at the moment, but he basically said that in a world of 6 billion people, these sorts of things come up all the time. At any given moment, lots and lots of people are dreaming about someone that they haven’t thought of in years, and lots and lots of people are dying. The two are bound to converge.

Our perception of it is what gives the experience meaning.

While researching the blog post about Intelligent Design (8/31/2005), I came across this great quote on probability:

… rarity by itself shouldn’t necessarily be evidence of anything. When one is dealt a bridge hand of thirteen cards, the probability of being dealt that particular hand is less than one in 600 billion. Still, it would be absurd for someone to be dealt a hand, examine it carefully, calculate that the probability of getting it is less than one in 600 billion, and then conclude that he must not have been dealt that very hand because it is so very improbable.”

– John Allen Paulos, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences

It always slays me when someone asks me what day my birthday is and, when I tell them (December 20th), they reply with something like, “Really! I know someone who was born on December 23rd!”

Holy crap, what are the chances?

Actually, if you want to make a quick buck off a deserving sucker, try out this bet. You and the sucker are in a room with 23 or more people (including you and the sucker). You bet that two of them share the same birthday. The probability is greater than 50% that you will win. If there are at least 30 people in the room, the probability is over 70%. If you are interested in seeing the math behind this, please visit The Math Forum @ Drexel.

I make none of these points in an attempt to disprove the existence of guardian angels, the loving influence of a Guiding Hand, or the magnetism of souls. One cannot prove a negative. However, I believe that it is worth reflecting on the fact that the human brain is wired for pattern recognition, and that it is a natural occurrence for us to see patterns, even when none are there.

In the ongoing trench war between the scientific vs. religious agendas, Intelligent Design represents the latest grenade lobbed.

Proponents of ID (William A. Dembski and Michael J. Behe chief among them) essentially state that ‘random evolution’ cannot account for the complexity and diversity of living things. Instead, they reason, this complexity indicates the hand of an intelligent creator. The basic idea goes back a long way, from the famous watchmaker analogy to St. Thomas Aquinas’s five proofs for the existence of God.

These are teleological arguments, and they’re compelling. However, they fall under the category of philosophy, not science, which is why the current debate over whether or not ID should be given equal time to evolution in science class is ludicrous.

Anything can be a competing idea to evolution, including a Flying Spaghetti Monster, but that doesn’t make it science. ID proponents argue that the best their pro-evolution counterparts can do is attack ID with absurd satire. John Calvert, the attorney who heads the Intelligent Design Network, stated, “If that’s all they can do to support evolutionary theory, they’ve got a big problem with their theory.”

That’s it right there. ID advocates go to great lengths to propagate the message that ID is a theory on equal scientific footing with evolution. It simply is not.

The scientific method is designed to prove or disprove hypotheses based on observation and valid, repeatable experimentation. One of the hallmarks of good science is the concept of falsifiability. The basic idea is that every theory should build in a condition which, if met, would disprove the theory. Popper’s swan analogy works well:

My theory, based on observation, is that all swans are white. However, if someone were to produce evidence of a black swan, I would have to revise my theory.

ID cannot be falsified. Any time one introduces a supernatural entity into the mix, evidence goes out the window.

“The universe is 6,000 years old.”

“What about fossils?”

“Well, the wizard who created the universe just made it look like that.”

That’s ID’s biggest problem. It explains everything, but illuminates nothing. Robert Todd Carroll has some great stuff on this.

Imagine taking this approach on a Biology test:

“Explain capillary action.”

“The Wizard did it.”

Boy, what a time saver…

Setting the whole validity question aside, I want to express an opinion about what I perceive to be the root of the problem. I am, admittedly, painting in broad strokes.

In modern, Western civilization, secularism holds sway as the dominant paradigm. Science has increasingly taken ground from Religion for over a century. Every time we see a news story about a judge putting a sculpture of the Ten Commandments in a courthouse or a school board debating whether or not ID should be taught in public schools, we are watching Religion try to regain lost ground.

I believe this perception to be based on a false dichotomy, e.g., if I believe in the Christian God, then I cannot believe in evolution, or vice versa.

I believe that Science and Religion are not mutually exclusive but, instead, deal with entirely different domains. One cannot prove (or disprove) that there is a God with Science, no more than the New Testament can tell you how to build an internal combustion engine.

Absolutes are the problem. Any time you try to explain everything exclusively using Science or Religion, you end up with things like Love being awkwardly reduced to a “complex set of chemical and neurological interactions,” or the origin of species as “The Wizard did it.”

Science does not deal with final causes, Religion does (teleology again). That is, Religion describes what things mean, Science investigates how things work. Science and Religion only threaten one another if people choose to perceive them as threats. If the broad perception were instead that each represents a unique toolset for dealing with different “problems”, the tension between the two would cease to exist.

I have an embarrassing tale to relate.

Fact 1: My home office is a bit cluttered.

Fact 2: I do web development for a local fitness trainer, and have acquired a fair amount of content related to his site.

I recently went about renewing my passport. You never know when you’re going to need to leave the country suddenly, and it’s usually one of those things that you don’t think of doing until you actually need it. So I grabbed an envelope and put in all the stuff – the old passport, the paperwork, two passport-compliant head shots and a check for $55.00.

The new passport came in the mail a few weeks later. I opened the envelope and pulled out the old passport (invalidated), the new passport, some literature, and…a photograph. I stared at the 4×6, very confused by its presence in the packet, because it dawned on me that I recognized it. It was a source image from the fitness trainer.

I tried to think over the roar in my ears as my body tried to set some sort of new record for the granddaddy of all blushes. How the hell did this happen? What was going through the mind of the employee who processed my application? MrPikes, why did you send a photograph of oiled, muscular, artificially bronzed men wearing very little to the United States Government?

What the hell kind of list have I just put myself on?

Now that a little time has passed, and my face has returned to its regular color, I’ve concluded that I must have reused an envelope when I mailed the passport renewal, and that the photograph was already in there. I still envision some future interaction with U.S. Customs after I return from an overseas trip.

~~~

Customs: Passport, please.

Me: Right here, sir. (Customs officer types information into his terminal)

Customs: Sir (turning terminal around), what were you thinking when you mailed this photograph to the United States Government?

Me: I honestly have no idea.

Customs: Got any more?

~~~

It was nice of them to send it back, though.