I’ve just come from giving a talk on DRM to HP’s research group in Corvallis, Oregon — a kind of sequel to last year’s Microsoft DRM talk. The text of the talk is dedicated to the public domain, and live on the web.

* Privacy

In privacy scenarios, there is a sender, a receiver and an attacker.
For example, you want to send your credit-card to an online store. An
attacker wants to capture the number. Your security here concerns
itself with protecting the integrity and secrecy of a message in
transit. It makes no attempt to restrict the disposition of your
credit-card number after it is received by the store.

* Use-restriction

In DRM use-restriction scenarios, there is only a sender and an
attacker, *who is also the intended recipient of the message*. I
transmit a song to you so that you can listen to it, but try to stop
you from copying it. This requires that your terminal obey my
commands, even when you want it to obey *your* commands.

Understood this way, use-restriction and privacy are antithetical. As
is often the case in security, increasing the security on one axis
weakens the security on another. A terminal that is capable of being
remotely controlled by a third party who is adversarial to its owner
is a terminal that is capable of betraying its owner’s privacy in
numerous ways without the owner’s consent or knowledge. A terminal
that can *never* be used to override its owner’s wishes is by
definition a terminal that is better at protecting its owner’s
privacy.

I’ve finally started podcasting! I love reading my stuff aloud, but it’s not practical for me to find quiet places to sit down with a mic and a Powerbook and record. So the idea is that I’m going to record my stories in serial form from wherever I am: hotel rooms, friends’ sofas, airport lounges, whatever, and post ’em. You can subscribe to the feed here, or download individual installments as MP3s here. The podcast is also available through iTunes. Thanks to the Internet Archive for hosting the MP3s and to Feedburner for munging the feed.

I’ve started the podcast by reading aloud from a novellette-in-progress called “After the Siege,” inspired by my grandmother’s hair-raising stories of being a little girl in Leningrad during the 900-day Siege of Leningrad, which she recounted this summer while we were at a family reunion in St Petersburg, Russia (Leningrad that was).

This Friday, I’m speaking at an event in Berkeley, California, called Online Video and the Future of Television, sponsored by the Intelligent Television project. I’m on a 3PM panel with Rick Prelinger of the Prelinger Archive and Peter Kaufman of Intelligent TV. Hope to see you there!

Friday, September 30, 2005
9.30 a.m. – 4.30 p.m.
The Hillside Club
2286 Cedar Street
Berkeley, CA 94709

More than 30 million hours of unique television programming are broadcast every year worldwide, and a growing fraction of it is digital, along with a flood of video from individuals, new production companies, and archives. The availability of large-scale public and private archives of television, video, and film offers enormous promise for educators, entrepreneurs, producers, broadcasters, and investors.

Nearly every aspect of television and video today is in transition. Storage is moving from tape to disk, distribution is moving from broadcast networks to the Internet, schedules are giving way to unscheduled or on-demand access, and viewing now happens via PCs, mobile phones, and home theaters.

This one-day conference, created by Archival.tv and Intelligent Television (http://www.intelligenttelevision.com), brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse — and until now, largely disconnected — specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.

Salon is serializing the first third of a novel I’m working on, whose working title is Themepunks. The first 50,000 words are a stand-alone short novel, and every week for ten weeks, Salon is publishing another ~5,000 words from the story.

The third installment is online. In this week’s piece: Perry and Lester, the garage hackers that Andrea (the tech journalist) is profiling, take her on a tour of the new technology esthetic, brought on by the lost generation of out-of-work photoshoppers, html jocks, and perl hackers left behind by the dot-bomb.

He handed her a white brick, the size of a deck of cards. It took her a moment to recognize it as an iPod. “Christ, it’s huge,” she said.

“Yeah, isn’t it just. Remember how small and shiny this thing was when it shipped? ‘A thousand songs in your pocket!'”

That made her actually laugh out loud. She fished in her pocket for her earbuds and dropped them on the table where they clattered like M&Ms. “I think I’ve got about 40,000 songs on those. Haven’t run out of space yet, either.”

He rolled the buds around in his palm like a pair of dice. “You won’t — I stopped keeping track of mine after I added my hundred-thousandth audiobook. I’ve got a bunch of the Library of Congress in mine as high-rez scans, too. A copy of the Internet Archive, every post ever made on Usenet… Basically, these things are infinitely capacious, given the size of the media we work with today.” He rolled the buds out on the workbench and laughed. “And that’s just the point! Tomorrow, we’ll have some new extra fat kind of media and some new task to perform with it and some new storage medium that will make these things look like an old iPod. Before that happens, you want this to wear out and scuff up or get lost–”

“I lose those things all the time, like a set a month.”

“There you go then! The iPods were too big to lose like that, but just look at them.” He passed back the iPod. The chrome was scratched to the point of being fogged, like the mirror in a gas-station toilet. The screen was almost unreadable for all the scratches. “They had scratch-proof materials and hard plastics back then. They chose to build these things out of Saran Wrap and tin-foil so that by the time they doubled in capacity next year, you’d have already worn yours out and wouldn’t feel bad about junking them.

“So I’m building a tape-loading seashell robot toaster out of discarded obsolete technology because the world is full of capacious, capable, disposable junk and it cries out to be used again. It’s a potlatch: I have so much material and computational wealth that I can afford to waste it on frivolous junk. I think that’s why the collectors buy it, anyway.”

(Link to part one, Link to part two)

Salon has just posted part two of its ten-part serialization of my novel-in-progress, “Themepunks.” Last week, we met Andrea Fleeks, a tech journalist; Lionel Kettlewell, a brazen Silicon Valley VC; and Rat-Toothed Freddy, a sleazy UK tabloid tech journalist, and learned that Kettlewell had bought up and liquidated Kodak and Duracell, two companies that have no place in a filmless, batteryless twenty-first century. Kettlewell proposes to use the money to fund micro-startups that combine cool commodity hardware, open source software and imagination to create new tools that are profitable for 3-6 months, until they are cloned and the margin on them falls to near-zero.

In this week’s installment, Andrea goes on assignment to Hollywood, Florida, where she meets Lester and Perry, a pair of tech-freaks who live in a junkyard where they remix dead high-tech toys into one-of-a-kind works of art:

Perry set Boogie Woogie Elmo down on a workbench and worked a miniature USB cable into his chest cavity. The other end terminated with a PDA with a small rubberized photovoltaic cell on the front.

“This thing is running InstallParty — it can recognize any hardware and build and install a Linux distro on it without human intervention. They used a ton of different suppliers for the BWE, so every one is a little different, depending on who was offering the cheapest parts the day it was built. InstallParty doesn’t care, though: one click and away it goes.” The PDA was doing all kinds of funny dances on its screen, montages of playful photoshopping of public figures matted into historical fine art.

“All done. Now, have a look — this is a Linux computer with some of the most advanced robotics ever engineered. No sweatshop stuff, either, see this? The solder is too precise to be done by hand — that’s because it’s from India. If it was from Malaysia, you’d see all kinds of wobble in the solder: that means that tiny, clever hands were used to create it, which means that somewhere in the device’s karmic history, there’s a sweatshop full of crippled children inhaling solder fumes until they keel over and are dumped in a ditch. This is the good stuff.

“So we have this karmically clean robot with infinitely malleable computation and a bunch of robotic capabilities. I’ve turned these things into wall-climbing monkeys; I’ve modded them for a woman from the University of Miami at the Jackson Memorial who used their capability to ape human motions in physiotherapy programs with nerve-damage cases. But the best thing I’ve done with them so far is the Distributed Boogie Woogie Elmo Motor Vehicle Operation Cluster. Come on,” he said, and took off deeper into the barn’s depths.

Doublefiltered, a webzine, has published a fine interview with me:

DF: You set one of your novels, Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, in Disneyland. How does Disney relate to all this?

CD: I am a huge Disneyfile, I love the park and I am always fascinated to see how it shows up in other peoples storylines – the same way that Vancouverites seek out bits of the Vancouver skyline in movies that have been filmed there.

Disney theme parks are a good backdrops against which to play out dramas because they embody so much utopianism themselves, so much science-fictional thinking. Walt was an optimist, and a science fiction writer whose canvas was people and social systems, like Henry Ford, and like a lot of other American entrepreneurs of that era. He was an experimenter, a social experimenter who tried out explicitly crazy communities.

DF: Do you find it at all ironic that the someone like yourself who is lobbying heavily for copyright reform is in this intimate imaginative relationship with Disney who today are one of the biggest proponents of tighter copyright restrictions?

CD: Not at all. I think that it is possible to create great art and still be an asshole. And that is Disney in a nutshell. The company does some very good things. There is hardly a company in the world that is as progressive as they are with respect to same sex spousal benefits, they are the larger employer of homosexuals in the southlands, they were the first to offer same sex benefits in the teeth of the crazy, loony, Christian right, Baptist constituency who accused them of destroying family values. And the same thing goes for their creativity.

I think that the Disney park is brilliant and wonderful. There are a lot of people who hope that we can have a popular revolution without popular entertainment – I say to them:

If your popular revolution demands that we give up on popular entertainment it won’t be very popular.

I’ve been working on a new novel since last December, working title “Themepunks.” The first third is in the can, and it is a short novel unto itself. The book is about a post-dotcom boom and bust, built on the ready availability of commodity hardware and open source code, and concerns itself with the lives of a gang of visionary tech entrepreneurs, journalists, bloggers, as well as Florida squatters, students in the midwest, and Brazilian geek activists. I’ve read aloud from it on a number of occasions, most recently at the Worldcon in Glasgow in August, and always to enthusiastic responses.

Salon magazine has begun to serialize the book, and they will publish a section every Monday for ten weeks. By that time, I hope act two will be done and Salon will be interested in it, though of course there’s no guarantee of either (but act one is self-contained and stands on its own). When the whole thing is done, Tor will publish it between covers and I’ll be doing my normal Creative Commons release, but I relish the opportunity to do what Dickens did — write a novel in serial form just a few weeks ahead of my readers.

Andrea Fleeks almost never had to bother with the blue blazer these days. Back at the height of the dot-boom, she’d put on her business journalist drag — blazer, blue sailcloth shirt, khaki trousers, loafers — just about every day, putting in her obligatory appearances at splashy press conferences for high-flying IPOs and mergers. These days, it was mostly work at home or one day a week at the San Jose Mercury’s office, in comfortable light sweaters with loose necks and loose cotton pants that she could wear straight to yoga after shutting her PowerBook’s lid.

Blue blazer today, and she wasn’t the only one. There was Morrow from the NYT’s Silicon Valley office, and Spetzer from the WSJ, and that despicable rat-toothed jumped-up gossip columnist from one of the U.K. tech-rags, and many others besides. Old home week, blue blazers fresh from the dry-cleaning bags that had guarded them since the last time the NASDAQ broke 4000.

The man of the hour was Landon Kettlewell — the kind of outlandish prep-school name that always seemed a little made up to her — the new CEO and front for the majority owners of Kodak/Duracell. The despicable rat-toothed Brit had already started calling them Kodacell. Buying the company was pure Kettlewell: shrewd, weird and ethical in a twisted way.

“Why the hell have you done this, Landon?” Kettlewell asked himself into his tie-mic. Ties and suits for the new Kodacell execs in the room, like surfers playing dress-up. “Why buy two dinosaurs and stick ’em together? Will they mate and give birth to a new generation of less-endangered dinosaurs?”