Last month, I gave a version of my “War on General Purpose Computing” lecture to the University of Westminster Law School. The Guardian captured the talk on video and edited it for length, then posted it.

My latest Guardian column is “Why did an MPAA executive join the Internet Society?” which digs into the backstory on the appointment of former MPAA CTO Paul Brigner as North American director of the copyright-reforming, pro-net-neutrality Network Society group, which manages the .ORG domain name registry.

I asked Brigner whether his statements about DNS blocking and seizure and net neutrality had been sincere. “There are certainly a number of statements attributed to me that demonstrate my past thoughts on DNS and other issues,” he answered. “I would not have stated them if I didn’t believe them. But the true nature of my work was focused on trying to build bridges with the technology community and the content community and find solutions to our common problems. As I became more ingrained in the debate, I became more educated on the realities of these issues, and the reality is that a mandated technical solution just isn’t a viable option for the future of the internet. When presented with the facts over time, it was clear I had to adjust my thinking.

“My views have evolved over the last year as I engaged with leading technologists on DNSSEC. Through those discussions, I came to believe that legislating technological approaches to fight copyright violations threatens the architecture of the internet. However, I do think that voluntary measures could be developed and implemented to help address the issue.

“I will most definitely advocate on Internet Society’s behalf in favor of all issues listed, and I share the organization’s views on all of those topics. I would not have joined the organisation otherwise, and I look forward to advocating on its behalf.”

Update: Joly sez, “After his appointment we (ISOC-NY) did pull Paul up on the carpet to explain himself – you can find the salient MPAA passage here

Why did an MPAA executive join the Internet Society?

(Image: Stop SOPA!, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 51295441@N07’s photostream)

I was in Prague last Saturday, giving an address to the General Assembly of Pirate Parties International. The video is on YouTube.

Jon Winokur, editor of the stupendous Portable Curmudgeon books, asked me to contribute to his latest project, “Advice to Writers,” so I did.

My latest Publishers Weekly column is “A Whip to Beat Us With,” which describes how publishers who allow retailers to add DRM to their products hand those retailers a commercial advantage to exercise over the publishers themselves.

Jim C. Hines’s e-books are marketed both through a big publisher and solo. The books that were re-priced by Amazon were his solo titles—unagented, and unrepresented by a major publisher. As an individual, Jim has no leverage over Amazon. Not so his publisher, Macmillan,[NB: Macmillan is NOT Jim’s publisher; this error was introduced during the editorial process and will be fixed ASAP] which controls a much larger number of SKUs and has much more leverage. Macmillan made headlines during its tense standoff with Amazon in 2011 over e-book pricing, but the publisher was able to sway Amazon because it could make a credible threat that it might get up from the negotiating table and take all its books, too—and others might follow.

But Macmillan’s edge—its scale—is also its undoing. Every day, Macmillan sells more e-books that have been locked into Amazon’s format. The millions of dollars that Amazon customers spend on Macmillan’s DRM-locked e-books represent millions of dollars of e-books Macmillan customers lose if they wanted to follow Macmillan away from Amazon. Publishers believe DRM protects their books. But DRM has created a world where publishers who walk away from negotiations with a DRM vendor like Amazon leave their customers behind.

Not just Macmillan. Any publisher that sees a substantial portion of its income from DRM vendors becomes little more than a commodity supplier to those vendors. If Hachette or HarperCollins decided to bite the bullet and pull their titles from Amazon during a dispute, how many of their authors would stay with them, knowing that the world’s largest bookseller and most popular e-book platform no longer carried their titles?

To appreciate this vulnerability, just look at what happened in February with the Independent Publishers Group, a distributor that asked Amazon to hold the line on its discount. They weren’t able to reach an agreement, and Amazon removed all IPG’s e-books from the Kindle store. The day that happened, IPG sent out a communique describing the situation and asking its readers to avoid the Kindle store in future.

A Whip to Beat Us With

US senators are calling for action on employers’ habit of demanding employees’ Facebook passwords, but no one seems to notice that many companies configure their computers so that they can eavesdrop on your Facebook, bank, and webmail passwords, even when those passwords are “protected” by SSL. In my latest Guardian column, “Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn’t just about passwords,” I talk about how our belief that property rights — your employer’s right to control the software load on the computer they bought for your use — have come to trump privacy, human rights and basic decency.

Firms have legitimate (ish) reasons to install these certificates. Many firms treat the names of the machines on their internal networks as proprietary information (eg accounting.sydney.australia.company.com), but still want to use certificates to protect their users’ connections to those machines. So rather than paying for certificates from one of the hundreds of certificate authorities trusted by default in our browsers – which would entail disclosing their servers’ names – they use self-signed certificates to protect those connections.

But the presence of your employer’s self-signed certificate in your computers’ list of trusted certs means that your employer can (nearly) undetectably impersonate all the computers on the internet, tricking your browser into thinking that it has a secure connection to your bank, Facebook, or Gmail, all the while eavesdropping on your connection.

Many big firms use “lawful interception” appliances that monitor all employee communications, including logins to banks, health providers, family members, and other personal sites.

Protecting your Facebook privacy at work isn’t just about passwords