[Plura-list] Unauthorized water; Remote portraiture; Stream the Little Brother stage play; HBO Max, a monopolist's parable

[Cory Doctorow]

Today's links

* Unauthorized water: GE fridges won't make ice or dispense water if you
use a third-party filter.

* Remote portraiture: Photographer Fran Monks is shooting with
videoconferencing tools.

* Stream the Little Brother stage play: For a limited time only!

* HBO Max, a monopolist's parable: Where net neutrality, vertical
monopolies and DRM collide.

* NY repeals 50-a: Cops' disciplinary records are back on public display.

* Openshc: A versatile controller capable of generating body poses and
gaits for quasi-static multilegged robots.

* MIT dumps Elsevier: The public sphere vs the Elsevier.

* This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2019

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing
projects, current reading

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🤵🏾 Unauthorized water

It's not clear when General Electric started boobytraping appliances
with DRM. I first encountered it in January when Shane Morris tweeted
about his fridge refusing to accept the $19 generic filter he replaced
the GE $55 filter with.

https://twitter.com/IamShaneMorris/status/1220367934947758080

The fridges use an RFID detector to distinguish original GE filters from
generic replacements, and engage in lots of anti-owner trickery, like
memorizing the IDs of previously used filters and refusing to accept them.

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/unauthorized-charcoal-ge-fridges-wont-dispense-ice-or-water-unless-your-filter-authenticates-as-an-official-55-component/159552/41

Morris isn't the only one ourtaged that his fridge is plotting against
him. One (anonymous) owner was so offended that they created a site
dedicated to warning off potential buyers and explaining to other
suckers how to bypass GE's lockouts.

https://gefiltergate.com/

There's a good reason for the anonymity. Under Sec 1201 of the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, showing how to bypass an "access control" to a
copyrighted work (eg RFID-detecting code in the fridge) is a potential
felony, carrying a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine.

This is quite the moral hazard. Manufacturers have learned that if they
design their products so that any use that hurts their shareholders
(like buying third party parts) requires bypassing DRM, it becomes a
felony to use your own property to your own advantage.

Which is why we've seen DRM creep into all manner of devices, from
insulin pumps to tractors to car engines to Iphone screens. "Felony
contempt of business model" is the statute that every monopolist has
dreamt of, and with DMCA 1201, they have it in their grasp.

Back in 2011, I wrote a short story about this for MIT Tech Review's
first sf anthology, called "The Brave Little Toaster" (in tribute to Tom
Disch).

https://craphound.com/news/2011/09/28/the-brave-little-toaster-from-trsf/

The issue only got worse, and so last year I published "Unauthorized
Bread" as part of my collection "Radicalized" (it's being turned into a
TV show by Topic):

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

The metastasis of DRM into every product category shows that when
business apologists talk about the sanctity of property, they mean the
sanctity of *corporate* property.

If the manufacturer gets to override your decisions about the things you
buy - and felonize any attempt to wrest control back - they property
ceases to exist. We become tenants of our devices, not owners.

It's digital feudalism, in which an elite owns all the property and we
get to use it in ways they proscribe. The difference is that today, our
aristocracy isn't even human.

It's the immortal, remorseless colony organism called the Limited
Liability Corporation, to which we are mere inconvenient gut flora.

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🤵🏾 Remote portraiture

Lockdown is hard on every profession, but I hadn't really thought about
how it impacts portrait photographers until I read about how Fran Monks
is shooting "socially distanced portraits" using videoconferencing tools.

https://www.bbc.com/news/in-pictures-52284371

Monks's work is mostly wide frame, capturing her subjects in the spaces
to which they are confined; she sets up the shot over videoconferncing,
then photographs her screen with a traditional camera.

"Even though the images are made by layer upon layer of digital process,
I enjoy the fact that the black border of the computer screen is
somewhat reminiscent of a darkroom print from a negative."

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🤵🏾 Stream the Little Brother stage play

The Custom Made Theater Company's 2012 stage version of my novel Little
Brother played to sold out houses in San Francisco, and ever since it
closed, I've heard from people who wanted to see it.

Last month, we figured out how to make that happen.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/28/holographic-nano-layer-catalyser/#custom-made

Between now and Jun 28, you can stream the stage production, thanks to
the excellent work of playwright Josh Costello and the company. It's
name-your-price with funds going to the theater company and the Theatre
Bay Area Performing Arts Worker Relief Fund.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/little-brother-by-cory-doctorow-2012-world-premiere-recording-tickets-106804932428

If you enjoy it - and I really think you will, as it's totally brilliant
- you might be interested in the third Little Brother book, Attack
Surface, which Tor Books is publishing in Oct (Head of Zeus books in the
UK).

https://read.macmillan.com/promo/attacksurfacepreordercampaign/

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🤵🏾 HBO Max, a monopolist's parable

There are so many reasons to dunk on HBO Max: its confusing name (quick,
what's the difference between HBO, HBO Max, HBO Go, and HBO Now?), its
terrible UI, and so on.

But worst of all is what it embodies about monopolies.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/streaming-laying-bare-how-big-isps-big-tech-and-big-media-work-together-against

HBO, of course, is part of Time-Warner, which is part of AT&T; (a
garbage company).

AT&T; caps its customers' data, but not when it comes to HBO Max. So if
you're a Netflix subscriber, every video you watch brings you closer to
massive excess bandwidth charges.

But if you're an AT&T; subscriber, HBO Max is "free" (in the sense that
the monopoly provider you're forced to use for internet access doesn't
charge you directly - merely uses your viewing habits to try to destroy
all alternatives).

(Incidentally, the US has some of the slowest, most expensive broadband
in the world, and the poorer, Blacker and more rural you are, the more
you pay and the less you get. Fun fact!).

Now, AT&T;'s competitors - Disney+, Netflix, or a new service that's
trying to enter the market - can pay AT&T; to have their data exempted
from the caps. But when Disney pays AT&T;, money actually changes hands,
making Disney poorer and AT&T; richer.

This is fundamentally different from what happens when HBO Max "pays"
AT&T; for preferential treatment - in that case, no money changes hands.
The company just uses an accounting trick to arbitrarily allocate some
share of the profits to the broadband division instead of TV.

Fine, you're getting HBO Max. Maybe you're even paying for it! You wanna
put it on your TV, which came with Roku built in. Or maybe you want to
use that Amazon Fire stick you bought.

Tough shit.

AT&T; only lets you put the video you're watching on your screen if you
use a device that it has greenlit, based on backroom deals that are
totally opaque to you.

Back in 2016, we almost got an "Unlock the Box" order from the FCC, that
would have forced cable cos to allow you to buy ANY cable box and use it
with the service you paid for, instead of paying eternal rent for an
underpowered, electricty-hungry crapgadget of their choosing.

AT&T; and its co-monopolists killed Unlock the Box by saying that cable
boxes didn't matter anymore because everything would move to streaming
anyway.

As Katharine Trendacosta writes, "In the cord-cutting era, Roku and
Amazon Fire TV have 70% of the market share for these kinds of devices.
Users are stuck in the middle of a fight between giants just to watch
content they supposedly get for 'free' or have already paid for."

"We need more choices for our ISPs, so they can’t keep charging us more
for bad service. We need more choices so they can’t leverage their
captive audiences for their new video services. We need net neutrality
so these giant companies can’t create fiefdoms where they manipulate how
we spend our time online. And we need our technology to be freed from
corporate deals so we get what we paid for."

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🤵🏾 NY repeals 50-a

Since the pre-internet days, the NYPD had posted its "Personnel Orders"
(reports from closed-door disciplinary proceedings) to a clipboard in
its public information office, explicitly so that journalists could look
at these reports.

In 2016, the NYPD abruptly stopped. Their excuse? They needed to "save
paper."

No, really.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200609/19164444678/new-york-legislators-dump-law-that-allowed-pds-to-withhold-officers-disciplinary-records.shtml

But the real reason came out later, as Tim Cushing recounts: "An NYPD
spokesman said someone in the PD's legal bureau had re-read the 1976 law
and realized the NYPD had no obligation to turn over this info to the
public. So it stopped."

The law in question is "50-a" - the notorious pretence that NY cops,
firefighters, and corrections officers use to suppress reports of their
official wrongdoing:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/09/war-crimes/#nypd-brown

NY lawmakers have been trying to get 50-a fixed for half a decade, and
they're finally succeeded, with a bill passing the state senate 40-22
(every GOP senator voted nay), and the assembly 101-43.

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/ny-legislature-50a-transparency-george-floyd-20200609-yew7soogazfmdg3cr3xlsbmwye-story.html

Orgs that provide cover for police misconduct are wetting their pants
over this, with a coalition of "law enforcement groups" publishing a
statement warning of “unavoidable and irreparable harm to reputation and
livelihood" of cops if misconduct is reported to the public.

Cushing: "These are your nation's law enforcement reps, ladies and
gentleman. And in the face of incremental accountability improvements,
they're issuing statements so self-serving that those issuing them are
blind to the inherent stupidity of their claims."


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🤵🏾 Openshc

Have you built a quasi-static multilegged robot, only to find yourself
struggling to provide it with body poses and gaits?

Openshc is here for you!

https://research.csiro.au/robotics/openshc/

It's got full C++ source for ROS (Robot OS), under a BSD/MIT-license
variant (CSIRO) and it "can be easily deployed on legged robots with
different sensor, leg and joint configurations" (works on simulated
robots too!)

https://github.com/csiro-robotics/shc_tutorials

Here's an computer science/robotics paper describing the research behind it:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.04424

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🤵🏾 MIT dumps Elsevier

After a protracted negotiation, MIT Libraries has announced that it will
no longer be subscribing to scholarly journals from the tech publishing
giant @ElsevierConnect.

https://news.mit.edu/2020/guided-by-open-access-principles-mit-ends-elsevier-negotiations-0611

MIT Libraries has developed a "framework for publisher contracts" that
sets out the terms under which it will buy scholarly and scientific
publishers' products, intended to safeguard "equitable and open access
to scholarship."

https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/

None of the deals offered by Elsevier lived up to these principles.

Elsevier is the one of the biggest scholarly publishers in the world.

Like its competitors, it does not pay for the research it publishes, nor
does it pay for the scholarly peer reviewers or much of the editorial work.

In 2016, a peer-reviewed paper that compared preprints to journal
articles found that companies like Elsevier contribute virtually nothing
to the papers they publish (the preprints are nearly identical to the
final product).

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1604.05363.pdf

Despite procuring their content and labor for free from scholars
employed by universities and other institutions, companies like Elsevier
extract huge payments from those very same institutions, while severely
limiting scholars' ability to disseminate their own research.

Protecting this nakedly inequitable situation requires all kinds of
extraordinary measures, such as securing "blocking orders" requiring
national censorship of competing scholarly repositories.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/05/swedish-internet-provider-bahnhof-protest-injunction-elsevier-website/

And as publishers get bigger and tap out existing revenue streams, they
turn to weirder and worse ways of making money. A decade ago, Elsevier
spun out a division that published fake scientific journals as marketing
tools for pharma companies.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090606/0632555149.shtml

MIT is a major institutional customer for Elsevier, so this is an
important milestone. but even more importantly, more than 100 other
universities have signed onto the MIT Libraries principles, which bodes
ill for Elsevier's future negotiations.

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🤵🏾 This day in history

#15yrsago Two million CueCats at $0.30/each
https://web.archive.org/web/20050613235306/http://www.spintradeexchange.com/liquidation.htm

#15yrsago Petition for Canadian abortion doctor's honorary doctorate
https://web.archive.org/web/20050909232217/http://www.petitiononline.com/DRHM0605/petition.html

#5yrsago Fury Road Ponies: Guzziline is Magic!
https://savethewailes.tumblr.com/post/120186445031/mad-max-fury-road-ponies-because-i-am-a-monster

#1yrago Twitter's anti-Nazi policies result bans on pictures of
anti-Nazi books
https://www.thedailybeast.com/journalist-david-neiwert-twitter-suspended-me-for-displaying-book-about-far-right

#1yrago In homeless LA, the families, retirees and working people who
live in their cars are desperate for overnight parking
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-homeless-safe-parking-los-angeles-20190610-story.html

#1yrago It Feels Good to Be Yourself: a sweet, simple picture book about
gender identity
https://boingboing.net/2019/06/12/theresa-thorn-and-noah-grigni.html

#1yrago Machine learning classifiers are up to 20% less accurate when
labeling photos from homes in poor countries
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.02659.pdf

#1yrago The latest popular uprising in Hong Kong is fighting to keep
Beijing from dragging dissidents to mainland China
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/06/hong-kong-gears-protests-extradition-bill-190611234342340.html

#1yrago When you take a commercial genetic test, you opt your whole
family into warrantless state genetic surveillance
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/opinion/police-dna-warrant.html

#1yrago A deep dive into stalkerware's creepy marketing, illegal privacy
invasions, and terrible security
https://citizenlab.ca/2019/06/the-predator-in-your-pocket-a-multidisciplinary-assessment-of-the-stalkerware-application-industry/

#1yrago Amazon unveils a new Echo Dot surveillance device for children
https://www.pcmag.com/news/all-new-echo-dot-kids-edition-launches-june-26

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🤵🏾 Colophon

Today's top sources: Forteller (https://blogg.forteller.net/), Tim
Harford (https://timharford.com/), Don Hayler, Slashdot
(https://slashdot.org/), Four Short Links
(https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 576 words (26466 total).

* A short story, "Making Hay," for MIT Tech Review. Yesterday's
progress: 302 words (302 total)

Currently reading: Adventures of a Dwergish Girl, Daniel Pinkwater

Latest podcast: How Big Tech Monopolies Distort Our Public Discourse
https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/06/01/how-big-tech-monopolies-distort-our-public-discourse/

Upcoming appearances:

* Discussion with Nnedi Okorafor, Torcon, June 14
https://www.torforgeblog.com/torcon-2020/

Upcoming books: "Poesy the Monster Slayer" (Jul 2020), a picture book
about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531

"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

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provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla* -Joey "Accordion Guy"
DeVilla

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