LCE: All watched over by machines of loving grace

Karsten Gerloff is the current president of the Free Software Foundation Europe, the European sister organization of the FSF. He began his LinuxCon Europe 2012 talk, entitled "All watched over by machines of loving grace", by focusing on a number of technological trends. However, he prefaced that by saying that what he really wanted to focus on were the more interesting topics of society, power, and control.

Technological advances

The number of computers in our lives is increasing. Karsten noted that he could count at least 17 computers in his home: in his camera, freezer, alarm clock, network router, car IVI system, laptop, and so on. All of those computers can in principle perform any computable task, but, in many cases, the software turns them into appliances.

At the same time as the number of computers in our lives has increased, the cost of communication has plummeted, and the range of knowledge to which we have access has vastly increased. But, it is not so long since things were very different. To illustrate these points, Karsten drew a couple of examples from his own life. In 1994, he went as an exchange student from Germany to a high school the US. The following Christmas, his girlfriend asked her parents for just one thing in lieu of all other presents: a 30-minute phone call to her boyfriend. By contrast, today we think nothing of firing up a VOIP call to almost anywhere in the world.

At university in the 1990s, when Karsten wanted to learn about a new subject, he went to the library. Where the resources of the library ended, so too did his research, more or less. Beyond that, the best he might attempt was to venture to a university library in another city, or request a book or two on inter-library loan, gambling that it might be relevant to his research. By contrast, today we start our research on a new topic by going to Wikipedia or a search engine, and increasingly, cutting-edge information appears first on the net.

Karsten noted that these huge changes in the cost of communication and accessibility of information are based on two powerful tools: general-purpose computers that will do anything we teach them to do, and general-purpose networks that will transmit whatever we want.

Restricted devices and products

However, the technological advances described above are under threat from those who see profit in turning our general-purpose computers into limited appliances, or into devices that are controlled by someone other than the owner. So, Karsten says, when we approach a service or device, we need to ask: what can we do with this? For example, can I make the powerful computer in my phone do something it was not intended to do?

Restrictions on functionality are often added when marketing gets involved in the product-design cycle. At this point, product features that get in the way of business goals are eliminated. Here, Karsten mentioned a couple of examples. All digital cameras produce raw image output. However, after converting that format to JPEG, low-end cameras then discard the raw data. Photographers who want the option of keeping the raw data must instead purchase a more expensive "professional" camera that doesn't discard the raw data. In the telecoms world, mobile phone operators often try to block VOIP over their data services, in an effort to force their customers to make and to pay for calls over the operator's own service.

These sorts of marketing-driven restrictions are very much against our interests, because the kinds of technological leaps described above—the fall in the cost of sending information, the increase in speed of sending information, and the consequent increase in the amount of information that we have access to—were only possible because someone took a general-purpose computer and connected it to a general-purpose network, and made it do something that no one had thought of before. Allowing this sort of generality of operation paves the way for innovations that are often unforeseen. Thus, when Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf devised TCP in 1974, they didn't think of the world wide web, but they designed TCP in a way that allowed the web to happen. Similarly, Tim Berners-Lee didn't conceive of Wikipedia when he designed the World Wide Web, but the Web was designed in a way that allowed Wikipedia to happen.

A restricted device—a smart phone that can't make VOIP calls, for example—is inconvenient. But the real cost of these sorts of restrictions is the limitations they place on our ability to create and innovate, to come up with the next big idea. We thereby lose opportunities to improve the world, and, Karsten noted, in a world where thousands of people die of hunger and preventable diseases each day, that's a cost we can't afford.

Free software and the forces against it

Given unrestricted hardware and networks, how do we implement our next big ideas? That is, of course, where free software comes in. Free software is powerful, Karsten said, because it allows us to share and reuse work, and to work across physical, geographical, and company boundaries. Everyone working on free software has their own purpose, but all benefit from the work. By being accessible and promoting a spirit of investigation, free software lets us control the technology we use, rather than vice versa.

However, there are forces that work against free software innovation. Karsten looked at some current and notable examples of such forces: UEFI secure boot, DRM, patents, and centralized control of information.

UEFI is the successor to BIOS. UEFI's secure boot protocol, or "restricted boot" as Karsten likes to call it, is a boot mechanism whereby UEFI checks that a boot loader is signed by an recognized key, and if the check fails, the machine will not boot. Secure boot provides a way for the person who does the authorizing to control what software you install on your machine. Of course, in this case, the authorizer is Microsoft. Hardware vendors that want to sell computers with a "Windows compatible" logo must comply with the rules that Microsoft defines (and can change).

For example, Microsoft says that vendors of Intel PCs must provide a mechanism for users to disable secure boot. But, hardware vendors that want to use the "Windows compatible" logo on an ARM device are not allowed to provide a mechanism to disable UEFI secure boot. Thus, since Windows phones started shipping in October, millions of restricted computers are flooding onto the market every day. (Of course, this is in addition to the millions of Android and iPhone devices that are already locked down via vendor-specific equivalents of secure boot.) Returning to his earlier point that the real test of freedom is whether you can make your computer do something that was unintended by the manufacturer, Karsten said that if you buy a Windows phone (or another restricted phone) then, you don't own it, in the sense of having a general-purpose computing device.

DRM (Digital Rights Management, or as Karsten prefers, "Digital Restrictions Management") started as the music industry's attempt to preserve a business model. But it has crept elsewhere, into devices such as the Kindle. The Kindle is a powerful tablet device that thanks to DRM has been turned into, essentially, a digital shopping catalog. "Once upon a time, companies used to send me catalogs at their expense. Nowadays, I'm being asked to buy the catalog. I'm not sure it's a good deal."

Karsten then turned his attention to patents and, in particular, the strategies of some companies that are acquiring large numbers of patents. He began with the observation that he really likes 3D printers because "I hope they'll do for manufacturing what free software did for computing: put control back in our hands." A few weeks ago someone obtained a patent on a DRM system for 3D printers. That patent is like other DRM patents: a patent for a piece of software in the printer that checks with a server to see if the hash of the to-be-printed file is in the set of files that the user is allowed to print; if it is not, then the file is not printed.

Who obtained the patent? A company called Intellectual Ventures, which was cofounded by Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft. Intellectual Ventures is a company with a reputation: "Calling Intellectual Ventures a patent troll would be like calling the Atlantic Ocean a puddle." The company is rather secretive, so information about its workings is hard to come by. However, some researchers recently published a paper entitled The Giants Among Us that pulled together all of the information that they could find. By now, Intellectual Ventures controls tens of thousands of patents. The company's strategy is to monetize those patents in any way it can. Sometimes that is done by licensing the patents to people who make things, but more commonly it is done by "extorting" money from people who make something without asking Intellectual Ventures's permission first. The researchers identified around 1300 shell companies operated by Intellectual Ventures (but they suspect they haven't found them all).

Intellectual Ventures pursues strategies such as threatening people with patent litigation, and demanding that companies pay money to avoid that litigation. The paper notes that "patent mass aggregators" such as Intellectual Ventures are also believed to employ hitherto unusual strategies for acquiring patents—for example, offering universities in developing countries contracts where, in exchange for cash, the university gives the company rights on all innovations that the universities create for the next N years.

In short, Intellectual Ventures is trying to create a monopoly on innovation. And they are not alone: Intellectual Ventures is the largest of the mass aggregators, but there are many other companies now doing the same.

However, Karsten is not without optimism. Patents and patent trolls constitute a powerful threat to innovation and free software. But free software is a powerful opponent, because "we work together and have a large shared interest…we don't acknowledge company or country borders, [and] we're very creative at working around restrictions and eventually beating them." It's Karsten's hope that the current patent system will start shaking at its foundations within five years, and will be breaking down within ten years.

The problem of centralized control

By design, the Internet was built with no central point of control. And on top of that distributed network, we've built distributed, decentralized systems such as email. But the general-purpose nature of our networks and computers is not a given natural order. It can be reversed. And indeed that is what is happening in many areas as companies erect structures that centralize control. Thus "Facebook defines who we are, Google defines what we think, and Amazon defines what we want", because we feed them information, and they place us in a "comfortable bubble" where we no longer see other opinions and cease being curious.

The problem is that those companies will sell us out when it is in their interests to do so. Here, Karsten mentioned the case where Yahoo! surrendered the details of a Chinese blogger to the Chinese government. Most likely what happened was that the Chinese government threatened to exclude Yahoo! from doing business in China. Consequently, Yahoo! provided details identifying the blogger, despite apparently having some information that suggested they knew that the blogger had antigovernment sympathies and was therefore at risk of persecution.

But, asked Karsten, this only happens in dictatorships, right? Well, no. In September, Twitter handed over messages by some of its users who were part of the Occupy Wall Street movement to New York prosecutors. After originally declining to do this on the grounds of protecting free speech, a judge threatened the company with a fine based on a percentage of its earnings. This threat constituted a double blow, since it would have required Twitter, a private company, to actually reveal its earnings. Given a choice between loyalty to private shareholders and loyalty to users, Twitter chose the former.

We can, of course, leave these centralized structures of control. But, we do so much as dissidents left the Soviet Union, leaving behind friends and family. Yes, Karsten remarked, it is all only digital, but there is still some pain in leaving if you have invested part of your life in these structures.

Rather than submitting to centralized control, we can build decentralized structures, running on servers in every home. We already have enough computers to do that. And in fact we already have most of the required software components: it's just a matter of putting them together, which is the goal of the Freedom Box project. (A Freedom Box talk by Bdale Garbee was unfortunately scheduled at the conference at exactly the same time as Karsten's talk.) Here, Karsten listed a number of the tools and protocols that already exist: Diaspora and GNU social for social networking; protocols such as OStatus, WebFinger, and Federated Social Web that allow these services to work together; distributed file storage through ownCloud and GNUnet; user-owned ISPs; Bitcoin as a currency; and distributed search engines such as YaCy. We can replicate (in a decentralized fashion) all the things that we today use in a centralized fashion.

The key to controlling our own future is to master the necessary technologies and skills. Karsten quoted from Douglas Rushkoff's book Program or Be Programmed:

So, said Karsten, when you see a system or a service, ask yourself: who controls this? If you don't like the answer, don't buy the product or the service. Go and build something better.

The work of the FSFE

Karsten concluded his talk with a few words about the activities of the FSFE. Like its sister organizations (FSF, FSF Latin America, FSF India), FSFE is a non-profit organization that engages in various activities to support free software. The organization does a lot of work in politics, to try and get rid of bad laws, and get good laws made. They run campaigns to increase people's awareness of free software. For example, they are currently running a "Free your Android" campaign where they show people how to put a freer version of Android on their devices. (Interestingly, they are getting a lot of interest from people who characterize themselves as non-technical, but who are concerned about where their data is going.)

Karsten extended an invitation to support the FSFE. There are many ways to do this, from simply signing up as a supporter to more actively engaging as a Fellow of the foundation. For individuals and companies that have the resources, financial donations are of course useful. "But, more important than this, stop taking the road of least resistance. Start doing things that make yourselves more free."

[For those who are curious, the title of Karsten's talk comes from the title poem in a book of poetry by the American writer Richard Brautigan, probably by way of a BBC documentary TV series of the same name. Both the book and the TV series have resonances for the topic of the talk. Brautigan licensed the poems to be freely reprinted in books and newspapers if they are given away for free. Wikipedia notes that the TV series "argues that computers have failed to liberate humanity and instead have distorted and simplified our view of the world around us".]