I’ve been thinking a lot about cycles lately. As I grow older I’m much more aware of the natural rhythms of nature and my body. I’m also acutely aware of the cyclical nature of my kidney disease—phosphorous levels and my general state of health cycle up and down on a regular, rhythmic basis. Working as an editor at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design I’m immersed in the iterative and cyclical nature of design work on a daily basis.
There are rhythms and cycles in everything. Even technology; especially technology. But technology’s cycles are unnatural and sustained solely by mistaken commercial interests. I used to buy a new laptop every year, but no longer. I jumped off that particular treadmill five or so years ago for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the wastefulness of the cycle. I’m on the third year of an IBM ThinkPad T42p. It’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned, although the Mac 180c runs a close second. So I’ve started thinking about a new computer.
The MacBook Pros are especially appealing especially given the fact that because they can run Windows and Linux it can replace two, maybe three, computers. But the closed nature of Apple’s iPhone and the company’s general arrogance annoys the living daylights out of me. It’s why I switched to Sony and now IBM laptops to begin with.
But then there’s University of Auckland (New Zealand) security analyst and “professional paranoid” Peter Gutmann’s “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection”, an analysis that equates the Vista Content Protection specification with the “longest suicide note in history.” This has been written about extensively; Karel Donk and Corey Doctorow have, by far, the best assessments. I especially like Doctorow’s nutshell overview of how Vista restricts the use of high-definition video:
“The operating system has been essentially rendered useless by a set of deliberately introduced malfunctions. For example, the if your computer detects erroneous data in its registers, or voltage fluctuations (both of which are typical of PCs whose parts have been manufactured by dozens of companies), it will restart major subsystems, hanging up while it flushes all your data—just in case those errors were part of a hack-attack on the system.
“Vista is a disaster. Microsoft is so desperate to get the entertainment industry locked into its platform that they’ll destroy themselves to get there. This is an operating system that, when idle, will have to check itself every 30 microseconds to make sure nothing is still happening, and no hackers are attacking it. It acts like an unmedicated paranoid. If Vista catches on, hundreds of millions of computers will be burning heptillions of cycles and tons of coal just making sure that no one is putting a voltmeter on the traces on its motherboard.”
Thankfully, my ThinkPad can ably run Ubuntu Linux, which is getting so close to usable I should be able to switch before too much longer.
This is just another technology cycle. When I first started using computers in the early 1980s, we bought software in baggies like drugs (remember Beagle Bros.?) off pegboard in basement storefronts. It was open source before we knew what open source was. It was unprotected and wide open; modifiable in the extreme. Then came the software companies who mistakenly believed that closed systems and copy protection was the answer to retaining customers. (They were terribly wrong; the way to retain customers is simply to make great products and then do it again.) It reached the ridiculous pinnacle of the hardware dongle, but then copy protection quickly faded into obscurity.
We’re finding ourselves, I think, at the bottom point of that unnatural cycle again. Consider Randall Stross’s “Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs” in today’s New York Times, a spot-on assessment of the copy-protection crippleware dilemma of Apple’s forthcoming iPhone and current iPod products:
“Here is how FairPlay works: When you buy songs at the iTunes Music Store, you can play them on one—and only one—line of portable player, the iPod. And when you buy an iPod, you can play copy-protected songs bought from one—and only one—online music store, the iTunes Music Store.”
Stross goes on to outline the tedious steps necessary to legally circumvent Apple’s crippleware: burn the tracks to CD and then rip them into the uncrippled .mp3 format. Or for audiophiles, buy the CD and rip it into the lossless and open .flac format. Of course, for most users it’s a quick—but illegal—trip to Bittorrent side of town for music in either file format (and a whole lot more). That’s not to say that all of the tracks on Bittorrent are illegal. Enlightened musicians have found the value in providing open tracks to their fans.
Stross goes on to call Apple on its hubris:
“Apple pretends that the decision to use copy protection is out of its hands. In defending itself against Ms. Tucker’s lawsuit [claiming that Apple unfairly restricts choice by refusing to support Microsoft’s crippleware], Apple’s lawyers noted in passing that digital-rights-management software is required by the major record companies as a condition of permitting their music to be sold online: ‘Without D.R.M., legal online music stores would not exist.’
“In other words, however irksome customers may find the limitations imposed by copy protection, the fault is the music companies’, not Apple’s.”
The crippleware benefits Apple, not the musicians or their labels. Stross cites Terry McBride, chief executive of Nettwerk, a label that distributes unprotected .mp3 files as saying that the “artists initially required Apple to use copy protection, but that this was no longer the case. At this point, he said, copy protection serves only Apple’s interests.” Stross quotes Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, as saying that the copy protection “just locks people into Apple.” When Bernoff recently asked Apple when it would remove crippleware from its iTunes Store, he was told, “We see no need to do so.”
There’s ample evidence that we’ve bottomed out of this particular crippleware cycle. Dave Goldberg, the head of Yahoo Music, has persuaded EMI to experiment with open .mp3 distribution. Goldberg told Stross that copy-protected crippleware will be short-lived. “Eventually, perhaps in 5 or 10 years, he predicts, all portable players will have wireless broadband capability and will provide direct access, anytime, anywhere, to every song ever released for a low monthly subscription fee.”
Such a system, Stross points out, can already be found in South Korea, “where three million subscribers enjoy direct, wireless access to a virtually limitless music catalog for only $5 a month.” Unfortunately, the new business model didn’t develop “until sales of physical CDs had collapsed.”
So c’mon Ubuntu (and the other Linux distributions), amaze us; we’re pulling for you.
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.