Pluralistic: 30 Oct 2020


Today's links


Facebook loses users, makes more money (permalink)

In 2017, 15m 13-34-year-old US Facebook users left the service. These are Facebook's most valuable users, worldwide, and this was the largest-ever exodus from Facebook.

But all of those users simply shifted over the Instagram

https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/tech/exclusive-look-numbers-showing-users-leaving-facebook-by-the-millions/

The theory of market economies is that the best companies with the best products and services attract the most customers. But when competition regulators allow large companies to gobble up little competitors to prevent them from growing into threats, markets become moneyball.

The Instagram acquisition – like other FB acquisitions, eg Whatsapp and Oculus – were explictly predatory, designed to reduce competition in the market and preserve profits by depriving customers of choice.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

That strategy works great (for FB and its shareholders). This year, Facebook has haemorrhaged US/Canada users – its most valuable users – and still seen surging earnings.

https://www.engadget.com/facebook-q3-2020-earnings-204642328.html

The company booked 22% year-on-year growth in the last quarter. Tellingly, FB now advises shareholders that the important indicator of the company's health isn't Facebook users, it's the "family of apps" number, combining FB, Instagram and Whatsapp.

In other words: heads Zuck wins, tails we lose.


DRM horror-stories needed (permalink)

In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act into law, including Section 1201, while felonizes the distribution of tools to bypass "access controls" (AKA DRM).

Practically speaking, that means if your printer cartridge has a digital lock that stops you from refilling it, then anyone who makes a tool to unfuck your printer risks a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine.

DMCA 1201 is an unmitigated disaster. Companies use this law to force you to sideline your own interests and instead conduct yourself to the sole benefit of their shareholders.

All they need to do is design the product so that using it your way means breaking DRM and your way becomes a literal felony: from repair to security audits, from consumables to parts, from apps to features.

DRM has proliferated as a means of enforcing shareholder preferences in your own home.

When DMCA1201 passed, Congress charged the US Copyright Office with holding hearings every three years to uncover potential problems with this very problematic law.

At these "triennials," people whose legitimate activities have been undermined by DRM can go before a committee of Copyright Office lawyers and beg for the right to use their stuff their way.

To its credit, the Copyright Office has granted many exemptions over the years despite objections from big entertainment and tech companies. But these exemptions are only for "uses" and not "tools."

When the Copyright Office grants archivists the rights to bypass DRM to preserve media, it can't authorize anyone to give those archivists a tool to accomplish this use.

Or an exemption for visually impaired people to bypass DRM on ebooks so they can be used with screenreaders, Braille printers or text-to-speech: this permits each blind person to find and exploit defects in ebook DRM, but not to help one another, or get help from others.

There are instances in which a use exemption does some good: for example, if you want to make interoperable diagnostic tools for cars, a use exemption lets you bypass the engine's DRM to learn what the error codes mean, and then build a tool that interprets them for others.

And many archivists are comfortable with sourcing underground tools to bypass DRM once they know they can legally use those tools.

But for the most part, the best thing we can say about use exemptions is they force the US government to document the defects in DMCA 1201.

The DMCA has a 22 year track record, and it's uniformly terrible, and getting worse – DMCA 1201 is how Medtronic is preventing independent hospital technicians from repairing their ventilators, RIGHT NOW, during a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Documenting the law's defects is more urgent than ever, especially as competition regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are investigating the ways that DRM creates and reinforces monopolies.

And you can help!

In 2021, the Copyright Office will once again consider petitions for exemptions to DMCA 1201, and @EFF is looking for your stories to help us craft our slate of proposed new exemptions.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/tell-us-how-you-want-modify-and-repair-devices-your-life

If you have a story about how:

  • someone in the United States;

  • attempted or planned to repair, modify, or diagnose a product with a software component; and

  • encountered DRM that prevented completing the modification, repair, or diagnosis

—we want to hear from you!

"Please email us at RightToMod-2021@eff.org with the information listed below, and we’ll curate the stories we receive so we can present the most relevant ones alongside our arguments to the Copyright Office."

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/tell-us-how-you-want-modify-and-repair-devices-your-life

(make sure you click through to see the questions before you email!)


This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Sony DRM uses black-hat rootkits https://web.archive.org/web/20051102053346/http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html

#15yrsago Public Enemy’s Internet strategy https://web.archive.org/web/20051103053915/https://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,69403,00.html

#5yrsago Petition: Rename Stephen Harper to “Calgary International Airport” https://www.change.org/p/rename-stephen-harper-to-calgary-international-airport

#1yrago Leaked document reveals that Sidewalk Labs’ Toronto plans for private taxation, private roads, charter schools, corporate cops and judges, and punishment for people who choose privacy https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-sidewalk-labs-document-reveals-companys-early-plans-for-data/

#1yrago After suing NSO Group for hacking Whatsapp, Facebook kicks NSO employees off its services https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/facebook-permanently-deletes-the-accounts-of-nso-workers/


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources: Slashdot (https://slashdot.org/)

Currently writing: My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 527 words (78855 total).

Currently reading: Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

Latest podcast: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 20) https://craphound.com/news/2020/10/25/someone-comes-to-town-someone-leaves-town-part-20/

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