// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
The Coming War on General Computation (2011)
Speech given at 28C3, the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin on December 26, 2011. Transcribed by Joshua Wise. This transcription attempts to be faithful to the original, but disfluencies have generally been removed (except where they appear to contribute to the text). Some words may have been mangled by the transcription; feel free to submit pull requests to correct them! Times are always marked in ((double parentheses)).
Anyway, I believe I've killed enough time ... so, ladies and gentlemen, a person who in this crowd needs absolutely no introduction, Cory Doctorow!
((32.0)) So, when I speak in places where the first language of the nation is not English, there is a disclaimer and an apology, because I'm one of nature's fast talkers. When I was at the United Nations at the World Intellectual Property Organization, I was known as the "scourge" of the simultaneous translation corps; I would stand up and speak, and turn around, and there would be window after window of translator, and every one of them would be doing this (Doctorow facepalms). (Audience laughs) So in advance, I give you permission when I start talking quickly to do this (Doctorow makes SOS motion) and I will slow down.
((74.1)) So, tonight's talk -- wah, wah, waaah (Doctorow makes 'fail horn' sound, apparently in response to audience making SOS motion; audience laughs) -- tonight's talk is not a copyright talk. I do copyright talks all the time; questions about culture and creativity are interesting enough, but to be honest, I'm quite sick of them. If you want to hear freelance writers like me bang on about what's happening to the way we earn our living, by all means, go and find one of the many talks I've done on this subject on YouTube. But, tonight, I want to talk about something more important -- I want to talk about general purpose computers.
Because general purpose computers are, in fact, astounding -- so astounding that our society is still struggling to come to grips with them: to figure out what they're for, to figure out how to accommodate them, and how to cope with them. Which, unfortunately, brings me back to copyright.
((133.8)) Because the general shape of the copyright wars and the lessons they can teach us about the upcoming fights over the destiny of the general purpose computer are important. In the beginning, we had packaged software, and the attendant industry, and we had sneakernet. So, we had floppy disks in ziplock bags, or in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. And they were eminently susceptible to duplication, and so they were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.
((172.6)) Enter DRM 0.96. They started to introduce physical defects to the disks or started to insist on other physical indicia which the software could check for -- dongles, hidden sectors, challenge/response protocols that required that you had physical possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy, and of course these failed, for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, of course, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers, while leaving the people who took the software without paying for it untouched. The legitimate purchasers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they resented the inconvenience of having to transport large manuals when they wanted to run their software. And second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. Typically, the way that happened is some expert who had possession of technology and expertise of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would reverse engineer the software and release cracked versions that quickly became widely circulated. While this kind of expertise and technology sounded highly specialized,