#it’s saying prioritize and organize against the system rather than replicate a system of competition

[notaplaceofhonour]

so sick of call-out posts that target individuals and care fuck-all about systemic considerations

like SO AND SO SUPPORTS [EVIL HEINOUS THING] BOOT LICKER BOOT LICKER! THEY’RE EVIIIIILLLL!!

Nevermind that 9/10 of these posts are extremely abstracted ship-of-Theseus half-truths in the first place: don’t you think maybe people who are threatened with a boot on their neck without the means to get out from it themselves might be a little more willing to lick the boot if it means alleviating the pressure on their neck? You think maybe part of the problem with destructive systems is how they instill learned dependence, how they make themselves necessary to people, and the people hooked into the systems aren’t The Problem?

#half the time the accusation boils down to ‘person x is a normie liberal’ and it’s presented like they’re a fucking Nazi lol #and no that’s not saying prioritize the oppressor over the oppressed #it’s saying don’t essentialize people #it’s saying prioritize and organize against the system rather than replicate a system of competition #you can recognize people’s humanity without excusing oppression #and understand that the wheels of oppression do not turn at the whims of some random tumblr or twitter user #istg

[mostlysignssomeportents]

SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects

Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.

In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone is using Facebook, then your Facebook replacement doesn't just have to be better than Facebook, it has to be so much better than Facebook that it's worth using, even though all the people you want to talk to are still on Facebook. That's a tall order.

Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects, using incumbents' dominance against them. To see how that works, let's look at a historical example of adversarial interoperability role in helping to unseat a monopolist's dominance.

The first skirmishes of the PC wars were fought with incompatible file formats and even data-storage formats: Apple users couldn't open files made by Microsoft users, and vice-versa. Even when file formats were (more or less) harmonized, there was still the problems of storage media: the SCSI drive you plugged into your Mac needed a special add-on and flaky driver software to work on your Windows machine; the ZIP cartridge you formatted for your PC wouldn't play nice with Macs.

But as office networking spread, the battle moved to a new front: networking compatibility. AppleTalk, Apple's proprietary protocol for connecting up Macs and networked devices like printers, pretty much Just Worked, providing you were using a Mac. If you were using a Windows PC, you had to install special, buggy, unreliable software.

And for Apple users hoping to fit in at Windows shops, the problems were even worse: Windows machines used the SMB protocol for file-sharing and printers, and Microsoft's support for MacOS was patchy at best, nonexistent at worst, and costly besides. Businesses sorted themselves into Mac-only and PC-only silos, and if a Mac shop needed a PC (for the accounting software, say), it was often cheaper and easier just to get the accountant their own printer and backup tape-drive, rather than try to get that PC to talk to the network. Likewise, all PC-shops with a single graphic designer on a Mac—that person would often live offline, disconnected from the office network, tethered to their own printer, with their own stack of Mac-formatted ZIP cartridges or CD-ROMs.

All that started to change in 1993: that was the year that an Australian PhD candidate named Andrew Tridgell licensed his SAMBA package as free/open source software and exposed it to the wide community of developers looking to connect their non-Microsoft computers—Unix and GNU/Linux servers, MacOS workstations—to the dominant Microsoft LANs.

SAMBA was created by using a "packet sniffer" to ingest raw SMB packets as they traversed a local network; these intercepted packets gave Tridgell the insight he needed to reverse-engineer Microsoft's proprietary networking protocol. Tridgell prioritized compatibility with LAN Manager, a proprietary Network Operating System that enterprise networks made heavy use of. If SAMBA could be made to work in LAN Manager networks, then you could connect a Mac to a PC network—or vice-versa—and add some Unix servers and use a mix of SAMBA and SMB to get them all to play nice with one another.

The timing of Tridgell's invention was crucial: in 1993, Microsoft had just weathered the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust investigation of its monopoly tactics, squeaking through thanks to a 2-2 deadlock among the commissioners, and was facing down a monopoly investigation by the Department of Justice.

The growth of local-area networks greatly accelerated Microsoft's dominance. It's one thing to dominate the desktop, another entirely to leverage that dominance so that no one else can make an operating system that connects to networks that include computers running that dominant system. Network administrators of the day were ready to throw in the towel and go all-Microsoft for everything from design workstations to servers.

SAMBA changed all that. What's more, as Microsoft updated SMB, SAMBA matched them, relying on a growing cadre of software authors who relied on SAMBA to keep their own networks running.

The emergence of SAMBA in the period when Microsoft's dominance was at its peak, the same year that the US government tried and failed to address that dominance, was one of the most salutary bits of timing in computing history, carving out a new niche for Microsoft's operating system rivals that gave them space to breathe and grow. It's certainly possible that without SAMBA, Microsoft could have leveraged its operating system, LAN and application dominance to crush all rivals.

So What Happened?

We don't see a lot of SAMBA-style stories anymore, despite increased concentration of various sectors of the tech market and a world crying out for adversarial interoperability judo throws.

Indeed, investors seem to have lost their appetite for funding companies that might disrupt the spectacularly profitable Internet monopolists of 2019, ceding them those margins and deeming their territory to be a "kill zone."

VCs have not lost their appetite for making money, and toolsmiths have not lost the urge to puncture the supposedly airtight bubbles around the Big Tech incumbents, so why is it so hard to find a modern David with the stomach to face off against 2019's Goliaths?

To find the answer, look to the law. As monopolists have conquered more and more of the digital realm, they have invested some of those supernormal profits in law and policy that lets them fend off adversarial interoperators.

One legal weapon is "Terms of Service": both Facebook and Blizzard have secured judgments giving their fine print the force of law, and now tech giants use clickthrough agreements that amount to, "By clicking here, you promise that you won't try to adversarially interoperate with us."

A modern SAMBA project would have to contend with this liability, and Microsoft would argue that anyone who took the step of installing SMB had already agreed that they wouldn't try to reverse-engineer it to make a compatible product.

Then there's "anti-circumvention," a feature of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, bypassing a "copyright access control" can put you in both criminal and civil jeopardy, regardless of whether there's any copyright infringement. DMCA 1201 was originally used to stop companies from making region-free DVD players or modding game consoles to play unofficial games (neither of which is a copyright violation!).

But today, DMCA 1201 is used to control competitors, critics, and customers. Any device with software in it contains a "copyrighted work," so manufacturers need only set up an "access control" and they can exert legal control over all kinds of uses of the product.

Their customers can only use the product in ways that don't involve bypassing the "access control," and that can be used to force you to buy only one brand of ink or use apps from only one app store.

Their critics—security researchers auditing their cybersecurity—can't publish proof-of-concept to back up their claims about vulnerabilities in the systems.

And competitors can't bypass access controls to make compatible products: third party app stores, compatible inks, or a feature-for-feature duplicate of a dominant company's networking protocol.

Someone attempting to replicate the SAMBA creation feat in 2019 would likely come up against an access control that needed to be bypassed in order to peer inside the protocol's encrypted outer layer in order to create a feature-compatible tool to use in competing products.

Another thing that's changed (for the worse) since 1993 is the proliferation of software patents. Software patenting went into high gear around 1994 and consistently gained speed until 2014, when Alice v. CLS Bank put the brakes on (today, Alice is under threat). After decades of low-quality patents issuing from the US Patent and Trademark Office, there are so many trivial, obvious and overlapping software patents in play that anyone trying to make a SAMBA-like product would run a real risk of being threatened with expensive litigation for patent infringement.

This thicket of legal anti-adversarial-interoperability dangers has been a driver of market concentration, and the beneficiaries of market concentration have also spent lavishly to expand and strengthen the thicket. It's gotten so bad that even some "open standards organizations" have standardized easy-to-use ways of legally prohibiting adversarial interoperability, locking in the dominance of the largest browser vendors.

The idea that wildly profitable businesses would be viewed as unassailable threats by investors and entrepreneurs (rather than as irresistible targets) tells you everything you need to know about the state of competition today. As we look to cut the Big Tech giants down to size, let's not forget that tech once thronged with Davids eager to do battle with Goliaths, and that this throng would be ours to command again, if only we would re-arm it.

(Crossposted from EFF Deeplinks)

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/18/kill-zones-r-us.html

[neptunecreek]

SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects

Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.

In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone is using Facebook, then your Facebook replacement doesn't just have to be better than Facebook, it has to be so much better than Facebook that it's worth using, even though all the people you want to talk to are still on Facebook. That's a tall order.

Adversarial interoperability is judo for network effects, using incumbents' dominance against them. To see how that works, let's look at a historical example of adversarial interoperability role in helping to unseat a monopolist's dominance.

The first skirmishes of the PC wars were fought with incompatible file formats and even data-storage formats: Apple users couldn't open files made by Microsoft users, and vice-versa. Even when file formats were (more or less) harmonized, there was still the problems of storage media: the SCSI drive you plugged into your Mac needed a special add-on and flaky driver software to work on your Windows machine; the ZIP cartridge you formatted for your PC wouldn't play nice with Macs.

But as office networking spread, the battle moved to a new front: networking compatibility. AppleTalk, Apple's proprietary protocol for connecting up Macs and networked devices like printers, pretty much Just Worked, providing you were using a Mac. If you were using a Windows PC, you had to install special, buggy, unreliable software.

And for Apple users hoping to fit in at Windows shops, the problems were even worse: Windows machines used the SMB protocol for file-sharing and printers, and Microsoft's support for MacOS was patchy at best, nonexistent at worst, and costly besides. Businesses sorted themselves into Mac-only and PC-only silos, and if a Mac shop needed a PC (for the accounting software, say), it was often cheaper and easier just to get the accountant their own printer and backup tape-drive, rather than try to get that PC to talk to the network. Likewise, all PC-shops with a single graphic designer on a Mac—that person would often live offline, disconnected from the office network, tethered to their own printer, with their own stack of Mac-formatted ZIP cartridges or CD-ROMs.

All that started to change in 1993: that was the year that an Australian PhD candidate named Andrew Tridgell licensed his SAMBA package as free/open source software and exposed it to the wide community of developers looking to connect their non-Microsoft computers—Unix and GNU/Linux servers, MacOS workstations—to the dominant Microsoft LANs.

SAMBA was created by using a "packet sniffer" to ingest raw SMB packets as they traversed a local network; these intercepted packets gave Tridgell the insight he needed to reverse-engineer Microsoft's proprietary networking protocol. Tridgell prioritized compatibility with LAN Manager, a proprietary Network Operating System that enterprise networks made heavy use of. If SAMBA could be made to work in LAN Manager networks, then you could connect a Mac to a PC network—or vice-versa—and add some Unix servers and use a mix of SAMBA and SMB to get them all to play nice with one another.

The timing of Tridgell's invention was crucial: in 1993, Microsoft had just weathered the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust investigation of its monopoly tactics, squeaking through thanks to a 2-2 deadlock among the commissioners, and was facing down a monopoly investigation by the Department of Justice.

The growth of local-area networks greatly accelerated Microsoft's dominance. It's one thing to dominate the desktop, another entirely to leverage that dominance so that no one else can make an operating system that connects to networks that include computers running that dominant system. Network administrators of the day were ready to throw in the towel and go all-Microsoft for everything from design workstations to servers.

SAMBA changed all that. What's more, as Microsoft updated SMB, SAMBA matched them, relying on a growing cadre of software authors who relied on SAMBA to keep their own networks running.

The emergence of SAMBA in the period when Microsoft's dominance was at its peak, the same year that the US government tried and failed to address that dominance, was one of the most salutary bits of timing in computing history, carving out a new niche for Microsoft's operating system rivals that gave them space to breathe and grow. It's certainly possible that without SAMBA, Microsoft could have leveraged its operating system, LAN and application dominance to crush all rivals.

So What Happened?

We don't see a lot of SAMBA-style stories anymore, despite increased concentration of various sectors of the tech market and a world crying out for adversarial interoperability judo throws.

Indeed, investors seem to have lost their appetite for funding companies that might disrupt the spectacularly profitable Internet monopolists of 2019, ceding them those margins and deeming their territory to be a "kill zone."

VCs have not lost their appetite for making money, and toolsmiths have not lost the urge to puncture the supposedly airtight bubbles around the Big Tech incumbents, so why is it so hard to find a modern David with the stomach to face off against 2019's Goliaths?

To find the answer, look to the law. As monopolists have conquered more and more of the digital realm, they have invested some of those supernormal profits in law and policy that lets them fend off adversarial interoperators.

One legal weapon is "Terms of Service": both Facebook and Blizzard have secured judgments giving their fine print the force of law, and now tech giants use clickthrough agreements that amount to, "By clicking here, you promise that you won't try to adversarially interoperate with us."

A modern SAMBA project would have to contend with this liability, and Microsoft would argue that anyone who took the step of installing SMB had already agreed that they wouldn't try to reverse-engineer it to make a compatible product.

Then there's "anti-circumvention," a feature of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, bypassing a "copyright access control" can put you in both criminal and civil jeopardy, regardless of whether there's any copyright infringement. DMCA 1201 was originally used to stop companies from making region-free DVD players or modding game consoles to play unofficial games (neither of which is a copyright violation!).

But today, DMCA 1201 is used to control competitors, critics, and customers. Any device with software in it contains a "copyrighted work," so manufacturers need only set up an "access control" and they can exert legal control over all kinds of uses of the product.

Their customers can only use the product in ways that don't involve bypassing the "access control," and that can be used to force you to buy only one brand of ink or use apps from only one app store.

Their critics—security researchers auditing their cybersecurity—can't publish proof-of-concept to back up their claims about vulnerabilities in the systems.

And competitors can't bypass access controls to make compatible products: third party app stores, compatible inks, or a feature-for-feature duplicate of a dominant company's networking protocol.

Someone attempting to replicate the SAMBA creation feat in 2019 would likely come up against an access control that needed to be bypassed in order to peer inside the protocol's encrypted outer layer in order to create a feature-compatible tool to use in competing products.

Another thing that's changed (for the worse) since 1993 is the proliferation of software patents. Software patenting went into high gear around 1994 and consistently gained speed until 2014, when Alice v. CLS Bank put the brakes on (today, Alice is under threat). After decades of low-quality patents issuing from the US Patent and Trademark Office, there are so many trivial, obvious and overlapping software patents in play that anyone trying to make a SAMBA-like product would run a real risk of being threatened with expensive litigation for patent infringement.

This thicket of legal anti-adversarial-interoperability dangers has been a driver of market concentration, and the beneficiaries of market concentration have also spent lavishly to expand and strengthen the thicket. It's gotten so bad that even some "open standards organizations" have standardized easy-to-use ways of legally prohibiting adversarial interoperability, locking in the dominance of the largest browser vendors.

The idea that wildly profitable businesses would be viewed as unassailable threats by investors and entrepreneurs (rather than as irresistible targets) tells you everything you need to know about the state of competition today. As we look to cut the Big Tech giants down to size, let's not forget that tech once thronged with Davids eager to do battle with Goliaths, and that this throng would be ours to command again, if only we would re-arm it.

from Deeplinks https://ift.tt/2XWVBQt

#Deeplinks

[tinymixtapes]

Fucktons of artists and independent labels speak out against FCC’s plans to roll back net neutrality rules, AND YOU CAN TOO

In case you’ve been living under a rock (that doesn’t have WiFi), freedom-loving American people everywhere are currently pissed the fuck off at the fuck-censoring fucks at the FCC after they introduced a fucking bill back in fucking May that would roll-back existing net neutrality rules. (In case you’ve been living under a REALLY REALLY BIG ROCK: “net neutrality” is the way in which Al Gore always intended the internet to function when he first discovered it off the coast of South America; and it means that ISPs MUST provide OPEN ACCESS to all the wonderful/egregious/funny/terrible/valuable/abhorrent/radical/boring/religious/violent/Neil Degrasse Tyson-related/Guy Fierri-related content that’s out there on the web and NOT “restrict” the shit you can see or say in ANY WAY just because of whatever batshit value systems they happen to personally subscribe at the moment.) In other words: net neutrality a HUGE DEAL that affects EVERYONE; and lots and lots of artists, musicians, gamers, writers, and other liberal-arts-minded supporters of a future that isn’t entirely George-Orwell-style-terrible are justifiably upset-as-fuck that Donald Trump’s FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, wants to go down in history as “that guy” who destroys it. To that end, two crusading organizations, the Future of Music Coalition and CASH Music have just released a new statement in which a “broad coalition of bands and artists, songwriters, and producers were joined by the American Association of Independent Music and an array of individual record label signatories” voice their “strong opposition” to Chairman Pai’s almost head-scratchingly evil-for-the-sake-of-evil and Voldemort-like plan. The statement was “submitted as official comments” to the FCC just yesterday. And additional sign-ons from artists, labels, and fans (which, duh, are TOTALLY ENCOURAGED) are being collected at musicforahealthyinternet.org from RIGHT THE FUCK NOW through the FCC’s reply comment period (which ends August 16). Now’s your chance to (a) add YOUR voice to fucking Ian MacKaye’s(!), and (b) help keep the internet a beautiful place where guys like ME at TMT can entertain and inform the fuck out of you at the same goddamn time. Sign. Sign. Sign. It takes 2 seconds. I’ll wait. All done?? GREAT. The full list of signatories and the text of the letter are below: As musicians, composers, producers, and independent labels representing diverse backgrounds, traditions, genres, and communities, we urge the Federal Communications Commission to protect the open internet as a vehicle for free expression and collaboration. We’ve built careers and big parts of our lives around our passion for music — creating it and connecting with listeners. Today, the internet is one of the primary places this work happens. We rely on it for everything from booking tours to selling merchandise, to collaborating with musicians on the other side of the globe. The fundamental principle of openness online has enabled artists to connect directly with each other and with audiences, empowering us to distribute our work and reach fans in a multiplicity of ways. At its best, the open internet has allowed for a flourishing of diverse voices, allowing to compete alongside the biggest companies, creating connections across geographic barriers, offering choice, flexibility, and creative autonomy. To truly make good on the remarkable democratic potential of the internet, the fundamental infrastructure underpinning it all must be neutral and nondiscriminatory. Unfortunately, the FCC’s current proposal would amount to a sharp turn in the opposite direction. It would allow big cable and wireless companies to create new pay-to-play fast lanes, disadvantaging those who cannot pay for preferential treatment, and replicating the industry’s past problems with payola. Allowing broadband providers to control this once-open platform shifts leverage away from individual artists, creators, and small businesses, and interferes with freedom of speech and expression. The implications for free expression also extend to digital service providers. Without strong net neutrality protections, digital retailers will have to compete to better meet the needs of the ISPs that can block, throttle, or slow down access to their offerings. These services should instead be competing to better serve the needs of diverse musicians and listeners. Artists and labels’ choices about how and where to bring their work to the market could likewise be constrained by what the ISPs prefer, rather than what works best for their individual business and creative goals. Of course, network neutrality alone is not sufficient to ensure a healthy internet, where free expression thrives, creative labor is fairly compensated, consumer privacy is respected, and diverse voices can reach audiences. But it is a necessary foundation for fair competition. We urge the FCC to sustain the existing, strong net neutrality rules, based on Title II of the Communications Act. The FCC should maintain bright line rules against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization on both fixed and mobile connections, as well as maintaining ongoing oversight of other types of discrimination. Artists: Aabaraki Alec Ounsworth (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah) Allan Wilson (!!!, Secret Drum Band) Amanda Palmer Amy Klein Antibalas Apostle of Solitude Beauty Pill Brent Knopf (Ramona Falls, Menomena, Eyelids) Brian Henneman, Bottle Rockets Craig Finn (The Hold Steady) Cuddle Formation Cumulus Dave Narcizo (Throwing Muses) David Bazan David Poe Deerhoof Devin Gallagher (Typhoon, Ghosties) Downtown Boys Dude York Ear Trumpet Labs Earth Eluvium Emily Reo Erin McKeown Flobots Franz Nicolay Gabriel Teodros Rebecca Gates GRYPT Harry & The Potters Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst Hurry Up Ian MacKaye Iji Jace Clayton Jarboe Jeff Mangum & Astra Taylor, Neutral Milk Hotel Jeff Rosenstock Jeff Tweedy & Spencer Tweedy Jon Spencer Jonny X and the Groadies Kimya Dawson Kristin Hersh Kronos Quartet Kyle Morton (Typhoon) Lee Baines III & The Glory Fires Lisa Schonberg (Secret Drum Band, Explode Into Colors) Matthew Caws (Nada Surf) Megabog Merchandise Merrill Garbus (tUnE-yArDs) Maggie May Morris (Genders, Sunbathe) Mike Watt Mike Wroblewski (Genders, Paper Brain) Mirah Mutual Benefit My Morning Jacket Pieter Hilton (Typhoon, Deathlist, Sunbathe, Genders, Secret Drum Band) Priests Radiator Hospital R.E.M. Scarves Slow Wolves Club Speedy Ortiz Spoonboy Stay Inside Superchunk Tanya Donelly (Belly) Thao & The Get Down Stay Down The Blow Tobi Vail (Bikini Kill, Spider and the Webs) Told Slant TW Walsh Will Johnson Will Sheff (Okkervil River) Zoë Keating Labels: American Association of Independent Music Atlantic Rhythms Bad Friend Records Bloodshot Records Carpark Records Cuneiform Records Dischord Don Giovanni Records DZ Tapes Exotic Fever Exploding In Sound JMC Aggregate Kill Rock Stars Merge Records Misra Records Partisan Records Polyvinyl Records Regalia Records Secretly Group Sister Polygon Records Slumberland Records Tape Modulator Thirsty Ear Recordings Thrill Jockey To Live A Lie Records Top Shelf Records http://j.mp/2uiRvox