Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

By Cory DoctorowArts

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Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com episodes

April 26, 2017 Talking Walkaway on the Author Stories podcast
My novel Walkaway came out today and I sat down yesterday with the Author Stories Podcast to talk about writing, publishing, and, of course, the novel.
0 min
March 02, 2017 Reply All covers DRM and the W3C
In the latest episode of Reply All, a fantastic tech podcast, the hosts and producers discuss the situation with DRM, the future of the web, and the W3C — a piece I’ve been working on them with for a year now.

The issue is a complicated and eye-glazingly technical one, and they do a genuinely excellent job presenting the story. Inevitably, there’s some nuance lost in the translation, and so here’s a bit more, for people who are interested.
The story talks about DRM as an anti-piracy technology. I think that’s just wrong, though DRM advocates walk a confusing line on this question. They freely admit that DRM can be broken by skilled attackers, and that dishonest people can just access versions of movies or songs or whatever that the DRM-breakers have stripped the DRM off of (the Reply All host starts off by describing how he hits all kinds of problems with DRM on movies he pays for, leading him to download easy-to-find cracked versions).
So if DRM isn’t anti-piracy, what is it? DRM isn’t really a technology at all, it’s a law. Specifically, it’s section 1201 of the US DMCA (and its international equivalents). Under this law, breaking DRM is a crime with serious consequences (5 years in prison and a $500,000 fine for a first offense), even if you’re doing something that would otherwise be legal. This lets companies treat their commercial strategies as legal obligations: Netflix doesn’t have the legal right to stop you from recording a show to watch later, but they can add DRM that makes it impossible to do so without falling afoul of DMCA.
This is the key: DRM makes it possible for companies to ban all unauthorized conduct, even when we’re talking about using your own property in legal ways. This intrudes on your life in three ways:
1. It lets companies sue and threaten security researchers who find defects in products
2. It lets companies sue and threaten accessibility workers who adapt technology for use by disabled people
3. It lets companies sue and threaten competitors who want to let you do more with your property — get it repaired by independent technicians, buy third-party parts and consumables, or use it in ways that the manufacturer just doesn’t like.
How do we know that companies only want DRM because they want to abuse this law, and not because they want to fight piracy? Because they told us so. At the W3C, we proposed a compromise: companies who participate at W3C would be allowed to use it to make DRM, but would have to promise not to invoke the DMCA in these ways that have nothing to do with piracy. So far, nearly 50 W3C members — everyone from Ethereum to Brave to the Royal National Institute for Bind People to Lawrence Berkeley National Labs — have endorsed this, and all the DRM-supporting members have rejected it.
In effect, these members are saying, “We understand that DRM isn’t very useful for stopping piracy, but that law that lets us sue people who aren’t breaking copyright law? Don’t take that away!”
The Director of the W3C, web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, wrote recently about why he supports DRM standardization, an odd step that it hard to understand, really: the leaders of the DRM standardization committee at the W3C have asked Berners-Lee to consult with his members to ask whether they want to see this DRM standard published. Instead, he appears to be telling us what decision he plans on coming to, regardless of how that consultation goes.
#90 Matt Lieber Goes To Dinner [Reply All/Gimlet]
0 min
December 21, 2016 Free audiobook of Car Wars, my self-driving car/crypto back-door apocalypse story
Last month, Melbourne’s Deakin University published Car Wars, a short story I wrote to inspire thinking and discussion about the engineering ethics questions in self-driving car design, moving beyond the trite and largely irrelevant trolley problem.

Shortly after, I went into Skyboat Media’s studio and recorded an audio edition of the story, which the Deakin folks mastered with visuals and SFX to produce a smashing video.
I’ve extracted just the audio as an MP3 for your mobile listening/podcast pleasure, as well.
37 min
December 08, 2016 Everything is a Remix, including Star Wars, and that’s how I became a writer
Kirby Ferguson, who created the remarkable Everything is a Remix series, has a new podcast hosted by the Recreate Coalition called Copy This and he hosted me on the debut episode (MP3) where we talked about copying, creativity, artists, and the future of the internet (as you might expect!).

Are you one of the many Star Wars fans eagerly awaiting the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story later this month? As you watch – and rewatch – the trailer, take a break to tune into Re:Create’s new Copy This podcast to learn about copyright and the role it’s played in the success of the fan-favorite series. As part of our ongoing work to elevate the discussion around copyright issues, the role copyright plays in our lives, and the need for balanced laws, Re:Create today launched Copy This hosted by writer, director and remixer Kirby Ferguson. The monthly podcast will bring to listeners conversations with some of the leading authors, policy minds, legal experts, and members of the creative community to take on the important questions and topics driving the copyright debate today.

New Re:Create Podcast Shows What Star Wars Can Teach Us About Copyright
[Recreate]
0 min
October 19, 2016 Interview with IEEE-USA Insight Podcast
I was interviewed for the IEEE-USA Insight Podcast last summer in New Orleans, during their Future Leaders Summit, where I was privileged to give the keynote (MP3)
0 min
October 13, 2016 Talking about Allan Sherman on the Comedy on Vinyl podcast
Jason Klamm stopped my office to interview me for his Comedy on Vinyl podcast, where I talked about the first comedy album I ever loved: Allan Sherman’s My Son, the Nut.
I inherited my mom’s copy of the album when I was six years old, and listened to it over and over until I discovered — the hard way — that you can’t leave vinyl records on the dashboard of a car on a hot day.
Our discussion ranged far and wide, over the golden age of novelty flexidiscs, Thomas Piketty, Hamilton, corporate anthems and many other subjects.
http://media.blubrry.com/comedyonvinyl/p/stolendress.com/comedyonvinyl/podcast_episodes/COV_Episode_199.mp3
Episode 199 – Cory Doctorow on Allan Sherman – My Son, The Nut
[Comedy on Vinyl]
56 min
September 26, 2016 How free software stayed free
I did an interview with the Changelog podcast (MP3) about my upcoming talk at the O’Reilly Open Source conference in London, explaining how it is that the free and open web became so closed and unfree, but free and open software stayed so very free, and came to dominate the software landscape.
“Desperate” is often the opposite of “open”: it’s when we’re in trouble that we’re most likely to compromise on our principles. How, then, did open become the default for so many tools and applications? Because when you use irrevocable open/free licenses, you lock your code open, defending it from anyone who would lock it up again—including a future version of you, in a moment of weakness.
Open licenses have served us well for more than two decades, but they need help if we’re going to survive the era in which computers invade our bodies and the structures we keep those bodies in. Cory Doctorow explains that we can lock the whole future Web open, if we do it right.
#221: How We Got Here with Cory Doctorow
[The Changelog]
(Image: Tux Droid, Sunny Ripert, CC-BY-SA)
0 min
August 25, 2016 Talking about the pro-security, anti-DRM business model on the O’Reilly Radar Podcast

On this just-released episode of the O’Reilly Radar podcast (MP3), I talk about EFF’s lawsuit against the US government to invalidate Section 1201 of the DMCA, which will make it legal to break DRM in order to fix security vulnerabilities in the Internet of Things devices that, today, are almost invariable insecure, and are also designed to be as privacy-invading as possible (to create “monetizable” data-streams) — a brutal combo.

Auditing IoT products is a liability for security researchers
Think about the conditions under which IoT companies operate. Their business plan—the thing they show to VCs to get the money to go into the business—is to monetize data. They’re all designed with security as an afterthought. They’re all designed with the minimum viable security to make this product not immediately burst into flames after you put it inside your body or put your body inside of it. Even worse, security researchers face total, brutal liability for investigating these devices and telling people which ones are and aren’t safe. It is completely nightmarish.
New pro-security business models
Note: The Electronic Frontier Foundation is representing Bunnie Huang and Matthew Green in a case challenging the constitutionality of Section 1201 of the DMCA.
One of the things that our DMCA lawsuit would provide for is a pro-security business model. Imagine if you could start a commercial consultancy that would come in and deworm your IoT household. It could come in and jailbreak all the devices and check their firmware loads, and replace the firmware loads with open firmware or patched firmware, or something else that sits in between. All of those things, all that commercial stuff as well, is currently off-limits, and would be available in the same way that you can enable third-party parts and services if there are no legal impediments. The hardware service and support market in the U.S. for all classes of goods, from lawnmowers to cars to air conditioners to computers, is 2 to 4% of America’s GDP. It’s a gigantic multi-billion-dollar sector, and in many cases, these are small and medium-size enterprises.
48 min
August 20, 2016 Podcast: Live from HOPE on Radio Statler
While I was in NYC to keynote the 11th Hackers on Planet Earth convention, I sat down with the Radio Statler folks and explained what I was going to talk about, as well as bantering with the hosts about the relative merits of DEFCON and HOPE and the secret to managing cons and marriages (MP3).
0 min
August 17, 2016 Podcast: How we’ll kill all the DRM in the world, forever
I’m keynoting the O’Reilly Security Conference in New York in Oct/Nov, so I stopped by the O’Reilly Security Podcast (MP3) to explain EFF’s Apollo 1201 project, which aims to kill all the DRM in the world within a decade.

A couple things changed in the last decade. The first is that the kinds of technologies that have access controls for copyrighted works have gone from these narrow slices (consoles and DVD players) to everything (the car in your driveway). If it has an operating system or a networking stack, it has a copyrighted work in it. Software is copyrightable, and everything has software. Therefore, manufacturers can invoke the DMCA to defend anything they’ve stuck a thin scrim of DRM around, and that defense includes the ability to prevent people from making parts. All they need to do is add a little integrity check, like the ones that have been in printers for forever, that asks, “Is this part an original manufacturer’s part, or is it a third-party part?” Original manufacturer’s parts get used; third-party parts get refused. Because that check restricts access to a copyrighted work, bypassing it is potentially a felony. Car manufacturers use it to lock you into buying original parts.
This is a live issue in a lot of domains. It’s in insulin pumps, it’s in voting machines, it’s in tractors. John Deere locks up the farm data that you generate when you drive your tractor around. If you want to use that data to find out about your soil density and automate your seed broadcasting, you have to buy that data back from John Deere in a bundle with seed from big agribusiness consortia like Monsanto, who license the data from Deere. This metastatic growth is another big change. It’s become really urgent to act now because, in addition to this consumer rights dimension, your ability to add things to your device, take it for independent service, add features, and reconfigure it are all subject to approval from manufacturers.
All of this has become a no-go zone for security researchers. In the last summer, the Copyright Office entertained petitions for people who have been impacted by Section 1201 of the DMCA. Several security researchers filed a brief saying they had discovered grave defects in products as varied as voting machines, insulin pumps and cars, and they were told by their counsel that they couldn’t disclose because, in so doing, they would reveal information that might help someone bypass DRM, and thus would face felony prosecution and civil lawsuits.

Cory Doctorow on legally disabling DRM (for good)
[Courtney Nash/O’Reilly]
48 min