I’ve just come across a very interesting new blog, uninnovate.com, which focuses on the phenomenon of “engineering expensive features into a product for which there is no market demand in order to make the product do less.” The first few posts tackle ‘Three legends of uninnovation‘ (the iPod’s copy restrictions, Sony’s mp3-less Walkman, and Verizon’s rent-seeking on Bluetooth features), Microsoft’s priorities (patching DRM flaws vs. security flaws that actually damage users), Amazon’s absurd new Unbox ‘service’ and ‘Trusted’ computing for mobile phones. The perspective is refreshingly clear: no customer woke up wanting these ‘features’, yet companies direct vast efforts towards developing them.

In a sense the ‘uninnovation’ concept is a similar idea to a large proportion of the architectures of control in products I’ve been examining on this site over the last year, especially DRM and DRM-related lock-ins, though with a slightly different emphasis: I’ve chosen to look at it all from a ‘control’ point of view (features are being designed in – or out – with the express intention of manipulating and restricting users’ behaviour, usually for commercial ends, but also political or social).

Uninnovate looks to be a great blog to watch – not sure who’s behind it, but the analysis is spot-on and the examples lucidly explained.

“This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that provides increased opportunities for communication, education and online participation, but which at the same time further isolates individuals and aggregates them into masses —more prone to control, and by extension more prone to discipline.”

Slashdot on ‘A working economy without DRM?’ – same debate as ever, but some very insightful comments

Slashdot on ‘Explaining DRM to a less-experienced PC user’ – I particularly like SmallFurryCreature’s ‘Sugar cube’ analogy

‘The Promise of a Post-Copyright World’ by Karl Fogel – extremely clear analysis of the history of copyright and, especially, the way it has been presented to the public over the centuries

(Via BoingBoing) The Entertrainer – a heart monitor-linked TV controller: your TV stays on with the volume at a usable level only while you keep exercising at the required rate. Similar concept to Gillian Swan’s Square-Eyes

“Your Digital Rights and Why They’re Important to You

Throughout the history of technology, Hollywood has fought innovation at every turn. Even technologies that benefit the studios, and that we take for granted, exist only because someone fought the studios for their very existence

…

The more such legislation [e.g. Analog Hole Bill] gets passed, the less innovation consumers will see, and the fewer options you will have for enjoying your content

….

There are two opposing forces at odds here. On the one hand, there are exciting new technologies that offer more and more choices for consumers to access and enjoy digital media when and where they want it. On the other, there is Big Media and a few of its powerful allies working behind the scenes to limit consumer choices to when and where they want it. How this all plays out will depend on how the rest of us respond in the coming days, weeks and months.”

The statement even exhorts customers to get involved with the EFF and to get in touch with their elected representatives, which is again a great initiative.

This is just the kind of intelligent engagement by product designers & engineers with the political implications of – and influences on – their work for which I’ve been looking throughout the ‘Architectures of Control’ project. Whether it meets the kind of criteria proposed by Jennie Winhall’s ‘Is Design Political?‘, I don’t know, but by standing up for users’ rights in such an open and frank way, and indeed structuring its business around that philosophy, Neuros seems a lot closer to real user-centred design than the vague waffle so often promulgated as such.

Impressive.

Via EFF DeepLinks, details of the Neuros MPEG4 Recorder 2, a product specifically designed to allow users to break through the arbitrary architectures of control imposed by other video devices and formats, and hence make the most of the content you own:

“[It] digitizes analog video output and records it to a CF card or a memory stick in MPEG4 format. The video can then be put on your computer, burned to DVD, moved to your video iPod, or slotted right into your Sony PSP. You can also output video to a display device from the R2.

In turn, the R2 helps you make legitimate use of your media and lawfully escape DRM restrictions…

* Free your recorded TV content: TiVo and other PVRs restrict moving recorded video to other devices. The DMCA limits removing these DRM locks, and, if the broadcast flag proposal passes, these restrictions will get even worse. Regardless, you can lawfully use the R2 to create a DRM-free copy, recording straight from your TV or TiVo.

* Free your DVDs: DVD ripping software is widely available, but using it to rip a film to your computer and video iPod may violate the DMCA. The R2 gives you a legal (albeit more cumbersome) alternative. Similarly, though region-free DVD players are available, you can use the R2 to help create a region-free copy of the movie itself.

* Free your VHS tapes: You’ve probably faced the unhappy choice between rebuying your VHS collection on DRM-restricted DVDs or lugging around a legacy player. The R2 helps you liberate your movies from their VHS chains.”

Of course, the R2 device’s legality – as a video analogue-to-digital converter – is threatened by proposed US legislation aimed at ‘plugging the analogue hole‘, hence its ‘endangered gizmo‘ status applied by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This would seem to be a case where a device really has been designed with the users’ needs and convenience uppermost in mind, yet it may be ruled out of existence by a legislature which listens more to (certain) corporate lobbying than to its own citizens.

Via Boing Boing, ‘Researchers develop prototype system to thwart unwanted video and still photography’, news from Georgia Tech of a system that scans and finds the CCDs of digital imaging equipment and shines bright light (or a laser) into them in order to flood them with light and prevent usable images being recorded.

“Commercial versions of the technology could be used to stymie unwanted use of video or still cameras. A Georgia Tech camera-neutralizing prototype could soon be used to stop movie piracy and other forms of unwanted digital-camera photography…

The prototype device, produced by a team in the Interactive and Intelligent Computing division of the Georgia Tech College of Computing (COC), uses off-the-shelf equipment — camera-mounted sensors, lighting equipment, a projector and a computer — to scan for, find and neutralize digital cameras. The system works by looking for the reflectivity and shape of the image-producing sensors used in digital cameras…

…the small-area product could prevent espionage photography in government buildings, industrial settings or trade shows. It could also be used in business settings — for instance, to stop amateur photography where shopping-mall-Santa pictures are being taken…

Once a scanning laser and photodetector located a video camera, the system would flash a thin beam of visible white light directly at the CCD. This beam – possibly a laser in a commercial version – would overwhelm the target camera with light, rendering recorded video unusable. Researchers say that energy levels used to neutralize cameras would be low enough to preclude any health risks to the operator.*”

Luckily for those of use who still value our freedom to use technology,

“Current camera-neutralizing technology may never work against single-lens-reflex cameras, which use a folding-mirror viewing system that effectively masks its CCD except when a photo is actually being taken. Moreover, anti-digital techniques don’t work on conventional film cameras because they have no image sensor.”

Regular readers of this blog will be able to guess how I feel about the prospect of the device described in the article, and indeed the moral motivation of the engineers and designers working on it.

This technology is designed expressly to remove the rights of the public by imposing arbitrary control architectures on public space. If something is being publicly displayed, I believe I should be free to photograph it, whether that be with a film camera, a digital camera, or eidetic memory.

Just because someone wants to prevent amateur photographers (read: everyday members of the public) getting a snapshot of their kids with Santa in a shopping mall, in order to sell them an overpriced ‘official’ photo, it doesn’t mean they should be allowed to do so. If it is permissible to operate a device in public which interferes with the operation of lawful imaging equipment, then presumably it will be permissible for a member of the public to shine lasers into the cameras used in the detection system?**

I really cannot mask my distaste for this device, and for the mindset that has created and funded it. It is the thin end of a wedge which has the potential to destroy so many of the freedoms technology has brought us. If I’m wrong, please let me know, but just think for a minute: what might a couple of the consequences be, ultimately, if this kind of technology becomes widespread?

Overall, the distasteful corollary following from widespread use and legitimisation of this kind of device is, simply, the death of amateur photography, as both a recreation and an artform. When arbitrary bodies can extract rent from me for photographing whatever they decide, I’m not going to bother recording the world around me any more, and neither will hundreds of millions of others. The next generation of kids will grow up not knowing the right to photograph what you want, just as the next generation of kids may well believe that music has to be bought over and over again for every device you want to play it on.

It is this embedding of arbitrary controls in the architecture of our society, working outside the law to enforce ‘rights’ with little legal basis, and intentions which are in no way in the public interest, which scares me a great deal.

Norms can be changed by technology without any law needing to change. We need to keep an eye on that, and the eye had better be wearing protective goggles.

*Wouldn’t it be awful if, say, I took a whole load of CCDs with sticky pads on the back into a cinema and scattered them all over the place? I can’t believe the system can dazzle 100 cameras at once. Or if I just happened to be wearing retroreflective sunglasses with similar characteristics to the CCD, and after being “almost blinded” by the device shining into my eyes (not really, of course), was able to make damn sure the device could never be used anywhere again?

**Oooh, what about all those CCTV cameras that film me everyday? Am I allowed to shine a laser into them? What if I live across the street from one? Can I train a laser on it permanently?

EDIT: There are some parallels here with the ‘analogue hole prevention’ mechanisms I looked at in Architectures of control in the digital environment, most notably Hewlett-Packard’s patented ‘paparazzi-proof’ camera-phone image inhibitor system.

EDIT (20.vi): The BBC has now picked up on the story – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5097774.stm – no new details but – oh look! – the claim about potential use to stop amateur photographers of shopping-mall-Santas has been left out. The story focuses on the uses to stop ‘pirates’ in cinemas, and not the potential uses ‘in the wild’. Remember, when presenting a potentially distasteful idea as something positive, leave out the bits that relate to everyday life. Make it seem as if you’re only targeting extremes, and then gradually shift the boundaries of what’s ‘extreme’. Martin Niemöller taught us that pretty well.

“Most people don’t realize how much they’re giving up when they consciously or sub-consciously use solutions that depend on [DRM]. I get a lot of email that accuses me of being a Chicken Little that overblows the situation by saying the sky is falling. Well, the sky is falling and if those folks want to live in denial, that’s their problem.”

Some of the examples are more straightforward cases of sloppily designed DRM implementations leading to security problems, such as the Sony Rootkit case; examples of ‘DRM switcheroo’ (what I’ve previously called feature deletion or external control on this blog) also abound.

Real-life anecdotes of users who have lost all their (legally acquired) music due to DRM errors or licensing changes – as I discussed in ‘Consumers’ reactions to DRM‘ – are perhaps one of the best ways of driving the message home to consumers (for example the examples discussed here).

The ‘DRM train wreck’ tag is a great initiative. I guess in time it would be good if DRM’d content acquired a stigma from consumers’ point of view, clearly seen as undesirable and worse than second-best, a format to avoid.

“So there’s me driving up to Homebase… and I get to within half a mile of the store and my car starts to slow down.

Before I know it, I’m doing five miles an hour. What’s more, half the other cars around me are doing the same. But the cars on the other side of the road are all fine. So I turn round and head home and suddenly it’s all back to normal. “What on earth is going on?” as our man Paxman would say.

“It’s simple” said the grease monkey at my local garage. “The people who made your car have done a deal with B&Q. They’ve fixed it so that if you ever drive towards Homebase, you’ll start going at 5 miles an hour.”

Network neutrality

Alert readers among you might observe that I’m talking rubbish, and, despite this being the BBC, I must admit I made the whole incident up. But imagine if such a thing were possible. How happy would you be if you were on the receiving end? Which brings us to the principle of network neutrality.”

The article goes on to describe a new Cachelogic BitTorrent system to allow faster downloads of material approved (& controlled) by media companies:

“Cachelogic are offering a series of data stores strategically placed around the Internet which the new BitTorrent system talks to. Whenever they see a commercially approved BitTorrent, they make a copy of the data.

The next time someone on the Internet requests that [sic] data, it comes not from the original sender but from the Cachelogic store, only this time massively accelerated.

You can see where this is going. The companies who subscribe to the service will see their data race down the toll roads much faster than everyone else’s can travel. What then for network neutrality?

We asked Bram about network neutrality… Does the Cachelogic proposal violate network neutrality? “Depending on how you define net neutrality that violates some definitions of it,” says Cohen.”

Without knowing more about the system I’m not sure what my reaction should be, since this is not quite the same as an actual ‘two-tier internet’, merely (perhaps) the equivalent of putting in faster servers for particular material. It is, then, changing the architecture of the system, but not in a way that forces users to behave in a particular manner.

You can bet, however, that the material that is distributed via the system will be heavily DRM’d and restricted, possibly requiring a new download (+ fee) each time. If that means a massive increase in network traffic, and that slows down the connections of users who aren’t participating in the service, then, yes, it is an architecture of control. It’s making it easier/less hassle just to go with the flow and learn to love big brother, since that’s the only way you can get fast downloads.

Any thoughts?