Design with Intent

Freudian slip in BBC iTunes story

By Dan Lockton ⋅ October 1, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

From this BBC story, as of 6.43 pm.
P.S. I love the way it’s claimed “everyone will benefit” from the royalty rise. As a consumer, I can’t wait to be paying more! Perhaps a price increase will help limit the consumption of this precious rivalrous good… oh, wait…
P.P.S. Not the first time a BBC story about [...]

The right to click

By Dan Lockton ⋅ July 4, 2007 ⋅ 14 comments

English Heritage, officially the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, and funded by the taxpayer and by visitors to some of its properties, does a great deal of very good work in widening public appreciation of, and engagement with, history and the country’s heritage.
But its ViewFinder image gallery website* sadly falls into the [...]

No photography allowed

By Dan Lockton ⋅ January 22, 2007 ⋅ 4 comments

A couple of recent stories on photography of certain items being ‘banned’ – Cory Doctorow on a Magritte exhibition’s hypocrisy, and Jen Graves on a sculpture of which “photography is prohibited” – highlight what makes me tense up and want to scream about so much of the ‘intellectual property debate’: photons are no more [...]

Digital control round-up

By Dan Lockton ⋅ December 30, 2006 ⋅ One comment

Some developments in – and commentary on – digital architectures of control to end 2006:
Peter Gutmann’s ‘A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection’ (via Bruce Schneier) looks very lucidly at the effects that Vista’s DRM and measures to ‘protect’ content will have – on users themselves, and knock-on effects elsewhere. The more one reads, [...]

Uninnovate – engineering products to do less

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 10, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

Image from uninnovate.com
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, [...]

Some links: miscellaneous, pertinent to architectures of control

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 1, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

Ulises Mejias on ‘Confinement, Education and the Control Society’ – fascinating commentary on Deleuze’s societies of control and how the instant communication and ‘life-long learning’ potential (and, I guess, everyware) of the internet age may facilitate control and repression:
“This is the paradox of social media that has been bothering me lately: an ‘empowering’ media that [...]

Planned addiction as a method of control: a parasitic lock-in business model

By Dan Lockton ⋅ September 1, 2006 ⋅ 2 comments

The news that tobacco companies have increased the levels of nicotine in their brands over the last few years – especially those popular with certain groups – made me think further about architectures of control:
“The amount of nicotine in most cigarettes rose an average of almost 10 percent from 1998 to 2004, with brands [...]

Use of RFID in DRM

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 22, 2006 ⋅ One comment

Via Dave Farber’s Interesting People, a brief New Scientist article outlines Sony’s continuing obsession with restricting and controlling its customers (the last one didn’t go too well):
“A patent filed by Sony last week suggests it may once again be considering preventing consumers making “too many” back-up copies of its CDs…
Sony’s latest idea is to place [...]

Ed Felten: DRM Wars, and ‘Property Rights Management’

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 15, 2006 ⋅ 3 comments

At Freedom to Tinker, Ed Felten has posted a summary of a talk he gave at the Usenix Security Symposium, called “DRM Wars: The Next Generation”. The two installments so far (Part 1, Part 2) trace a possible trend in the (stated) intentions of DRM’s proponents, from it being largely promoted as a tool to [...]

Freedom to Tinker – The Freedom to Tinker with Freedom?

By Dan Lockton ⋅ August 4, 2006 ⋅ Post a comment

At Freedom to Tinker, David Robinson asks whether, in a world where DRM is presented to so many customers as a benefit (e.g. Microsoft’s Zune service), the public as a whole will be quite happy to trade away its freedom to tinker, whether the law needs to intervene in this, and on which side: [...]

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