9rules is a community of the best weblogs in the world on a variety of topics. We started 9rules to give passionate writers more exposure and to help readers find great blogs on their favorite subjects. It’s difficult to find sites worth returning to, so 9rules brings together the very best of the independent web all under one roof.

It was a great honour to be accepted, given the quality of the other blogs involved and the number that applied during the 24 hour ‘submission window’. I remember sitting in a coffee shop on Lothian Road in Edinburgh having taken my laptop away on holiday purely to do the 9rules submission at the right time: some ‘recognition’ on this level meant a lot to me, and it still does.

And the site’s got a lot of new readers through 9rules: the start of every new post appeared, within a couple of hours, in both the ‘Design‘ and ‘Technology‘ feeds on the 9rules site, and a lot of people clicked through to read the full things, and then (often) stayed to read other posts. Equally, I found some truly amazing new blogs and interesting voices through perusing other members’ feeds: there is a wealth of passionate talent and opinion out there, and 9rules’ members never failed to impress. To a large extent I was a passive consumer of what 9rules brought me; I didn’t get involved with the ‘my.9r‘ social networking feature of the site, nor write any ‘Notes‘ (if I’m going to write something intelligent, I’ll write it on the blog, was my reasoning, but I certainly read a number of interesting discussions in the Notes section, and enjoyed doing so).

However, 9rules is changing its membership policy (compare the current ‘About’ page) and yesterday I received an email from 9rules’ Tyme White indicating that, effectively, any members who don’t participate in the community aspects of the site are no longer welcome:

Members spoke out about their displeasure concerning members that they never interact with and never hear from, yet all member entries carry the same weight on 9rules, which is not fair. After talking it out in Clubhouse, we made participating either in the private member area or my.9rules a requirement, part of the membership agreement… If you feel you are contributing by your entries being shown, 9rules is no longer a good fit for you, decline the agreement (or do not respond), remove the leaf from your site and we will remove your site from displaying on 9rules. If you agree but don’t have the time to interact or don’t feel you should (or don’t want to), the participation will become a chore, something you didn’t want to do in the first place. It just won’t work in the long-term so it would be best to decline now…

Let me be clear – participation in either the new member area or my.9rules is required for all members, requested by members.

I understand what she’s saying, and I’m not going to argue – but it’s a shame: forced participation would certainly “become a chore” and I’m not going to agree to commit to anything along those lines (I wonder how the level of participation will be measured or assessed?), so this site will be leaving 9rules, sadly, in due course.

Taking a broader view, in internet terms, 9rules’ move – to more of a ‘walled garden’, turned in on itself – seems very much at odds with the increased openness which has driven the dramatic growth of, say, Facebook. Perhaps 9rules wants ‘quality’ rather than ‘quantity’, but defining ‘quality’ as ‘frequency of participation’ seems to be rather arbitrarily quantitative, if that makes sense. I’m not sure there’s actually any correlation between time spent on interactive banter within a closed community, and creating worthwhile blog content that people want to read: it would seem that time spent on one precludes spending time on the other.

I hope some of the readers who originally found this site through 9rules will continue to read it (the RSS/Atom feed links are in the sidebar on the right), and I thank 9rules for the extra exposure it gave this site during my time as a member.

So this sign available from ACID (Anti-Copying In Design) made me laugh with astonishment, and cringe a little:

Image from an ACID leaflet, “You wouldn’t say that copying was the sincerest form of flattery if it cost you your business”. The sign doesn’t seem to be shown on ACID’s Deterrent Products online store.

I understand what ACID is trying to do, and unlike most anti-copying initiatives, ACID is set up specifically to protect the little guy rather than enormous intransigent oligarchies. ACID’s sample legal agreements and advice for freelancers on dealing with clients, registering designs, etc, are great initiatives and I’m sure they’ve been a fantastic help to a lot of young designer-makers.

But a sign ‘banning’ photography at exhibitions? At design exhibitions where new aesthetic ideas are the primary reason for most visitors attending? That seems hopelessly naïve, akin to a child defensively wrapping his or her arm around a piece of work to stop the kid at the next desk copying what’s being written, but then pleading with teacher to put it up on the wall.

And I would have thought, to be honest, that “with phone cameras your ideas… [being] sent globally within seconds” is more likely to lead to instant fame and international recognition for the designer on sites such as Cool Hunting, We Make Money Not Art, or Core77 than (presumably unauthorised) “mass production”. But maybe I’m wrong: I’m sure you’ll let me know!

Most young designers are desperate for exposure. I know every design exhibition I’ve shown stuff at (not many, to be fair), I’ve been delighted when someone photographs my work. ACID’s sign also raises the question, of course, whether when someone displaying the sign actually sells a piece of work, it comes with a label attached telling the purchaser than he or she may not photograph it, or show it to friends. Wouldn’t that be a logical extension?

P.S. We’ve looked before at actual technologies to ‘prevent’ photography, such as Georgia Tech’s CCD-blinder and Hewlett-Packard’s “remote image degradation” device (in the wider context of “plugging the analogue hole”). As I replied to a commenter on the Georgia Tech story:

It won’t be too long (20 years?) before photographic (eidetic) memory and computers start to overlap (or even interface), to some extent, even if it’s only a refinement of something like the Sensecam. What’s going to happen then? If I can ‘print out’ anything I’ve ever seen, on a whim, why will I worry about what anyone else thinks?

First, an apology for anyone who’s had problems with the RSS/Atom feeds over the last month or so. I think they’re fixed now (certainly Bloglines has started picking them up again) but please let me know if you don’t read this. Oops, that won’t work… anyway:

Still, I can rest easy in my bed tonight knowing that those vicious pirates will be facing a tough legal crackdown to stop them copying data. Apparently, it’s also possible to legislate that pi=3.

Blue lighting is sometimes used in public toilets (restrooms) to make it more difficult for drug users to inject themselves (veins are harder to see). The above implementation is in Edinburgh, next to the Tron Kirk.

It was more difficult to see my veins through my skin, but there was normal-coloured lighting in the street outside, and one would assume that the users would thus just go outside instead, though the risk of detection is greater. (An additional result of the blue lighting is that, on going outside after spending more than a few seconds in the toilets, the daytime world appears much brighter and more optimistic, even on an overcast day: could retail designers or others make use of this effect? Do they already?)

So the blue lighting ‘works’, but is it really a good idea to increase the risk that an injection will be done wrongly – maybe multiple times? This is perhaps a similar argument to that surrounding delibrately reducing visibility at junctions: the architecture of control makes it more dangerous for the few users (and those their actions affect) who ignore or bypass the control. This seems to be an architecture of control with the potential to endanger life, although the actual stated intention behind it probably includes ‘saving lives’.

Without knowing more about addiction, however, I can’t say whether making it difficult for people to inject will really help stop them doing it; it would seem more likely that (as in the linked Argus story), the aim of the blue lighting is to move the ‘problem’ somewhere else rather than actually ‘solve’ it – as with the anti-homeless benches, in fact.

Another example in this kind of area is the use of smoke alarms specifically to prevent people smoking in toilets, e.g. on aeroplanes (the noise, and embarrassment, is a sufficient deterrent). There’s even been the suggestion of using the Mosquito high-pitched alarm coupled to a smoke detector to ‘prevent’ children smoking in school toilets (I’d expect that quite a few would deliberately try to set them off; I know I would have as a kid). A friend mentioned the practice of siting smoking shelters a long way from office buildings so that smokers are discouraged from going so often; this backfired for the company concerned, as smokers just took increasingly long breaks to make it ‘worth their while’ to walk the extra distance.

Henry e-mails:

“Perhaps this is too obvious: parking meters; and I mean modern digital ones, enforce arbitrary limits on how much you can pay for at a time (4 hours). Is this to share the enjoyment of democratic parking (at a dollar an hour), or some social engineering ploy to force productive members of the workforce to enter the valet service economy, and thus a reminder of the fact that if they work harder, they could afford a driver?”

Tongue-in-cheek aside, there is something unhelpful, to some extent manipulative, designed into a lot of parking ticket machines (as well as some other vending machines). Take a look at the following machine I photographed this morning in a shoppers’ car park in Pinner, Middlesex, UK:

What’s the excuse for the ‘No change given – Overpayment accepted’ policy? It’s not as though it’s technically too difficult to give change: these aren’t mechanical penny gobstopper machines from the 1950s. Sure, it would make each machine a bit more expensive to include the change-giving function, but so what? If every one of the hundreds of people who park each day paid, say, 5 pence extra the cost of the more expensive machine would be recouped within a week or two, surely?

Of course, the real reason for the ‘no change given’ policy is that many customers who arrive at the machine without the 50p + 20p (or other combinations needed to make 70p) will put in £1 instead. Thus for a certain percentage of customers, the machine receives 1.43 times the revenue it ought to. I don’t know how many people overpay, but the point is, none of them can underpay. The system is asymmetric. The house always wins.

Does the car park operator (in this case Harrow Council) factor the extra revenue it receives from forcing overpayment into its projected revenues from the machines? Do they record how many people overpay, and use that statistic to plan next year’s budget? Or is overpayment treated as an ‘unexpected’ windfall? Or perhaps, just perhaps, without the overpayment the car park would make a loss?

Any more examples of awful ‘no change given’ implementations, or related anecdotes, musings, etc, much appreciated!

“…the sound is being used in a dance track, Buzzin’, with secret melodies only young ears can hear.

…

Simon Morris from Compound Security said: “Following the success of the ringtone, a lot of people were asking us to do a bit more, so we got together with the producers Melodi and they came up with a full-length track.

“It has two harmonies – one that everyone can hear and one that only young people can hear.

“But it works well together or separate,” he added.”

There’s a clip linked from the BBC story, or here directly (WMV format). Can’t say the “secret melodies” are especially exciting (and yes, I can hear it!) but I suppose it’s a clever idea. There could be some interesting steganographic possibilities, and indeed it could be used for ‘cheating in tests’ as Jason Thomas puts it here.

This is the same Simon Morris who’s quoted in an earlier BBC story as saying that teenagers (in general) don’t have a right “to congregate for no specific purpose”, so it’s interesting to see him getting involved with young peoples’ music. Nevertheless, I can see the dilemma that Compound Security are in: they’ve created something designed to be unpleasant for teenagers, but are also capitalising on its potential appeal to teenagers. It’s clever, if rather inconsistent branding practice.

I’ve blogged before mentioning the work of the UK Design Council’s RED research arm, which applies ‘design thinking’ to redevelop and create public services appropriate for societal changes right now and in the years to come. The previous post was specifically about Jennie Winhall’s ‘Is design political?’ essay, but I’ve kept in touch with RED’s work and was very interested to attend RED’s Open House last Friday, along with Katrin Svabo Bech and Kate Andrews.

The presentation, by Jennie Winhall, Chris Vanstone* and Matthew Horne, introduced the Kitchen Cabinet (democratic engagement) and Activmobs projects, along with a brief discussion of the concept of shaping behaviour through design, which is of course of significant pertinence to the ‘architectures of control’ idea (as it is indeed to captology).

(Sadly, there was apparently not time to give any more than a cursory treatment of RED’s Transformation Design concept [PDF link, 193 kb], which re-casts design thinking as the cross-disciplinary approach for problem-solving in a great variety of disciplines. The paper leads with a great quote from Charles Eames: “More than 30 years ago, Charles Eames, the American multidisciplinary designer, was asked, ‘What are the boundaries of design?’. He replied, ‘What are the boundaries of problems?’”. I was especially looking forward to a discussion on transformation design, as my hunch is that many of us who’ve chosen to go into design (and engineering) have realised and appreciated this for a long time – indeed, it may even be the reason why we went into it: a desire to acquire the tools to shape, change and improve the world – but that by expressing it explicitly, RED has a great chance to win the understanding of a political establishment and general public who still often equate design with styling and little more. But I digress…)

Jennie Winhall’s discussion of shaping behaviour through design was a clear exposition of the principle that empowering people to change their own behaviour ought to be more preferable than forcing them to change their behaviour externally. Traditional policy-making fails in this context: it is easier to put in CCTV than to solve the underlying casuses of crime; it is easier to fund more obesity treatment than it is to tackle poor diet in the first place (the phrase ‘symptom doctor’ was not used, but it might have been). Describing the idea of manipulating behaviour through design as being slightly ‘sinister’, Jennie noted that it has been used in a commercial context for many years (it was one of those talks where I was almost bursting to interrupt with actual examples discussed on this website, though I didn’t!), but, as Oxford’s Lucy Kimbell pointed out, there is not necessarily an easy way to apply the techniques in a field where the aims are less well-defined (“social good” as opposed to “money”):

“But the outcomes of public service designs are complex. RED sees value in making use of design methods used in Marks & Spencer, for example, to make the consuming experience “compelling and desirable” and applying them to public service contexts. In the M&S context, the use of these methods may well have a clear, measurable business objective: increasing sales, for example – and even here design practitioners may well struggle with framing the design problem, communicating with the client, and measuring the value of the design process and artefacts. How much harder it is to define and agree goals for public services or public goods?”

Looking at the politically motivated examples of architectures of control which I’ve examined over the last couple of years, I’d say a significant percentage of them are designed with the goal of stamping out a particular type of behaviour, usually classed as anti-social and usually extremely contentious: this really is social engineering. The success of skateboarding ‘deterrents’ is measured by how few children skateboard in an area. The success of the Mosquito is measured by how few children congregate in an area. The success of park benches with central armrests is measured by how there are no longer people lying down on them. The “woollier” behaviour-shaping architectures of control, such as Square Eyes or the Entertrainer are very much edging towards captology, and perhaps these examples are closer to RED’s field of experience.

WorldChanging also has a discussion of the RED Open House presentation.

*Speaking to us individually, Chris Vanstone used “stick, carrot or speedometer” as a way of classifying design methods for behavioural change, and I think this is worthy of a separate post, as this is an extremely insightful way of looking at these issues from an interaction design point of view.

Welcome, readers from Metafilter and del.icio.us.

One point raised in the Metafilter discussion is whether the term ‘architectures of control’ is a sensible one for this phenomenon, and whether ‘architectures of control in design’ is a good title for the blog. I understand the issue; it’s something (clearly) I considered at length when starting my research. It’s not an especially succinct title, and the use of the ‘architectures’ term is potentially a source of confusion (or irritation) if the link between the design of environments and the design of products and systems is not fully appreciated:

“Architecture is the design and construction of buildings… The noun is never pluralized, nor ever used as a verb, gag, except by the designers of computer software and hardware who needed to appropriate the term because they wanted to make their jobs sound more impressive. This kind of business school speak – always reaching for the most portentous word available when a simple one would do the job just fine – drives me nuts. That is one reason I have difficulty with the title of his blog.
The second is that it is a redundancy: Design of control in design.”

First time I’ve ever been accused of business school speak! But the term ‘architectures of control’ has been in reasonably wide use for a while before my research; from my own point of view, I originally borrowed it from chapter 4 of Lessig’s Code & Other Laws of Cyberspace, as the central thesis here is pretty much that Lessig’s ‘code is law’ principle – relating specifically to the way the internet is structured – applies equally to any product, system or environment with which a user interacts. Anything can be designed to enforce and restrict behaviour. Applying programming analogies to hardware, or architectural analogies to software, or other combinations, can be a useful way of allowing different disciplines to understand each other. Or so it would be nice to think!

But is there a better term than ‘architectures of control’? I’m completely open to suggestions.

Update (19th Sept): The term apparently has enough currency for eBay affiliates to buy Google Adwords using it, e.g.

…but then they’re not always noted for the most sensible key-phrase choices!

Josie Appleton, at the always-interesting Spiked, takes a look at the increasing systemic hostility towards ‘young people in public places’ in the UK: ‘When did ‘hanging around’ become a social problem?’

As well as the Mosquito, much covered on this site (all posts; try out high frequency sounds for yourself), the article mentions the use of certain music publicly broadcast for the same ‘dispersal’ purpose:

“The Local Government Association (LGA) has compiled a list of naff songs for councils to play in trouble spots in order to keep youths at bay – including Lionel Richie’s ‘Hello’ and St Winifred’s School Choir’s ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’. Apparently the Home Office is monitoring the scheme carefully. This policy has been copied from Sydney, where it is known as the ‘Manilow Method’ (after the king of naff, Barry Manilow), and has precursors in what we might call the ‘Mozart Method’, which was first deployed in Canadian train stations and from 2004 onwards was adopted by British shops (such as Co-op) and train stations (such as Tyne and Wear Metro).”

(I do hope each public broadcast of the music is correctly licensed in accordance with PPL terms and conditions, if only because I don’t want my council tax going to fund a legal battle with PPL. Remember, playing music in public is exactly equivalent to nicking it from a shop, and, after all, that’s the sort of thing that those awful young people do, isn’t it?

I also wonder why there is a difference between a council playing loud music in public, and a member of the public choosing to do so. If kids took along a stereo and played loud music in a shopping centre or any other public place, they’d get arrested or at the very least get moved on.

What would the legal situation be if kids were playing exactly the same music as was also being pumped out of the council-approved/operated speakers, at the same time? It can hardly be described as a public nuisance if it’s no different to what’s happening anyway.

What if kids started playing the same music as was on the speakers, but out-of-synch so that it sounded awful to every passer-by? Maybe shift the pitch a little (couple of semitones down?) so the two tracks overlayed cause a nice ‘drive-away-all-the-customers’ effect? What would happen then? What if kids build a little RF device which pulses repeatedly with sufficient power to superimpose a nice buzz on the council’s speaker output?)

Anyway, Ms Appleton goes on to note a new tactic perhaps even more extreme than the Mosquito, and a sure candidate for my ‘designed to injure‘ category (perhaps not actually endangering life, but close):

“Police in Weston-super-Mare have been shining bright halogen lights from helicopters on to youths gathered in parks and other public places. The light temporarily blinds them, and is intended to ‘move them on’, in the words of one Weston police officer.”

Wow! Roll on the lawsuits. (Nice to know that the local air ambulance relies on charitable donations to stay in the air, while the police apparently have plenty of helicopters available)

The article quotes what increasingly appears to be the official attitude:

“…this isn’t just about teenagers committing crimes: it’s also about them just being there. Before he was diverted into dealing with terror alerts, home secretary John Reid was calling on councils to tackle the national problem of ‘teenagers hanging around street corners’. Apparently unsupervised young people are in themselves a social problem.”

As we know from examining the Mosquito, this same opinion isn’t restricted to Dr Reid. It was the Mosquito manufacturer Compound Security’s marketing director, Simon Morris, who apparently told the BBC that:

“People have a right to assemble with others in a peaceful way… We do not consider that this right includes the right of teenagers to congregate for no specific purpose.”

So there you have it. As Brendan O’Neill puts it in a New Statesman piece referenced in the Spiked article:

“…Fear and loathing… is driving policy on young people. We seem scared of our own youth, imagining that “hoodies” and “chavs” are dragging society down. We’re so scared, in fact, that we use impersonal methods to police them: we use scanners to monitor their behaviour, we blind them from a distance, and now employ machines to screech at them in the hope they will just go away. With no idea of what to say to them – how to inspire or socialise them – we seek to disperse, disperse, disperse. It will only heighten their sense of being outsiders.”

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 a piece of monitoring hardware inside the CD. Its patent suggests embedding a radio-frequency ID chip that could be interrogated wirelessly by a PC or CD player. The chip would record the number of times the disc was copied and prevent further recordings once it reached the limit. The device could also be fitted to DVDs. Whether Sony will turn the patent idea into reality remains to be seen.”

Of course this will require new CD players and CD-ROM drives with the ability to read, write to and act on the signal from the RFID chip – which means its impact may not be very significant.

It’s not clear whether the “permitted” copies have to be made onto “chipped” Sony-authorised discs (otherwise the technology seems rather pointless, as people will just make copies of the un-protected copies instead of repeated copies of the original) – if this is the case, then is this not just a sly “razor blade model” or “PRM” (in Ed Felten’s phrase) attempt to make Sony CD-writers require the purchase of Sony chipped blank CDs in order to copy music?

And would this break the Orange Book standard for CD-Rs?

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 help enforce copyright law (and defeat ‘illegal pirates’) to the current stirrings of DRM’s being explicitly acknowledged as a tool to facilitate discrimination and lock-in — and the apparent ‘benefits of this’:

“First, they argue that DRM enables price discrimination — business models that charge different customers different prices for a product — and that price discrimination benefits society, at least sometimes. Second, they argue that DRM helps platform developers lock in their customers, as Apple has done with its iPod/iTunes products, and that lock-in increases the incentive to develop platforms.

Interestingly, these new arguments have little or nothing to do with copyright. The maker of almost any product would like to price discriminate, or to lock customers in to its product. Accordingly, we can expect the debate over DRM policy to come unmoored from copyright, with people on both sides making arguments unrelated to copyright and its goals.”

As noted by some of the commenters, that unmooring also unmoors the DRM debate from being presented as an ‘honest content providers vs illegal pirating freeloaders’ one. Price-fixing, lock-ins and so on are difficult to defend, and I find it hard to think of convincing examples where “price discrimination benefits society” or “lock-in increases the incentive to develop platforms”. If customers are locked in to a platform, there is no incentive to innovate for the locker-in, and much higher barriers for competitors to draw them away. Path dependency is rarely good for companies, and rarely good for society, and lock-ins would seem to be a major contributor to path dependency. The argument that “Apple wouldn’t have developed the iPod (and the record companies wouldn’t have let Apple develop iTunes) if DRM didn’t exist to lock customers in” is specious: there were plenty of portable music players before they came on the scene, and surely most 40GB music iPods were always intended to be largely filled with music acquired from somewhere other than iTunes.

Ed goes on to talk about the trend “toward the use of DRM-like technologies on traditional physical products.” (Long-term followers – if any! – of my research might remember this is very similar to the phrase “Architectures of control: DRM in hardware” which Cory Doctorow used to link to my original web-page on the subject), and uses the example of printer cartridge lock-ins (see also here):

“A good example is the use of cryptographic lockout codes in computer printers and their toner cartridges. Printer manufacturers want to sell printers at a low price and compensate by charging more for toner cartridges. To do this, they want to stop consumers from buying cheap third-party toner cartridges. So some printer makers have their printers do a cryptographic handshake with a chip in their cartridges, and they lock out third-party cartridges by programming the printers not to operate with cartridges that can’t do the secret handshake.

Doing this requires having some minimal level of computing functionality in both devices (e.g., the printer and cartridge). Moore’s Law is driving the size and price of that functionality to zero, so it will become economical to put secret-handshake functions into more and more products. Just as traditional DRM operates by limiting and controlling interoperation (i.e., compatibility) between digital products, these technologies will limit and control interoperation between ordinary products. We can call this Property Rights Management, or PRM.”

Not too sure about that term myself, as I feel the affordances the technology is controlling are moving further and further away from actual ‘rights’. DRM is bad enough as a catch-all term for technology which in many cases is denying users rights they may legally hold in some countries (e.g. fair use or backup copies). I think “technology lock-ins” or “technology razor-blade models” might be a more descriptive label than ‘PRM’. (Or ‘architectures of control’, of course, but my definition of these is much broader than simply lock-ins).

Ed gives three examples of possible future extensions of technology lock-ins, none of which seem at all unlikely; in fact they’re all easily possible right now:

“(1) A pen may refuse to dispense ink unless it’s being used with licensed paper. The pen would handshake with the paper by short-range RFID or through physical contact.

(2) A shoe may refuse to provide some features, such as high-tech cushioning of the sole, unless used with licensed shoelaces. Again, this could be done by short-range RFID or physical contact.

(3) The scratchy side of a velcro connector may refuse to stick to the fuzzy size unless the fuzzy side is licensed. The scratchy side of velcro has little hooks to grab loops on the fuzzy side; the hooks may refuse to function unless the license is in order [hence my photo at the top of this post! - Dan] For example, Apple could put PRMed scratchy-velcro onto the iPod, in the hope of extracting license fees from companies that make fuzzy-velcro for the iPod to stick to.

Will these things actually happen? I can’t say for sure. I chose these examples to illustrate how far PRM might go. The examples will be feasible to implement, eventually. Whether PRM gets used in these particular markets depends on market conditions and business decisions by the vendors. What we can say, I think, is that as PRM becomes practical in more product areas, its use will widen and we’ll face policy decisions about how to treat it.”

The comments on both posts (Part 1 | Part 2) go into some extremely interesting discussion of the ideas and examples, with the ‘pen/licensed paper’ one being conclusively noted as ‘baked’ with Bill Higgins explaining the Anoto* technology.

(*And no, I don’t think the “www.anotofunctionality.com” of that link is deliberately in the same league as “www.powergenitalia.com,” “www.expertsexchange.com,” etc, but it’s still oddly apposite given the “no to functionality” with which so many lock-ins shed users when they’re fed up with paying over the odds for replacement parts.)

I look forward to the third part of Ed’s talk summary: this is a fascinating area of discussion which is central to much of the ‘architectures of control’ phenomenon.

Now, I know, I know, there may be an important backstory behind that person’s search. Some people apparently really do have problems with kids intimidating them (e.g. see these comments on the Mosquito) and believe that a technological solution is the only answer.

But take the concept in isolation: how will history judge the “device to stop young people congregating” concept? Will it be seen as a cruel, archaic display of embdedded prejudice, in the same way that we would be horrified to see “device to stop X race of people congregating” or “device to stop X colour people congregating”?

Or will it be seen as a mild, thin end of a much larger, more sinister wedge (“device to stop ALL people congregating”)?

Now, the immediate response of most of us is probably “razor blade model!” or even “stifling democratic innovation!” (as Hal Varian or Eric von Hippel might put it), and indeed that was probably my own instinctive reaction.

It’s not clear, though, that this is a standard architectures-of-control-enforced-razor-blade-model of the kind we’ve seen with printer cartridges. Most phone owners surely don’t ever replace their batteries during the life of the phone, so I can’t believe that selling owners batteries can be a major part of the business plan for a new phone. I’ve never bought new batteries for any phone I’ve owned. A friend did, though by that time his phone was six or seven years old and he had to resort to eBay to find the correct type.

No, the promulgators of battery authentication claim that battery authentication is all about ensuring consumer safety:

“Battery-pack authentication is necessary because the lithium-ion cells that are the building blocks of all such packs are changing, and, although they still may have the same physical dimension, their input charging voltage and required charging rates are changing and fragmenting across markets. If the cells charge at the wrong voltage or too quickly, they may explode.“

My reaction, as a design engineer, would be: Why not standardise those characteristics, then? Standards don’t “fragment across markets” without someone causing that fragmentation. (It is true, though, that advancing battery technology does make charging patterns much more important to the life of the battery.)

“Vendors can ship their products with the proper battery pack, only to find that customers go the after-market route to replace or back up battery packs because after-market packs are easy to find and usually cheaper. Counterfeit battery packs pose a threat to user safety.”

Make the ‘proper’ packs cheaper and easier to find, then. Surely that’s cheaper and easier than developing a 64-bit key code battery authentication system, and keeping “its secret key in an 8×8-ft vault with 3-ft-thick walls, [with] only two people in the company hav[ing] vault keys,” as described in the EDN article?

Also, quit using the term ‘counterfeit’ to mean ‘all non-manufacturer-approved parts’. That’s a slippery slope to Newspeak. If I buy Fujifilm for a Kodak camera, is that film ‘counterfeit’? Of course not. It would be if it were being passed off as Kodak film, but that only seems to be the case with some of the batteries mentioned in the article (the Kyocera and LG ones near the start). If that’s the real problem – counterfeit batteries with the manufacturer’s logo on them – then be honest about it.

Greater, cheaper availability of the correct, manufacturer-approved batteries would be beneficial for the manufacturer in terms of aftermarket sales. If it means selling them with reduced margins in order to drive other manufacturers out of the market, then so be it. If the other manufacturers really are counterfeiters, passing off their products with the phone manufacturers’ logos, and the batteries really are dangerous as claimed, then there’s (potentially) a lot of brand damage going on.

The problem of exploding lithium batteries clearly isn’t insignificant – the following images are from a US Army/Naval Surface Warfare Center presentation [PDF] linked in the MAKE post:

Images from http://proceedings.ndia.org/5670/Lithium_Battery-Winchester.pdf

But, as commenter ‘unterhausen’ points out on the MAKE post:

“The risk of Li-poly batteries is independent of the manufacturer to a large degree. The problems come when they are damaged, shorted, overheated, or overcharged… Any Li-poly of the current generation will have the same problems… The chips are anti-competitive nonsense.”

This is an interesting area of debate, and likely only to become more prevalent as energy storage technology becomes more advanced. Will fuel cells for vehicles have authentication ICs built in? You bet.

How will ‘they’ do it with hydrogen fuelling stations, though? Will the pumps/dispensers themselves have a chip which ‘handshakes’ with the vehicle? Will you have to use ‘Toyota’ branded hydrogen for your Toyota to start?

The opportunity’s there, in a way that it never was for standard batteries, petrol, etc, in the past. Few people were naïve enough to buy solely Duracell batteries for their Duracell-branded torch (flashlight) because they thought it ‘would work better’, but when it comes to a device which only works when the manufacturer’s own branded batteries are used

It does make me wonder, though, why Henry Ford never got into the gas station business – was it just antitrust legislation that would have prevented it? General Motors and Standard Oil apparently colluded, and GM also co-owned the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation that held patents for the tetra-ethyl lead added to fuels from the 1920s onwards – which surely provided a large degree of economic lock-in (more GM cars sold = more TEL sold = even more money for GM) – but there was no technological lock-in.

Today we have technology that does allow technological lock-in, and it’s becoming cheaper and cheaper to deploy.

Nevertheless, if WGA does have a kill switch, and does remotely kill off 50% of Windows’ user base over night, that’s just going to be good news for GNU/Linux adoption, and Apple. There’s not going to be any perfect substitution, that every copied installation of Windows has lost Microsoft $xxx therefore by preventing those installations from working, Microsoft will recover $xxx from each user. Sure, they’ll make some more money, but the loss in goodwill will more than offset that. Vastly more than offset it.

Anyway, I thought the following post by LilBambi had some great, succinct observations on this topic, plus the general ‘architectures of control’ mindset and its implications for a free society:

“Some have suggested that only those who are doing something wrong would worry about such things. To them I say, get a life! Either you are too young to know history and should start reading about history, or too foolish to think the transgressions of governments against citizens across time and countries wouldn’t be so much easier in such an environment. Freedom and liberty are not something that are given, they are earned and must be diligently maintained or they will be lost.

Until recent years, I have loved Windows, even Windows XP which many have a love/hate relationship with!

But no more … I really have had it with ‘copyright holders’ who think just because they made something that they can reach across a wire or the air to restrict what you do with what you buy or put whatever they want on your computer hardware (or make computer hardware that you pay for with disabling abilities in it that can be remotely disabled) just because you bought their hardware, OS, software, music or movie. This IS NOT what US copyright law or US patent law was supposed to do, nor what it was until Disney, Sonny Bono and the DMCA.

And just wait for Vista …. as the saying goes … you ain’t seen nuttin’ yet!

If you are not familiar with HDCP ['trusted'/treacherous computing], you should be….check out … Understanding HDCP for more on what’s coming to computer hardware, software and Vista…

The list of hardware vendors now supporting HDCP is staggering. They make it out to be some great thing, the greatest marketing ‘parlor trick’ of all time. But pretty soon there will be NO FAIR USE of what you buy, just as the entertainment and software/OS cartels have been drooling over and wanting all along.

BTW: There are also recent postings on Blu-Ray, HD DVD, Big Media, broadcast flags and the DMCA as well here on my blog and they all tie together to show how easy it will be to remove ALL fair use rights you have ever had and enforced by our own tax payer funded government.

And what happens when all the backbones in this country are on this new ‘restriction enabled’ hardware? Will the backbones be forced or unwittingly, or knowingly install the new enabler operating systems and software? Will there be new ways to constantly monitor users, restict access, create toll roads that the broadband providers want, suppress information, personal freedoms, freedom of the press and more? Will there even be a land of the free and home of the brave? Only time will tell. “

Henry Porter’s chilling Blair Laid Bare – which I implore you to read if you have the slightest interest in your future – contains an equally worrying quote from the LSE’s Simon Davies noting the encroachment of architectures of control in society itself:

“The second invisible change that has occurred in Britain is best expressed by Simon Davies, a fellow at the London School of Economics, who did pioneering work on the ID card scheme and then suffered a wounding onslaught from the Government when it did not agree with his findings. The worrying thing, he suggests, is that the instinctive sense of personal liberty has been lost in the British people.

“We have reached that stage now where we have gone almost as far as it is possible to go in establishing the infrastructures of control and surveillance within an open and free environment,” he says. “That architecture only has to work and the citizens only have to become compliant for the Government to have control.

“That compliance is what scares me the most. People are resigned to their fate. They’ve bought the Government’s arguments for the public good. There is a generational failure of memory about individual rights. Whenever Government says that some intrusion is necessary in the public interest, an entire generation has no clue how to respond, not even intuitively. And that is the great lesson that other countries must learn. The US must never lose sight of its traditions of individual freedom.”"

My blood ran cold as I read the article; by the time I got to this bit I was just feeling sick, sick with anger at the destruction of freedom that’s happened within my own lifetime – in fact, within the last nine years, pretty much.

Regardless of actual party politics, it is the creeping erosion of norms which scares the hell out of me. Once a generation believes it’s normal to have every movement, every journey, every transaction tracked and monitored and used against them – thanks to effective propaganda that it’s necessary to ‘preserve our freedoms’* – then there is going to be no source of reaction, no possible legitimate way to criticise. If making a technical point about the effectiveness of a metal detector can already get you arrested, then the wedge is already well and truly inserted.

Biscuit packaging kind of pales into insignificance alongside this stuff. But, ultimately, much the same mindset is evident, I would argue: a desire to control, shape and restrict the behaviour of the public in ways not to the public’s benefit, and the use of technology, design and architecture to achieve that goal.

Heinlein said that “the human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire”. I fear the emergence of a category who don’t know or care that they’re being controlled and so have no real opinion one way or the other. We’re walking, mostly blind, into a cynically designed, ruthlessly planned, end of freedom.

Related: SpyBlog | No2ID | Privacy International | Save Parliament | Areopagitica

*Personally, I have serious doubts about the whole concept of any government or organisation ‘giving’ its people rights or freedoms, as if they are a kind of reward for good behaviour. No-one, elected or otherwise, tells me what rights I have. The people should be telling the government its rights, not the other way round. And those rights should be extremely limited. The 1689 Bill of Rights was a bill limiting the rights of the monarch. That’s the right way round, except now we have a dictator pulling the strings rather than Williamanmary.

ABC Looks Beyond Upfront To DVR, Commercial Ratings Issues (needs you to sign in – use username ‘wasteoftime’, password ‘wasteoftime’):

“ABC HAS HELD DISCUSSIONS ON the use of technology that would disable the fast-forward button on DVRs, according to ABC President of Advertising Sales Mike Shaw, with the primary goal to allow TV commercials to run as intended.

…

Shaw also threw cold water on the idea that neutering the fast-forward option would result in a consumer backlash. He suggested that consumers prefer DVRs for their ability to facilitate on-demand viewing and not ad-zapping–and consumers might warm to the idea that anytime viewing brings with it a tradeoff in the form of unavoidable commercial viewing.

“I’m not so sure that the whole issue really is one of commercial avoidance,” Shaw said. “It really is a matter of convenience–so you don’t miss your favorite show. And quite frankly, we’re just training a new generation of viewers to skip commercials because they can. I’m not sure that the driving reason to get a DVR in the first place is just to skip commercials. I don’t fundamentally believe that. People can understand in order to have convenience and on-demand (options), that you can’t skip commercials.“

It’s hardly worth commenting on this (without going off on a rant), except to note that maybe he should be talking to Philips…

“First, is it ethical to hack an Xbox or any other bit of commercial hardware? I’m not just talking about Microsoft hardware here… I’m thinking about the smaller fish that might have a good idea, but can’t make it viable to get it out of the door because their business model could be undermined by people circumventing any security they put in place.”

Other people’s failed business models should not be the concern of customers. If they’re buying the hardware, it’s up to them to do what they want with it. If customers want to do something with the hardware that the manufacturer has not anticipated, why not work with them?

“Put a free operating system into the ecosystem and it’s only a matter of time before users start looking for free (or nearly free) hardware to run it on. Problem is, it’s much easier to make a virtual product that’s free than it is to come up with free hardware.

While we’re on the subject of free operating systems (or free anything for that matter), it’s important to bear in mind that someone, somewhere, has paid for it, maybe not with money, but with their time or effort. There’s no such thing as a totally free lunch – someone, somewhere, always picks up the tab.”

This is especially naïve. It’s free as in speech, not necessarily free as in beer.

He then goes on to talk about how he “fears” that Nicholas Negroponte’s $100 Laptop may become popular in the west where it “is going to be attractive to a whole host of hackers and modders and could be used as the basis for countless projects.”

How is this bad? The more widely the system is adopted, and the more user knowedge and expertise that is generated and disseminated, the greater the network benefits for all involved, from kids in Cambodian vilages to kids in Cambridge, MA.

Indeed, a truly global, low-priced hardware system with a huge user base and huge knowledge base, modifying, improving and repurposing the hardware, including millions of users in developing countries right from the start, is surely something extremely desirable: truly the democracy of innovation.

The comments on the post contain some great analogies to help set the record straight.

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.