Werd I/O

Bruce Schneier had to brief a branch of government on a government agency today:

This morning I spent an hour in a closed room with six Members of Congress: Rep. Logfren, Rep. Sensenbrenner, Rep. Scott, Rep. Goodlate, Rep Thompson, and Rep. Amash. No staffers, no public: just them. Lofgren asked me to brief her and a few Representatives on the NSA. She said that the NSA wasn't forthcoming about their activities, and they wanted me -- as someone with access to the Snowden documents -- to explain to them what the NSA was doing. Of course I'm not going to give details on the meeting, except to say that it was candid and interesting. And that it's extremely freaky that Congress has such a difficult time getting information out of the NSA that they have to ask me. I really want oversight to work better in this country.

If there's this level of government oversight on the NSA - i.e., practically none - and if the NSA is actively spying on government, which seems likely, it's fair to describe them as a superlegal organization. They're effectively above the law, above the government, and above democracy. All in the name of security. Is this the kind of agency that should exist in a country whose stated principles all relate to representative democracy and individual freedom?

The following is doing the rounds on social media. It sounds like fun, so I thought I'd adapt it:

I, Ben Werdmuller, promise to send a small work of art for the first fifty people who comment on this post by replying from their own website. Twitter or Facebook is not enough. Just link to this post and let me know you want in; I'll update this and provide an easy way to do that shortly. (If you're a developer, you can get started right away.)

***You may in turn post this on your own site and make something for the first fifty people who comment they want in on your post.***

The rules are simple: it has to be be your work, made by you and the recipient must receive it by the end of 2014 . It can be anything: a drawing, photo, video, a conceptual work of art or anything in between ...

This weekend, Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich called on the world to examine Firefox's source code to protect it from NSA intrusion:

Through international collaboration of independent entities we can give users the confidence that Firefox cannot be subverted without the world noticing, and offer a browser that verifiably meets users’ privacy expectations.

Firefox is the only major web browser that's fully open source; by extension, it's the only browser that can be publicly verified to be free of unwanted surveillance code (and other malware). This is a great example of how open source software is more secure, and can be more trustworthy than closed source platforms.

However, browsers are more than their core, so it's important to bring up the issue of plugins and components. These are not necessarily as verifiable, so users should proceed with diligent caution. (Perhaps a site could be established that verifies software and plugins in an auditable way?)

For example, the closed-source h.264 video codec has typically not been supported by Firefox's core code. Instead, the browser links to operating system libraries if they exist, or can use the Adobe Flash plugin to play these videos. In most cases, neither the OS libraries nor the Flash plugin are open source, and therefore are not verifiable. Additionally, you may remember that Cisco has released a component that will allow for cross-platform h.264 support:

We plan to open-source our H.264 codec, and to provide it as a binary module that can be downloaded for free from the Internet. Cisco will not pass on our MPEG LA licensing costs for this module, and based on the current licensing environment, this will effectively make H.264 free for use in WebRTC.

Note that it's the binary module, not the open source codec, that will be license-free, and this is what will be incorporated into Firefox:

We are grateful for Cisco’s contribution, and we will add support for Cisco’s OpenH.264 binary modules to Firefox soon. These modules will be usable by downstream distributions of Firefox, as well as by any other project.

This remains a great move by Mozilla, because it opens up sites like YouTube (and latakoo) without forcing users to install Flash, but it does mean that the h.264 codec component in Firefox will be unverifiable. In turn, this continues to highlight the importance of truly open source, license-free media codecs, not just to maintain a healthy software development ecosystem, but to protect all of our privacy, too.

The problem is not that there aren't any open source h.264 implementations; it's that the MPEG-LA issues licenses for the technology based on patents it controls, which effectively means that anyone who wants to create h.264 files at scale must build significant license costs into their model. Cisco's binary distributions include an agreement that they will pay for these license costs.

It's worth noting that Mozilla continues to work on Daala, its fully open source codec, and Google has made some strides into kind-of-license-free video with VP9. However, h.264 has established itself as a standard - we use it at latakoo for that reason - and is unlikely to be displaced in the near future.

I found this piece about the "do what you love" mantra challenging:

By keeping us focused on ourselves and our individual happiness, [Do What You Love] distracts us from the working conditions of others while validating our own choices and relieving us from obligations to all who labor, whether or not they love it. It is the secret handshake of the privileged and a worldview that disguises its elitism as noble self-betterment. According to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love. If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.

It goes on to describe how this way of thinking actually erases peoples' work:

But by portraying Apple as a labor of his individual love, Jobs elided the labor of untold thousands in Apple’s factories, conveniently hidden from sight on the other side of the planet — the very labor that allowed Jobs to actualize his love.

The whole piece is worth reading.

I don't think it's completely right, but there's no doubt that "do what you love" comes from a place of privilege, and is only available to a small subset of people. It certainly shouldn't diminish the work done by other people, as the article rightly points out. And there is an implied distinction there, which implies that someone is somehow less of a person if they aren't in the privileged position of being able to work in a particular way.

That implication is unjust, and harmful in a variety of ways. From a technology standpoint, I find myself coming back to the obvious questions: How can we empower? How can we help remove these kinds of divides? And then wondering if these are the right questions at all.