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- MCP server with stdio transport for local use
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Episode: 1237
Title: HPR1237: Cory Doctorow tribute to Aaron Swartz
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1237/hpr1237.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-17 22:07:37
---
Hi everybody, my name is Ken Fallon, and several of you have contacted me to see if
Hacker Public Radio could do anything to mark the passing of Arn Schwartz.
In that period of time, I was listening to the commanderline.net where Thomas Gideon
featured a speech by Corey Doctreau who was on a book tour for his new book, Homeland,
and instead of talking about the book, give possibly one of the best and more moving speeches.
Thanks to Corey and indeed Thomas for arranging the use of that clip here today.
Links to the various different websites can be found in the show notes for this episode,
but first a few moments of silence.
So hi, I'm not going to read from the book because there's podcasts of me reading it in which all
the places where I habitually make mistakes have been edited out, and so they will sound better
than me reading it to a person. Instead, I will talk about what English teachers inevitably call
the themes of the book, although the only book that can be properly said to have a theme is the
novelization of Spider-Man, which has the Spider-Man theme. I'm going to talk instead about the ideas
in the book and it takes the form of a recent history lesson that starts in February of 2010
in a town called Lower Marion, Pennsylvania, which is an affluent suburb of Philadelphia,
the kind of place where they can afford to give MacBooks to all the students. So all the students
get free MacBooks and they take them home every night and they bring them back to school every
morning. Their homework assignments are given to them over the network, they turn them in
over the network, and this is the only device they're allowed to use at school. So it's kind of a
mandatory laptop. And in February 2010, a student named Blake J. Robbins brought a lawsuit against
the school district because his high school principal had called him in and said, Blake, you're
taking drugs. And he said, I don't take drugs. And his principal said, well, can you explain this
and show them a photo of himself the night before in his bedroom, taking what looked like a pill.
And the young man said, well, that's not a pill. That's a Micah Nikes candy. I eat them all the time.
And how did you get a picture of me in my bedroom? And that's where the lawsuit kicks in.
What we found out is that the school, quite correctly, assumed that the students would have their
laptops stolen or that they would lose them. And so they put some anti theft software on the laptops.
Now in any other world, we would just call the software spyware because what it let them do
was activate the camera over the internet and take a picture that they could see without the
little green light going on. And you know, Anton Chekhov, he says, if you put a gun on the
mantelpiece and act one, it'll go off by act three. If you give school disciplinarians the power
to spy on students in September by February, they'll be a lawsuit as it turns out. And so there was
this lawsuit. And as the lawsuit unwound, we found out that they had normally taken this picture of
this one kid one time. But of course, they'd taken thousands of photos of many students that they
suspected of being disciplined issues in some way, including photos when they were undressed
photos when they were at home at school photos, when they were in the company of people who weren't
students, their parents, other kids, their siblings. And in the wake of it, the school promised
and all the laptop schools in America that were doing this were formed their ways such that
they would no longer do this. They would no longer secretly install software that let them
covertly take photos of kids in their schools. Instead, they announced that they had installed
software on these laptops that they could use to take pictures of these kids. Because,
as you'll know, if you've studied your Panopticon, you don't have to tell people that you don't
have to hide the fact that you're spying on children in order to terrorize them into obedience.
It actually works better if you tell them that they can be spied upon at any time because then
they'll internalize the surveillance, right? The Germans they call the policemen inside.
So, let's move to Germany, 10 months later, September of 2010, when a group of fun-loving,
free-wheeling hacker troublemaker types called the Chaos Computer Club, who were the right kind
of troublemakers, getting the right kind of trouble. They outed the government of Bavaria
for secretly installing software spyware on the laptops of people that they suspected of being
some kind of disciplinary issue. And this software, they call it the Bundes-Trojaner or State
Trojan, like a Trojan horse. The Bundes-Trojaner, being 10 months more recent than the stuff they
were using in Lormarian, could do video, could do audio, could grab screen grabs and keystrokes
and plunder the hard drive. And moreover, a CCC show that once you reconfigured that machine,
the infected machine so that it betrayed its owner, it presented many risks to the owner,
because not only could agents of the state use the Bundes-Trojaner to spy on an infected
computer's owner, but anyone else could too, you could go to a Starbucks or any other place where
people gathered on a single wireless network, use your laptop to scan for infected systems,
and then hijack those systems too, you could ride piggyback on the state intrusion.
So, now we'll go to September 2012. In September 2012, the Federal Trade Commission
settled with eight companies. Seven of these companies were in the rent to own business,
they rented to own life's necessities to people who couldn't afford to buy them outright,
and were willing to pay for them four or five times owner over in order to possess them,
because they felt that they needed them to participate in society. And of course,
the top suspect for that used to be cars, these days it's laptops. So, these seven companies,
they rented to own laptops, the eighth company made laptop security software. They're called
designerware. They were based in northeast Pennsylvania. You can probably tell where this is going
to end up, right? So, the settlement with the FTC, the eight companies stipulated that they'd
use designerware's product to spy on the customers of the rent to own companies, and that they'd
not only taken stills of them, but they'd recorded video of them, and they'd recorded video of
them having sex, they'd recorded video of their children in the nude, they'd intercepted lots of
private communications emails and communications from doctors and HMOs, privileged communications
from lawyers, stuff from their bank, their financial records, as well as their passwords,
they'd audio bugged them, and they plundered their hard drives for any files that looked interesting.
And the FTC, they settled with these eight companies, and they're the consumer watchdog agencies,
so they did what you hope they would do. They forbade them from doing it anymore. They said,
you can't do this anymore, you must stop it unless anyone would guess? You tell them, right? Yeah,
if you disclose it in the long, gnarly, useless, hairball of legalese that you have to click through
so many times a day to participate in 21st century society, you can basically do anything.
Now, consumer union, they tell us that it would take 27 hours a day to read through this legalese,
so you can be pretty sure that nobody reads all of it, but I think most of us read none of it,
and there's a good reason that you never read it before you click I agree. The first reason not
to read it before you click I agree is that if you've ever read one, the one thing you can be
certain of is that you absolutely don't agree with anything in it, right? Because they all boil down
to some version of, by being dumb enough to use this product, you agree that we're allowed to
come over to your house and punch your grandmother in the mouth and wear your underwear and make long
distance calls and eat all the food in your fridge, or a local equivalent, you know, insert the
Twitter or Facebook or Gmail equivalent here, and so we don't read them because why bother,
and we don't read them because the worst thing that they could do to us is what kick us off the
service, make us get a different Gmail account, big deal, right? Well, maybe it's worse than that,
because in 1986, Congress passed the first major anti-hacking law in this country,
the Computer Broad and Abuse Act, and rather than list all the things you weren't allowed to do
under the law, which would have been a long list and obsolete by 1986.5, instead they just said
anytime you exceed your authorization on a computer that doesn't belong to you, you do something you
haven't been permitted to do, everything not forbidden is mandatory, you are in violation of the law
and you can go to jail, you're a felon. So, along comes federal prosecutors who put two and two
together, they go well on the one hand, we've got this long list of stuff that you're forbidden
from doing in the terms of service, and on the other hand, we have a statute that says when you
do something that you're not authorized to do, you're a felon, and then we have these people who
do things that we don't like, and we can bring felony charges against them for violating the
terms of service, because everybody's always violating terms of service, and guess what?
People plead guilty when you do that, because people plead guilty when you indict them period,
97% of the people who are federally indicted in this country plead guilty and never argue their case.
So, either our prosecutors are the greatest prosecutors in the history of the human race,
and they're so psychically good at their job that they only get it wrong 3% of the time,
or there's something rotten going on, or there's coercion going on, where the threat of extended
sentences and a horrific and inhumane prison system that's so overcrowded, the Supreme Court has
ordered California to start releasing prisoners who haven't served their sentences, because no matter
what they've done, they don't warrant the kind of human rights abuses inherent to being shoved
into a overcrowded prison system, that people are willing to plead out to three years in jail,
rather than face 50 years in jail, and the prospect of bankrupting their families on the way to
defending themselves. There are people going to jail now for computer fraud and abuse act violations,
because they plead guilty. People whose crimes are things like adding one to the number at the long
web address when they were looking at their AT&T customer record, discovering that if you did
that, you were looking at someone else's AT&T customer record with lots of confidential information
that could be used to compromise them, outing AT&T for bad security practices and finding
themselves in the receiving end of a federal indictment for their trouble. But there is someone
who didn't settle out, someone who was indicted under the CFA as well as other statutes,
and we're going to talk about briefly tonight, someone who helped me write this book,
someone you've heard a lot about lately, for reasons that are not very nice,
an old friend of mine named Aaron Swartz. I met Aaron in around the year 2000 when he was just
a little kid. He was 14, but he looked younger, and he was one of these prodigy kids,
his parents didn't bother sitting into school. They kind of homeschooled him for certain values
of homeschool, which just means like he was bright and they turned him loose and said go learn stuff,
he's very curious. One of the things he got really interested in was how the internet worked.
He got involved in internet standards bodies where they hammer out the technical
specifications of the internet itself. Though the standard he was taken with was something called
RSS 2.0 without getting into a lot of details is a way that computers and the internet can talk
to each other, which is what every internet standard does approximately. There were many standards
like it, but this one was Aaron's. Aaron got involved in this stuff and participated. So
meaningfully on the mailing list, they didn't know he was a kid. They invited him down to the
meetings. They started to say you should come out, we do face-to-face and San Francisco and the
like, you should come on out. And he had to say you know what, I don't think my mom would let me
because I just turned 14, right? And so after they got over their shock of the fact that this
was a 13-year-old who've been helping them out, they really wanted them to come out, right?
They wanted to meet them. And luckily for them, there was a reasonable facsimile of an adult
on this mailing list, a woman named Lisa Ryan, who's terrific and was my girlfriend at the time.
We're still great friends. And she offered to Shaperonum as kind of a representative from
the standards body. And so his parents would put him on the plane in Chicago where he lived.
And we'd pick him up in San Francisco where we lived. And we'd squire him around town. We'd
take him to the meetings. We'd take him out for dinner. We'd introduce him to nice people.
We'd marble at his horrific, horrific eating habits. Aaron only ate white food. French
fried potatoes, boiled potatoes, pizza with nothing on it, boiled rice, but not fried rice,
because it wasn't white enough, white toast. And you know, you'd hear him talking. You'd go like,
this is a very bright kid. And if he doesn't die of scurvy, he's really going to go soon.
2005, he joined the company Reddit. They gave him the title co-founder. He contributed some
pretty important code to Reddit and made it the site that it are today. When Reddit got bought
out by Wired and his parent company, Condé Nast, they moved him into the Wired magazine offices
where he did not thrive. He was not meant for a desk job after a series of breathtaking and
escalating acts of public disobedience. And in subordination, he was shown the door and wished
all the best, which is precisely what he went on to do. In 2008, he got involved with a federal
database called Pacer. Now, there's two kinds of law in this country. There's the Congressional
Law, the statute books. You've seen the I'm just a Bill's Schoolhouse Rock video. You know how that
works, right? And then there's the pointy end of the law, the judge law, which is the law that
the judges make when you argue your case in front of them and they weigh your case in the balance
and read what the other judges have written about other cases like yours and utter an opinion,
issue an opinion in which they write down. Now, all the statute books are a couple of good-sized
bookshelves, everything that Congress has passed in 1776, but the judge law is a couple of good-sized
libraries. Everything judges have written since 1776. So historically, it's been hard to lay
hands on it because there's a lot of it and it's expensive to reproduce. And yet, to know the law
is to read the judge law. It's not enough to read the statute books. Those of you who are programmers,
the statutes are the requirements document, the judge law is the source code. You need both,
right, to understand the law. So in the 1980s, Pacer took the judge law online. It was an early
federal database to put this online and they charged $0.7 a page to understand how antiquated
this was. It was measured in pages. Somehow, they decided that there was a thing called a page
of internet. And so they charged by the page, $0.7 a page, which, you know, given that you might
have to look at hundreds of thousands of pages, especially in the 1980s, when $0.7 was $0.7
could add up, right? And, you know, but they had to pay for the computers, which were big and
bulky and stupid and expensive and the specialized skills that it took to administer and the enormous
bails of hay that the Brontosaurus is that powered the wheels by going around and around eight day
in and day out to keep the Pacer system running. But by 2010, 2011, 2012, it was kind of an
anachronism, right? Because now computers are fast and cheap and small and you could run the
whole thing off a DS, you know, you could you could seat it on on the pirate bay with a thousand
seeds and let anyone download their own copy of it. But instead of making it cheaper, for some
reason, they made it more expensive. It went up to 10 cents a page. So some people at Princeton,
some activists, they decided that they would make Pacer public because there's a funny thing about
the law, which is that it doesn't belong to anyone. It's not public property so much as it's
no one's property. You can copy the law, you can share the law, you can make copies of the law,
you can charge money for the law, you can do anything you want once you have the law. So they
created a service called recap, Pacer backwards. And the way recap worked is you plugged it into your
browser when you went to pay for a page of Pacer, first of a check to see whether that page was in
recap. And if it was, you got it for free, you got the copy from recap. And if it wasn't, you paid
your 10 cents and your page went into recap. Aaron liberated $1.5 million worth of federal law,
the 20% of law most widely cited and put it and it ended up in recap, which we all thought was
completely cool and amazing. The FBI did not think it was cool and amazing. They staked him out,
they opened a file on him, they began surveillance. Then they brought him in for questioning without
his lawyer present. And this is a public service announcement. If anyone from any law enforcement
agency would like to speak to you, you should ask to have a lawyer present. I said this the other
night when I was giving this talk in San Francisco, this is a 24-city tour. In San Francisco, I said this
and a woman came up afterwards to get her book sign and she said, by the way, I work for the FBI.
And I said, oh cool, what did you think of my advice that no one should talk to the FBI unless
they have a lawyer present? She said that is excellent advice. So there you have it from the
horse's mouth. Don't talk to the FBI with a lawyer present. Don't talk to law enforcement
with that lawyer present. That's what Aaron did. He didn't talk to the FBI with that lawyer present.
He got off and was fine. But it didn't end so well the next time. In February or in 2010,
Aaron got involved in another big database project. This one was with a database called JStore,
where we store all of the scientific and technical articles published in the journals. Most,
if not all, but most of these things are publicly funded. They're either coming out of public
universities, government agencies, public research institutions, or private institutions with
public funding. So we paid for the science and the science is the truth of the world, right?
It is our best understanding of how the world actually works. Scientists, mine crumbs of reality
all day long and they publish it and it gets aggregated in these big databases. So if you want
to know the truth of the world, like say when someone comes along and says, you should vote for me,
I know the truth of the world and I can make it better. And you want to find out whether
their theory of how the world works conforms to our best available evidence. You should be able
to see the science, especially since you paid for it. And you should also be able to see the
science because we never know who's going to make something cool out of science. Last week, I was
listening to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as it happens that a young man from Baltimore
on the radio who had been spolunking around JStore and found an article on carbon nanotubes that
gave him an idea for detecting pancreatic cancer early. And you may know pancreatic cancer kills
most people who get it because we detect it so late. It's too late to do anything about it.
He spammed John Hopkins Cancer Research, sent it a thousand emails, 999 of them were unanswered.
One of them came back from a researcher who said, this is not an entirely stupid idea. We should
talk about it. The reason this kid was on the radio is because it worked. They're shipping, right?
An early test for pancreatic cancer. And on the radio, he said, I don't know who's going to have
the next great idea. And that's why I think what Aaron did was so important. So JStore,
the journal articles are either free for you if you go, if you're in a big research institution
or fancy private university or a well-funded public school or a very well-funded private school.
But otherwise, you have to pay for every article, whatever the journal's charged, $10 to $50
an article. And so it's kind of weird that we have to pay for our science. So what did Aaron do
with this science? Well, by 2010, he was a fellow at Harvard and down on the road up Massachusetts
Avenue, there was another big well-funded private institution, MIT. Aaron started going over to MIT
where they have this very progressive policies. Anyone can hang out at MIT. You should. If you're
ever in Cambridge, Mass, go hang out at MIT. It's great. It's like real genius, but real, right?
You can use their Wi-Fi. They make it public. That's cool, too. And their Wi-Fi, best of all,
hooked up to JSTOR. You can access JSTOR all you want when you're on campus at MIT. They pay for
that. So here comes Aaron and he starts downloading thousands of articles on MIT's network.
Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. The network administrators try to shut him down.
He plays cat and mouse with them for a while, trying new ways to get around them. And then
finally, I guess he figured enough was enough. So he broke into a wiring closet on campus at MIT.
Now, when I say he broke into a wiring closet at MIT, you probably think he like defeated the
biometric locks on a level three biohazard containment facility. But it's not like that. The
closet that Aaron broke into, his nefarious breaking and entering method was turning the door knob.
And this wiring closet was one in which many people turned the door knob. A homeless guy kept his
clothes in it. Aaron went in and he plugged his laptop straight into the network and started
downloading articles by the million, which is when they caught him and when they charged him
with computer fraud and abuse act violations. And when they told him that they thought they could
put him in jail for 50 years. But Aaron didn't settle. He had money. He thought he was in the
right. After all, what had he done up into that point? He was entitled to the articles.
He just downloaded them automatically and he plugged his laptop into the network, right?
So are we really going to put someone in jail for taking too many books out of the library?
That's crazy. Plus, he knew some good lawyers. He was hanging out with Larry Lessig. He
fought it. But they fight dirty. They issued a press release. They said, we're going to put him in
jail for 35 years because stealing is stealing, whether you do it with a crowbar or a laptop,
suggesting that federal prosecutors not only don't understand laptops, they also have only a vague
understanding of crowbars. But they also started to bleed him out. They wouldn't give them the
documents to which he was entitled. His defense would go and request these documents that he was
supposed to get right after the indictment and the judge would order the prosecution to turn
them out and the prosecution wouldn't. And they'd send the lawyers back to do it again and again.
Running out of money, right? Starting to have to ask friends for money to continue his defense.
It was rough, especially considering that now he was looking at the 35-year indictment. It was
pretty, pretty hard. But he kept fighting. He fought a crappy internet copyright regulation
called SOPA, which you will all be familiar with. At least you'll know that there was a day
last year when none of the kids in America could do their homework because Wikipedia went black
in protest of SOPA. Remember this, right? So when I was in DC like a week before SOPA and I
talked to people and the general consensus inside the beltway was don't bother. There are enough
congressmen and senators who've taken enough money from the affected industries and who've been
told that they can, that they will get no more money the next election cycle that this thing is
going to pass. You can't beat it. Decide instead what you're going to do in a world in which this is
law. That was a crappy answer. And groups fought at groups here, New America and public knowledge and
CDT and ACLU and so on fought at the American Library Association. But all these little activist
groups across the country sprang up to do it too. There was the group Aaron had founded,
Demand Progress. There was another group out in Cambridge Mass fight for the future,
EFF, some of the usual suspects. And together all these different groups and ad hoc coalitions
beat SOPA. And they beat it through all kinds of groovy, cool new activist moves, right? Like not
just sending petitions to Congress. But you know SOPA, it had this provision that said if you have a
website where people are allowed to talk to each other, a message board for your little league team
where you talk about who's bringing the Gatorade and who's got the car pool, you were responsible for
policing it for copyright violations. So if someone posted something, you had to make sure it didn't
violate copyright. So somehow you, as some person who's like main expertise was coaching a
little league team, had to be able to understand the nuances of copyright law. But not only that,
you had to make sure they didn't link to a place where copyright infringement was going on.
So someone links to Tumblr. Now you somehow have to look at all the things on Tumblr and make
sure that it doesn't infringe copyright. If you do that, I'm here to tell you there are things on
Tumblr that you will never unseen no matter how hard you try, right? But it went in beyond that.
There was like wonder after this that said you are responsible for policing it so no one links
to places where they are linking to places where copyright infringement takes place. So as soon as
someone links from Facebook to the message board or message board to the Facebook, you have to make
sure nobody ever links from Facebook to the pirate bay. End of the internet as we know it. It becomes
the next generation of cable TV companies can talk to us. We can't talk to each other and we never
get to say we're back to them. So one of the groovy activist moves was to create a widget where if
you had a website that would be killed by this, a place where people could talk to each other,
you could put up a little piece of JavaScript and when people visited your website it would say,
hey, hi, you've heard of this soap thing? Yeah, I'm going to have to shut down if it passes.
What's your zip code? Oh, okay, well here's your congressman and here's your senator and here's
a button you can click to call them up right now. And we put 8 million phone calls through to congress.
And they realize that no matter how hard it is to get reelected without campaign funding for
major donors, it's much harder to get reelected without votes. And that was the end of SOPA.
And it was great and we celebrated and we partied and we were proud of ourselves and I think
Aaron was proud and pleased of himself too, but clearly this stuff weighed on him. They would
meet with the prosecutors and the prosecutors would say there was no deal on the table that doesn't
involve jail time, a million dollar fine and a felony conviction so you can't vote, you can't hold
off as you can't be a doctor or teacher or work with kids. In the congressional hearings that just
went on into the prosecutors intimated that one of the reasons they did this was that they felt
that it would be embarrassing having indicted him not to have him go to jail. They wanted to make
sure that they wouldn't lose face. So last January, about six weeks ago now, two years of the day
after Aaron's arrest, Aaron killed himself in his apartment in Brooklyn, which you probably already
know. So here I am going around with this book as I say, Aaron helped me write. And I'm trying to
figure out what to say about all of this stuff. And one thing I know is that Aaron did none of this
because information wants to be free. I had a long heart to heart with information and it confessed
to me that the only thing it wants is for us to stop anthropomorphizing it because information wants
nothing but people want to be free and you make people free with good information. You make people
free with the law. Knowing what the law says makes you more free than someone who doesn't know
what the law says. You make people free with science. Knowing the truth of the world makes you
freer than not knowing the truth. You make people free by letting them know what their devices are
doing so that they know that they're not betraying them or spying on them or doing something terrible
to them that compromises them. But in this country, we don't make laws that assist that. In this
country, we make laws that stand in the way of it. Like in 1998, we passed the Digital Millennium
Copyright Actor, DMCA. The DMCA is another parade of horrors that I could talk about all night,
but I'll just call your attention to the anti-circumvention provision. It says that if you make a device
that has a lock that the manufacturer put in it to stop you from doing something, kind of the
computer equivalent of selling you a fridge with a butter dish screwed closed because you didn't
pay for the butter dish feature. That removing the lock, changing the computer, the device,
so that it does the thing the manufacturer would prefer you not do, is illegal, even if doing
that thing isn't. And it's illegal to tell someone had removed the lock. And it's illegal to tell
someone what they need to know to figure out how to remove the lock. So you might have a phone
that's locked to the Apple store. It might have an iPhone or an iPad. And removing the lock is
illegal, right, so that you can install software that Apple hasn't put in the App Store. Maybe it's
the app that tells you every time a drone kills someone in Pakistan that Apple rejected because they
don't want people thinking about drones and people dying in Pakistan when they use Apple products.
Removing that lock is illegal, telling someone had to remove the lock is illegal. Well,
kind of. The copyright office every three years, it holds hearings into maybe we should have
some exceptions to this. So they made an exception to allow you to jailbreak phones but not tablets or
iPods, but that exception doesn't include to making circumvention tools to unlock your device
or telling someone how to make it or using them or sharing them. So if you can unlock your iPhone
without doing any of those things, it's legal now, but it might not be legal in three years. But,
but it's not totally illegal unless it's an iPad, right, or maybe you have an Nintendo 3DS, right,
and this is the device that lots of kids carry around. It's a game device. These are the devices
that are in their living rooms and that are in our pockets and have the potential to compromise us
in all kinds of ways and that are thousands of times more powerful than the computers you were
using 10 years ago. Maybe you've got an Nintendo 3DS, the Nintendo 3DS has a little thing in it
that locks it so that you can only run software that Nintendo has put in its store and collected
some money for. And so if you want to play a homebrew game or a game that someone wanted to sell you
without having to give Nintendo a cut, you have to unlock it. Every time you turn on your 3DS,
it tries to connect to the internet and call the mothership to see if there's a new operating system
for it, even if you don't want it to. And having found it and downloads it and installs it,
even if you tell it not to. And once it's installed it, it reboots itself and checks for tampering.
And if you've tampered with it, it switches itself off and it never switches itself on again.
That's the end of your 3DS. And it's illegal to find out how that lock works, tell people
how that lock works or disable that lock. So security researchers, they go around and they find
out how our devices work. They find out about the bad stuff lurking in them that compromises
in a thousand ways. Because your phone fills your pocket and you take it with you into the most
intimate context and it knows who your friends are and knows what you say to them and it knows
where you've been and it knows every one of your secrets. And so to find out whether or not it's
an honest servant, you have to take it apart to see what it's doing. And researchers who do this
are quite rightly afraid that they'll get into trouble, like Trevor Eckhart, who found out that
the carriers had put spyware called carrier IQ on 141 million phones that they sold to the American
public. He found this out because he was looking at Android phones, which are legal to take apart
because they're not as locked as the Apple phones. And then he later found out that it was in the
Apple phones too by examining for the traces that he knew what to look for once he'd found this
in the Android phones. This spyware could capture all of your keystrokes, including your short
messages, your passwords and so on. It could plunder your files, including your photos and it
could know where you were and send all this to third parties. And when Eckhart went public,
he faced legal threats because he was embarrassing these companies that now paper over this by
putting it in their terms and conditions. So when I get this talk in Seattle at the start of the
tour, a woman put her hand up and said, you're scaring me, how will I make my devices secure?
And I said, you won't make your devices secure. I won't make my devices secure. No one of us can
make our devices secure. But if I just finished telling you about waterborne parasites, you wouldn't
say, how will I make my water supply secure? Where will I get the water filtration plant? How will I
inspect the sewer system and make sure that it's not going awry? Right? We regulate water with
gravitas. We regulate it like it's a matter of life and death because it is. But networks are
matters of life and death too. And yet we regulate them like they were fax machines attached to waffle
irons. Like they were the next version of cable TV, mobile phone 2.0. You know, the world's greatest
pornography distribution system, not like the nervous system of the 21st century, a time when
everything we do involves using the internet and at a time where shortly everything we do will
require using the internet. We fail to treat these with the respect that they deserve.
So why do we do this? Why is it so rotten? Well, the cliche, which is I think true, is that the
system is corrupted by money. If you are a lawmaker, your job is to get reelected and the way to get
reelected is by raising a lot of money and the way to raise money is by making rich people happy
and the way to make rich people and companies happy is by passing laws that make them richer and
with their additional riches they can give you more money to get reelected. Lather rinse repeat
for a few election cycles, throw in citizens united. And the next thing you know, it's a felony to
find out what your computer is doing. Right? So when I wrote this book, I wanted there to be in it
a election campaign that wasn't based on money. Where people use computers to figure out how to
get elected by people who liked their ideas rather than by people who thought that they would
make them richer. And so I asked all these different election strategists that I knew people who'd
worked on on Dean, on Obama, people who worked on Republican campaigns. What's your best shot at
using computers to get elected without a lot of money? And what they gave me was interesting,
but it was inside the beltway and inside the box. So I wrote to Aaron thinking, oh in a couple
of days he'll shoot me some bullet points, some stuff. I bet you he's thought about this.
Now an hour later he shot me back a full-fledged design document for what he called the machine
for getting votes. A way to use social media and networks to put votes into a campaign based only
on the candidate's integrity and the voters wish to see that candidate in office. And it was so good,
it was shovel ready. I pasted it straight into the book. All except for the last two sentences,
which were got to go. I'm going to go do this now. And the last Cody checked into GitHub before he
died was clearly related to it. So we get to decide. Here we are making the future and we get to
decide. Are we going to have a future where the computers listen to us? Were there default
posture as yes master? Are we going to have a future where the computers boss us around? Were
there default posture as I'm sorry I can't let you do that Dave? We get to choose. Are we going
to use free systems where it's legal for people to figure out what's going on in them so
the shenanigans can be detected and corrected or are we going to use systems that are locked
where nobody is allowed to tell us if they find something rotten going on in them where they
might compromise us in a thousand ways because the world is made of computers. Remove the computer
for most of our buildings and those buildings become uninhabitable. What that tells you is that
buildings are in fact specialized cases for computers that we happen to live in. Your car is a
computer that hurdles down the road at 50 miles an hour with you in it surrounded by other humans
trapped in computers likewise hurtling at 50 miles an hour. The 747 I flew from London where I
led to Seattle where I started this tour a couple of weeks ago. That is a flying Sun Solaris
workstation in a fancy custom aluminum case connected to some badly secured Scota controllers.
So not only do we live with our bodies inside of computers we're putting our computers inside of
our bodies now. So some of you like me are Walkman generation some of you are iPod generation.
We will all log so many punishing earbud hours that there will come a day when we'll need hearing aids.
When we get those hearing aids they will probably not be retro hipster beige plastic analog transistor
numbers. They're going to be computers that we insert into our bodies that will know what we hear
that will be able to stop us from hearing things that will be able to make us hear things that
aren't there and to tell people what we're hearing so we have to get this right we have to know
we can trust our computers unless that sounds futuristic and far fetched. Let me tell you that
it's actually a tone down version of what's already here because last November just a few months ago
a researcher named Barnaby Jack gave a presentation at an Australian security conference on implanted
defibrillators to our amazing technology if you have a heart condition in the doctor thinks that
your heart is going to lose the rhythm and you'll die as a result she can anesthetize you and
cut you open and reach into your chest cavity spreading your ribs and attach a computer to your
heart with its own little battery and the computer will listen to your heart beating and if your heart
misses the beat it will give you a little shock that brings you back right and doctors well they
want to know what this thing is doing after they put it in your chest cavity and attaching a
wire to something that is inside your test cavity is messy and so it's got a wireless interface
and that's where Barnaby Jack comes in because from 30 feet away he can detect your defibrillator
and reprogram it so it seeks out other defibrillators to reprogram and he can cause them to seek
out other defibrillators defibrillators to reprogram and then either at some random time or at a set
moment in the future they can deliver lethal shocks to their owners so this is not something that will
become a matter of life and death this is a matter of life and death now I asked Adam for some
Aaron for some other help with this both this and the book that came before a little brother
have a series of afterwards two afterwards each the first one has an afterward by the
cryptographer and security expert Bruce Schneider who explains why our bad security thinking
means that we get nonsense security measures that make us less free and less safe the other one was
by a hacker a hardware engineer named Bunny Huang who when he was a grad student and MIT broke
the security on the Xbox and made it so you could boot the Linux operating system can new Linux
operating system on it so that you could run your own programs on it use it as a computer
he wrote a great book about it that you can download for free or buying stores it's called the
hacking the Xbox great title says does what it says on the tin and it explains how to be a reverse
engineer how to think like a reverse engineer for this one I got Jacob Applebaum to write one
of the afterwards and you may know Jacob as a volunteer for the WikiLeaks project he's also
a volunteer on the tour project which is a project that builds censorship resistance surveillance
resistant network tools that are used by dissidents by radicals by people who work in fortune 100
companies where they block Boeing Boeing by students to get around sensorware and to get around
surveillance he wrote a great editorial or great afterward about you make writing code that makes
us more free using technology that makes us more free and then Aaron wrote me an afterward and he
wrote me an afterward that's a letter to someone who is thinking about how to make the world better
explaining the mindset that went into defeating sopa and what you can do to fix it and in the end of
it he writes it wasn't supposed to happen this way a rag tag bunch of kids typing on their laptops
is not supposed to be able to stop one of the most powerful forces in dc but we did it and we
can do it again but it only works if you take part which is really the message of this talk and
only works if you take part we get to choose what future we are going to live in you can choose
to use free and open source code and free and open source devices but you can also choose to
help us understand the public health issue that is networks so you can join organizations like
the electronic frontier foundation and creative commons and you can give money and energy and time
and join the mailing list of organizations like the campaign for democracy and technology
like the like the new america foundation like demand progress errands group like the fight for
the future coalition they all need your help they all need your time they all need just your name
on a mailing list so you call your senator at the moment when it does the most good all of those
are ways that you can substantially help and what's amazing is that there are so many of these
groups that I could write all their names off all night because 15 years ago there was a bear
handful of them and now this is proliferated because everybody is starting to understand that
this stuff matters because everybody is starting to see that networks matter in ways that go beyond
cable tv or the profit maximization strategies of the internet or the wiretapping fantasies of
the security apparatus and so people are joining the struggle every day and it's what makes me
hopeful for it and I hope you'll take part two but before I finish the talk and move on to
questions there's one more thing I'm going to talk about it's a very short bit a coda and the
reason is short is it's not a subject on any kind of expert on but it's something I told errands
family I would talk about when I told them I was going on the road with this book and it's suicide
and depression so people do get depressed and sometimes it's easy to tell why you're depressed
sometimes you're under a 35 year indictment sometimes you are have money problems or romantic
problems or job problems sometimes you've got problems with abuse or alcohol or substances
sometimes it's something in your past you can't exactly recall sometimes you may not even be able
to put your finger on it because maybe it's just bad chemicals it's hard to tell sometimes but
whatever it is people get low and you can get so low that you may think you'll never get up again
you may find yourself in a place that's so dark you think you'll never see the light again
you may feel like the world would be a better place if you weren't in it and people feel that way
more than we talk about I felt that way we don't talk about it our world allows us to connect
with one another in ways that we've never seen before we know so much about each other I can look
at your four square check-ins and see where you are I can look at your Facebook page and see what
you're talking about I can look at your Instagram and see what you're eating but unless I ask you
and unless I listen very carefully I might never find out what you're feeling it's easy to look
at all those check-ins to look at that stream of information that comes off of all of us and
assume that everything's okay but you have to take an affirmative step you have to do something
we can use our networks to take care of each other in ways that we've never dreamt of there's a
thing I would have said to Aaron if I thought to if I thought to ask if I'd known what was going
on and I'm sure all of his friends would have said things like this I never said it to him I'm
gonna say it to you because maybe you'll get a chance to say it to someone else or maybe you'll
need to hear it sometime and it's this whatever problems Aaron was facing killing himself didn't
solve them whatever problems Aaron was facing his problems are now unsolved forever if he was
lonely he will never again be embraced by his friends if he was despairing at the fight he will
never again rally his comrades with his strategy and leadership if he was sorrowing you will
never again be lifted up into joy so it's kind of a low note to end this on but the high note is
we get to choose we get to choose if we're going to have technology that makes us more free or
takes freedom away we get to choose if we're going to use that technology to atomize us and
alienate us from one another or to take care of each other we get to choose and like Aaron said
it only works if you take part thank you
so now we have some time for questions I'll remind you that a long rambling statement
followed by what do you think of that is technically a question but not a good one
and there's a microphone going around so if you want to give it to this gentleman here
or in fact why don't you take it there I'll just repeat his question you you work your way back
there go ahead I can speak pretty loud okay thanks for coming I saw your webcast
it framed that last year but we had a misconnection so thank you for trying and thank you for coming
today also it framed connects last year Aaron gave an amazing speech I heard you all look it up
statement connects Aaron's words amazing video about you know the end speech I do very good one
yeah yeah that was a great conference and one of the subjects that was net neutrality can you
want to talk a bit about sure the question is what about net work neutrality so let me define
network neutrality really quickly for you using a very sharp example that I like I first heard it
from Craig from Craig's list he says it came from someone else so who knows where the credit is
but here's the thing imagine you picked up the phone you called Tony's pizzeria on the corner
which makes the best pizza in town and their phone wasn't engaged it was sitting there no one's
talking on it but instead of ringing in Tony's pizzeria you got a message this is AT&T Tony's
pizzeria has not paid for premium carriage you can wait five seconds and talk to Tony or press
one to be connected to dominoes right net neutrality or the absence of network neutrality is the
idea that if you are running a network service that you can slow down or block services that compete
with the ones that you've been bribed to carry right that's that's the basic tenet of it and when
you talk to the carriers about it you talk to the telecoms about it they say well it's a free
market what do you expect we paid for those lines we put them in the in the ground and we need the
money from them to build more networks and better networks if you don't like it build your own
network and running however the heck you want but here's the thing the carriers didn't pay to make
those networks oh sure they paid for the copper but the right of way right imagine if every time
you wanted to run a cable through someone's basement or stick a telephone pole on their front
lawn imagine if you had to pay for the privilege pay lawyers to negotiate it contract it paper it
over keep up you know the next person who owns the house decides to change their mind and tells
you to move your telephone pole or get your wires out of their dirt imagine where you would end up
right it would cost trillions to run that it would exceed the GDP of the planet to build a phone
network like that so the phone companies are the beneficiaries of an enormous public subsidy and if
they don't want to run the network that we let them put in our dirt they should get their wires out
of our dirt right they will give them 60 days if they haven't got our wires out of the dirt by then
we'll pay them the scrapage fee copper is up and we'll find someone who's willing to take this
titanic public gift and run the network in the public interest and if they want to run their
networks however they want let them build private enterprise networks where every foot of right
of way has to be paid for at the market rates right and that's what I think about network neutrality
um someone in the back who has the mic there you go yeah thanks um two question
uh what about pacer what about jaystor what about pacer and what about jaystor yeah what about
pacer what about jaystor but what about pacer being it's a pacer wool because the the federal government
claimed from the vast majority of pacer users uh it's not a propensity for the service because if you
use you know uh what it deems and it's interesting to be a reasonable number of pages of legal
documents i think it's something like eight or a hundred pages of money uh baseball you know
that's really one of three right uh second question is i think the amount of information it's something
about they they instructed agencies to they get the one yeah yeah we need to make a public
sure for sure so the first one was was what about pacer so first of all it's kind of a
tutology to say that the people who use pacer don't have a problem using pacer right uh like
like everybody who uses pacer doesn't have a problem using pacer doesn't tell you anything about
all the people who aren't using pacer and particular doesn't tell you about any of the things you
could find out about the law if you could download the whole sucker and start doing analysis on it
which which is pretty important and we've seen lots of you know if we believe in the human genome
project we should bring it we should believe in the american law big data mining project too so
that's that's the first thing uh... about uh... j store uh... so yes the feds say that they're
gonna and and and the nh already requires research to go uh... into the uh... into uh... open access
or something like open access after a set period but uh... there's all the stuff that's that's
already locked away in there and we can't get access to that now there's another proposal for
getting access to this that i've heard from uh... a friend of a friend who's working on law review
article about it and i'll tell you about it because i think it's pretty cool
and those of you who are i know some of your lawyers in the in the audience maybe you'll maybe
you'll run with this uh... so if you produce a copyrighted work in the course of your normal
employment duties in the absence of any all other agreement that work uh... the copyrighted
network best with your employer it's called a work made for hire so if your job is to write research
papers at your university by default unless you sign another agreement with your university your
university holds the copyrights to those and it's arguable that academics who work for universities
and write research papers those research papers are the copyrights of their universities but
when the journal publishers hand you the take it or leave it copyright deal for publishing your
article which you have to publish in order to advance up the academic later later which says you
assign all rights to the journal publishers and and don't have any rights to the to the to the
article after you after it's published um... they don't send that contract to the university's legal
department they sent it to the academic who wrote it so here's where it gets interesting what if
you could find ten universities m it uses some favors at this point to run a class action suit
in which they said to all the journal publishers that you owe us a half-tillion dollars in DMCA
statutory damages that hundred and fifty thousand dollars per download per article and since you
don't have that much will just settle for you making it all open access and what we really
interesting is we put the publishers in the position of arguing that when people produce works
for corporations that they don't belong to the corporations which i don't think they're going to
want to argue so well-designate yeah yeah so it'd be very funny to see well-designate following
the amicus brief on behalf of the open access uh... it's it's one of those things like the pirate
bay uh... uh... in finland uh... uh... suing the fin this finish anti-piracy group for copying the
source code for their website into uh... a finish parity website anti-piracy website uh... and
finland doesn't have a parity exemption copyright because the companies that that took the source code
lobbied against a parity exemption so they're gonna they're gonna say they're gonna fight
the uh... the charge of copyright infringement by arguing that they made a parity and if they lose
well the pirate bay gets to take down this anti-piracy site and if they win they get a priority exemption
and finish law so there's it's kind of uh... it's a bit of a kobi ashi alternative
uh... yeah uh... go ahead
hi i'm my
um... um... um... i'm my romantic type of human rights and public bay um...
i'm a great question to the police
sure
one why do you think your audience has as we now
or the parents of questions like who your audience is and make up and what do you find out
um... um... to what advice would you give for an individual person with a blog
action against an individual in the government?
sorry what was the second question?
what specific advice would you just try to provide for an individual who is pursuing
the following action?
oh against the government
oh not about how to whistle blow effectively but what to do about the mental health issues
uh... uh... so how does it look like?
right
all right so why do i think my audience is mostly male? well i guess when you write books with male
protagonists uh... people tend to uh...
especially i think young adults tend to empathize with the character and find
it easier to empathize with with same gender stuff
i think the other thing though is i'm the beneficiary of a weird trend in young
adult publishing which is that uh... there is a story in publishing that only uh...
girls read uh... young adult novels and so uh... publishers reject
boy books pretty pretty roundly and and uh... make them bigger
effort to publish girl books and promote them whatever that means i mean some of them are very
obviously gendered they're they're they're gendered in a way that makes me feel creepy about
the idea that my daughter might read them because they're about uh... they're about kind of uh...
performing femininity in literature as a kind of training document books about girls who like
shopping and sort of things some of them are just have female protagonists but are
marketed primarily girls and uh... and so as a result
there's not uh... a lot of books aimed at boys and one of the things i hear a lot from teachers
librarians and teacher librarians is oh my my boys are quote reluctant readers um... and uh...
what i tell them is here's a book that boys will like and so i'm on the beneficiary for in in
some ways of there being a fairly restricted field right there's not much competition
in the world of books for boys who want to read but are going through this period of self definition
where they feel awkward about reading a quote girl book um... so i think there's that i mean for
the record i've been to lots of schools and libraries that were packed with young women
as well as young men and who are very enthusiastic about the book so i don't know if the people who
turn up at a at a at a bookstore on a school night at six thirty are representative of the audience
as a whole or what it's hard to say it's hard to get a a handle on i mean one of the things
about publishing that differentiates it from sort of new media is publishing knows very little about
who its customers are relative to something like say amazon or or google or or facebook which kind
of knows what color underwear they wear and who all their friends are right in terms of uh... what
advice but i give people who want to do whistle blowing well if somebody emailed me about wanting
to do whistle blowing i would probably uh... if they so assuming they did so in an unencrypted
way from like a webmail account i would send them a very brief email that said uh... here's a
phone number that you should call me from a phone that isn't your work phone uh... and uh... you
should delete this email and then and the email you sent me and i would delete their email and then
i would talk to them about who at the electronic frontier foundation or who it's ccc or whatever they
should talk to about good security protocol and maybe try and hook them up with jake apple balm
or someone like that to get them using tour otr which is the off the record forward secrecy
in internet chat you can download tour button which is a uh... browser uh... that that pops up uh... and
is by default secure and then it has a chat mode that allows you to chat in a way so that um...
even if the chat is intercepted and the keys are later known it still can't be decrypted uh... which
is pretty cool uh... that there's a book came out recently that jake apple balm contributed to
called cipher punks and in it jake says um... the universe likes secrets right that there is a
a weird thing about math which is that you can you can make a secret you can decipher a message
trillions of times more easily than you can decipher it quadrillions of times more easily than
you can decipher it there is buried somewhere in the deep mathematical structures of our universe
a penchant for secrecy which is cool if you know how to use it and so i would basically kind of
introduce them around individually i don't think that there is yet the one great document about
whistleblowers i mean eFF has some of these and other places have some of these it'd be great to see
it it'd be great to see it produced and and with good links to tour hidden services where you could
download binaries of good tools and so on but i don't think that's there yet
uh... how about the gentleman in the eFF shirt they're always good for
they're always good for a laugh not a rigger i promise you yes sir who i've never had any
communication with so it feels to be like a lot of our legislative battles what the world
do you feel there are areas that are particularly like where we could actually gain some rights
so how can we gain some rights well you know i i'm going to give you the larry less against her to
this because larry you'll know is one of the the parents of the modern copyright reform movement
and he's given it up he no longer cares about copyright erin didn't care about copyright erin
had forced sworn fighting about copyright he said it was a waste of time because every time
you uh... stomped a stupid copyright law three more popped up it's like it's like it's like
baba yaga and so um... larry has devoted himself instead to corruption uh... you know he points out
i think correctly that that uh... the money in politics has made politics worse and that it's
made politics iridimably corrupt so that we never get good policy policy that's in the public
interest and so he said we need to solve this and being a a constitutional scholar he looks for
solutions that may be a little bit weird on their face but that don't involve uh... having to
get a constitutional amendment through or are are often three the supreme courts to get uh... to get
uh... citizens united repeal so he uh... he proposed a system of vouchers that use it or lose it
vouchers that you could give to political candidates that all americans would get
and the political candidates who took those vouchers would have to for swear uh... private funding super
packed funding so you can have all your citizens united money but this would dwarf the citizens united
and it would make the optimal strategy for any lawmaker to get elected to uh... uh... please voters
right that's how you could get elected and reelected to make voters happy make the largest number of
voters happy which is kind of a cool idea and he's got a group called root strikers like as
in striking at the root instead of the branches called root strikers dot org and they need your help to
so that's how i would try to advance an affirmative agenda because otherwise we're fighting the
holding action i think the advantage of things like soba even though as soon as we kill soba
three more pop up is that it builds a movement right there's you know there it builds the
consciousness that we can change things go ahead
there's a lot of content on board what about the uh...
a lot of times with with e-books uh...
they don't understand what you're about but uh...
to say a few words about our official skill city
like for example if you want to check some of the e-book out of the library
right well
so here's the thing right uh...
the fact that
uh...
you can't check a book out of the library while someone else has got to check out
is in the context of the grand sweep of human history and the human project
that is a bug and not a feature right
the the universal access to all human knowledge is is a dream as old as as
infinite life extension and alchemy and so on it's it's it's a it's a utopian
vision that actually kind of lies within our grasp in ways that it's never
light lane before
and yet um...
publishers treat it like a bug instead of a feature and we you know there's
something funny going on now where you could never open on uh... you could
never invent libraries today right if you if you went out
assume there were no libraries if you proposed libraries
the the industry would never let you get away with it right if there are
they're an historical anomaly
and so uh...
uh... they they don't want there to be library like rights to e-books instead
they want e-books that are somehow restricted harper call-ins
has e-books that disintegrate after twit twenty six uses
so used to work in library so i was i was a lowly page
in and the business in urban affairs department of the north here central
uh... library where nalohawkinson also used to work
and uh...
my job is the page in addition to other things
was taping up the newspapers taping them back together
because we have to keep them for thirty days before the microfeesh came in
and i could run a newspaper
through a hundred sets of hands in thirty days
but harper call-ins says that it's
i have to say very well made books that my british publisher they were until
recently
uh... that it's but very well made books their digital analog
should should fall apart after only twenty six circulations
which is just observed
and i think that you know the fact that we have uh... universal dr m in e-books
makes them unsuited for libraries uh... and and i think that libraries
should just stop
buying
d-r-m-e-books publishing
is is worried it's running scared it's facing huge pressure from amazon and so on
and it's bullying libraries which are it's evergreen solid gold customers
and so i think that librarians don't understand the cars that they hold
it's true that in the age of austerity we started eating each other and so
sometimes you'll hear people talking smack about librarians
but honestly
is there anyone who can with a straight face a
big library
all of those librarians they got into it for the money
i mean we know
why libraries exist they exist because people are public-minded they are public
spirited right that's that's they represent that
part of our of our culture
maybe we'll do uh... one more question
while we're doing that question
you can get your non-disruptible book
right at the book store and get a couple more for you know that you know it
really is the best way to get to some of the different issues
uh... and this is an independent progressive bookstore
don't you think you can order later tonight on that they were placed
independent bookstores have this
uh...
it has to be an awesome
uh...
uh...
right
right
thank you
right
right
right
right
how can i
approach that in a mindset that would be
and how can we as
you know
future
right
how do you how do you archive
rich data rich data format metadata so that it lasts forever that's a really
really hard question i don't know that i have an answer for it
except that the thing that i'm i'm somewhat sang went about is that because
computers
show no sign of slowing down in their park in their progress
that new computers run thousands of times faster than old computers which means
that new computers can just emulate older computers
so in some ways we have a certain degree of future proofing
in that
whatever environment you build that rdf stuff in
presumably you could run that environment inside the
computers of tomorrow
like a ship in a bottle right
in terms of in terms of
metadata i mean i miss something about metadata skeptic
i wrote an essay called metacraft
which is actually apparently trotted out in a lot of library schools
it is yeah
and so i'm slightly skeptical about this is an area where i totally differed
from errand this was errands big thing was was rdf
he loved the idea
that you could say show me articles by errand that are thirty days old or less
about tractors and the internet could understand what you meant by all of those things
i just think that there's like some inherent problems to that
like you know your librarian you know the dewey decimal system
melvin dewey was weird he had strange ideas about the structure of knowledge
right and it privileges some kinds of things and not others
and there's whole dewey numbers for countries that don't exist anymore
and no dewey numbers are very deep decimal numbers for countries
that have sprung into existence but are nevertheless very important today
and you know there's there are inherent problems to future proofing this stuff
and so i don't know that i have a great answer
i like david wineberger's book everything is miscellaneous
as a kind of approach to understanding the difficulty of the metadata problem
i think it's a really really good book about what happens when you can
shelve a book everywhere in the library rather than pretending that it has one true place
so anyway thank you all for coming tonight
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