Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

Here I point out the “freedom stack”. This ties very deeply in with The Shadow Parliament Project. Watch and learn.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — Sweden’s Parliament narrowly approved a law Wednesday that gives authorities sweeping powers to eavesdrop on all e-mail and telephone traffic that crosses the Nordic nation’s borders.

I urge all Swedish people to start using strong crypto. Download PGP for e-mail, exchange public keys (hold parties!), and use encrypted VoIP rather than the phone system whenever possible. In fact, I don’t just urge Swedish people to do this. I urge everybody to do this.

Link

I am dumbstruck. I just heard. This is BIG. David Davis, for this, I salute you.

• BBC News (watch the video)
• Telegraph
• Wikipedia, more Wikipedia.
• Even more Wikipedia.

First, think about free cultural projects. Think about what happens when people disagree on the direction the project is taking. The project forks, right? Now, hold that thought in your head for a bit.

A new type of voting system

Now, lets talk about voting systems. When voting, a voter is presented with two functions: vote for one of the options, or don’t vote. I suggest we add a third: forward your vote to a third party.

This is the essence of “representative democracy”, but I’m talking about expanding it - in representative democracies everybody forwards their vote to a predefined subset of the people, and each representative has an equal weight in subjects. Here I’m saying anybody can forward their vote to anybody, and forwarding votes increases the weight of that individual’s vote.

The three functions of the vote:

1. Abstention
2. Direct vote
3. Elected proxy

So, for example, if Bob doesn’t have any particular interest in agriculture, he can forward his vote in an agriculture related issue to his friend Sam, whom he trusts to make the right decision about agricultural issues.

What’s more, Bob can choose to automatically forward his vote on all agricultural issues to Sam. And Sandy, who isn’t very political, but trusts Bob a lot, can choose to automatically forward her vote on all issues to Bob, except on issues about education, because she thinks her friend Tanya knows more about that.

The three options of the proxy:

1. Single issue electorate.
2. Categorical electorate.
3. Arrant electorate.

Importantly, they are all free to change their mind at any time. An agricultural matter may arise where Bob has an opinion - it’s not that he doesn’t trust Sam. It’s just that he wants to make his own call on this one. To make this viable, we need another feature: overriding. Until the closing of the polls on a specific issue, a voter may change her mind as often as she wants, and only the last decision is counted.

Changing your mind is allowed, within a generally accepted timeframe.

Consider that every single system of authority on Earth exists as a possible state of arrangement within this voting system. I should draw pictures to illustrate, but suffice a few examples:

1. Dictatorship:  Everybody forwards their vote to one person. (Let’s not hang ourselves in discussion on why this situation would arise)
2. Parliamentary democracy: Everybody forwards their votes in equal measure to the same group of people - in Iceland, 63 people.
3. Bicameral democracy: The social network is disconnected into two groups, one significantly larger. Within each of these subsets there is a parliamentary democracy configuration.

And so on.
For all of this to be viable, you need software that provides this functionality. Solving this sort of voting may be arbitrarily complicated and can only be done in a reasonable amount of time by a computer. This means, for security, we want everybody to use strong crypto - but that’s just a devil in the details, so let’s not go too deep into implementation.

For now, just assume that this software will be written. Now on to the juicy stuff.

Forking the Legal Codebase

It turns out that most countries leave their laws in the public domain. This means that by copying the laws in entirety you do not infringe on copyright. This is good. It also has the interesting side effect that there is nothing that stops you from making changes. Obviously these changes are not law, but they are still legal code.

Think of society as a running program, where the laws are one of the underlying logical components. If you change the laws, you change how the system works.

So take the voting system described above, and put it on a website. Call this your Shadow Parliament. Now, encourage every citizen of your country to sign up. Make some mechanism to ensure their identity - avoid giving people more than one account, and avoid giving people accounts who aren’t actually citizens of your polity. Now start the most interesting social experiment of all time. Two steps:

1. Every bill that appears on the real parliament is copied automatically onto the Shadow Parliament, where is undergoes the electoral process.
2. Bills can be proposed by members of the Shadow Parliament in the same way as they are proposed by delegates at the real parliament, and undergo the electoral process as such.

Slowly but surely, the two legal codebases will diverge.

How to bootstrap a Shadow Parliament

When you fork the legal code, obviously your Shadow Parliament needs to obey the laws on it, at least to the extent of the functionality of the parliament itself.

As a result, you first need to make, using the traditional legal process as described in your country’s laws, a legal parliament running on the copy. This means host general elections. There are probably some loopholes you can use to make that process fairly painless, but I suggest consulting some lawyers on how to do it “legally”. Remember that the polity you’re running is a clone, so size restrictions and other things might be a lot easier to overcome.

As soon as you have a working base of parliamentarians running on the copy, make a lot of changes to the laws (the first divergent steps) - and to the constitution! - to make a networked system legal on the law codebase. Make sure you change the laws so that forwarding votes is legal.

This is formality, but it’s something that needs to be done right in order for the experiment to work. If you botch it, somebody will call foul later on.

Making the claim

Every country has its fair share of controversial issues. These are the leverage for the next step. As the experiment continues, the legal system will diverge more and more as the real parliament and the Shadow Parliament show that they are representing the parliamentarians, the lobbyists, and the corruptors on the one hand, and the people on the other.

When you’ve got enough divergence, there might be reason to suggest that perhaps the legally elected legislature of your country isn’t actually doing its job properly, if indeed its job is to be the face of democracy. At some point during the divergence process, if you get enough traction, you’re going to have at least a few parliamentarians who start acting on the results of the Shadow Parliaments own votes. (By all means be careful to have closing dates on issues at least a few hours before they close in the real parliament!) These parliamentarians will be representing democracy, yes, but they will also be fueling the fire, because if they’re just doing exactly what the Shadow Parliament wants, why have them there at all?

So, when you have enough divergence, you might suggest a global merge of the two legal code projects - that the “real” parliament merges the differences from the shadow parliament into their own. This will mean that the Shadow Parliament’s lineage of law will legally supersede the old Parliament’s laws, and will effectively take over the legislative wing of your country’s government.

The cool thing

This is my hack. The beauty of this is equivalent to the beauty of the GPL. Richard Stallman recently chided me for using the word “viral” to describe the GPL… so I’ll refrain from using that word… but essentially, this idea has a few features that make it bulletproof.

The first is that the people in power won’t like it at all, but they cannot (legally) stop it from happening.

The second is that even though it is inherently subversive, the more people that know about the idea and understand its implications, the better.

The third is that it leads to more freedom, far more freedom, a kind of freedom nobody has ever experienced. It isn’t even Utopianism, that’s the great part. Proof of concept exists, right here, in this article. Now we’re only months away from running code.

In response to my podcast of the other day, Fenn asked:

How should one go about building a post-scarcity society in a patent-and-copyright-encumbered intellectual climate?

There’s no easy way to answer this, as the answer is neither obvious nor uniquely defined. I can posit three suggestions that I think are deeply related:

1. First, one of the things that will inevitably happen over the next decade, which has been going on for the past three decades, is that the idea of copyright will change. We are accustomed to an extremely rigid system for copyrights, born out of a greed which no longer really has any place in the realms of man in our new digital reality. Those who wish to uphold the old form of copyright are increasingly having to criminalize children and family folks, and any system which marginalizes the majority of the population (by stamps of unethicality, criminality, or whatever) is doomed to die (in the cybernetic sense) eventually.
2. Second, there has been a lot of talk about manufactured scarcity on Global Swadeshi recently, and in a number of other places. This has relevance here: We already live in a post-scarcity society on a number of levels. We haven’t achieved full cornucopia yet, but for all intents and purposes nobody should be want of anything. The only thing stopping us from having this kind of global equality is the patent-and-copyright-encumbered intellectual climate of which you speak. But that intellectual climate isn’t self-organizing. Rather, it’s a result of the assumption of scarcity, which leads people to believe they can’t survive without property, which leads to greed. This may sound simplistic, but it needn’t be more complicated. So if you want to build a post-scarcity world, start by breaking the current system and replacing it with something better. This can be done in a number of ways and I don’t support any single one more than any other, but as a rule the less violence applied the better.
3. Third, there is the option of doing the subversive hack. Nokia, amazingly, heralded this in the hardware market by saying that their patents were free for use in free/open source projects without royalties, and that they would not allow companies that did not follow the same guideline to use their patents. This was a big win, and completely parallel to the GNU General Public License or the Creative Commons licenses. Basically, these licensing schemes are viral in nature, and the more you spread the meme the stronger it becomes. Because of this I have been discussing open hardware licensing with a number of ‘big guys’ over the last couple of months, and I happen to know that Richard Stallman and Neil Gershenfeld have been discussing this issue (Neil told me the other day…).

Or, taken into short form:

1. Just wait, the problem will solve itself.
2. Encourage the problem to solve itself by political activism. (And btw, anarchism is the way to go)
3. Push for subversive licensing methods and adopt free hardware licenses that are hostile towards patents.

On the third note, I think I’ll take the liberty of posting a few highlights of the mails thrown back and forth under the topic “Open Hardware License” a couple of months ago. I hope nobody minds.

The discussion started with Michel Bauwens asking about Open Hardware Licenses, or more generally, Open Source Physical Objects,

What do we need to have “economically-significant, replicable, open source physical production efforts?”, i.e. true Distributive Production. Marcin Jakubowski proposes a set of OSE Specifications to judge such efforts.
Key entries: Free Hardware Design, Open Development, Open Customization ; Open Design, Open Hardware, Open Innovation, Open Source, Open Source Product Design, Open Source Hardware
See also: Citizen Product Design; Co-Creation; Co-Design ; Desktop Manufacturing ; Peer Production Entrepreneurs ; Self-organized Design Communities
Open Source for Appropriate Technology: Instructables, Honeybee Network, Appropedia, Howtopedia, Demotech
Sixteen Key Technologies for an Open Habitat. Marcin Jakubowski [3]
Key organizations: Open Design Foundation ; Open Hardware Foundation
Typology by degree of openness: Closed Hardware; Open Interface, Open Design, Open Implementation
The Open Source Product Design platform has a list of Open Design projects
MAKE magazine “has managed to regenerate a previously static culture of do-it-yourselfers at a feverish pace”
The Village Forum focuses on how we design and build our habitat.
The P2P-Design Delicious tag monitors the topic

Vinay Gupta said:

The issue is patents. Open Source derives it’s power from copyright law - they use the property right of “copyright” and then pool it by using the GPL and other such licenses which rest on copyright.

Patent is a huge pain in the ass. You could do an open source patent pool, but that’s a very expensive and hard to manage undertaking.

So… one option is to work in the domain of no property rights - public domain - which is where a manufacturing technology goes if it is disclosed without patents, or is patented but the patent has expired.

But then what if you publish your design, then somebody makes a small tweak which kind of perfects your design, and then patents their tweak - without a patent on the original item, you can’t require them to release their changes for general use, because there’s no property right that you hold which applies to their work.

A problem, for sure, in terms of doing Open Manufacturing in the same vein as Open Source.

And later followed up:

I’m not sure we need an open hardware license. I’m also pretty sure that we need to investigate other approaches to protecting IP other than copyright and patent, because neither one really expresses the essence of what we’re trying to get at here. Copyright and Patent are two forms of Imaginary Property: we could easily create a third form of Imaginary Property that suited our needs, although it wouldn’t have legal status unless new laws were passed, or old ones amended.

To which I responded:

The problem with Open Source licenses on physical objects is that even though they might do the trick in a legal context, it isn’t what they’re designed to do, so the wording is all wrong. It’s like selling vodka as a disinfectant. It’ll do the job marvelously, but a lot of people will remain skeptic.

Conversely I think doing an “Open Hardware License” would be missing the point to a certain degree - the boundaries between hardware and software are bound to grow increasingly fuzzy as we draw closer to digital fabrication (let alone molecular assembly), and even if we lump those two together we’d be neglecting all the other kinds of “intellectual property”, such as ideas, etc.

I consider patents to be harmful by design. Their original purpose, to spur innovation, worked to a certain degree but it certainly doesn’t scale (much like the republic) - as soon as you have a certain number of innovators, they find their options limited by the number of existing patents, and the patent system becomes counterproductive. Bounty based systems may be better for certain purposes, but this is an issue I haven’t seen anybody nail properly yet.

Which brings me to my point: What we need isn’t just a new license, it’s a new terminology for dealing with “objects”, both physical and imaginary, something that encompasses both snugly, fits in with modern legalese and does the job patents were originally intended for without artificially stifling innovation or stepping on anybody’s toes.

Once we have that kind of framework, a license that applies in general terms to all these things will probably follow somewhat naturally, and that has the potential to handle software, hardware, biomass or whatever humans need to possess.

Marco Fioretti joined the conversation, with:

A much more effective and easier to implement solution may be to simply:

- reduce duration in time of patents
- do not allow them in some fields: software, living things…

if it ain’t completely broken, that is if there is an intermediate
solution that puts an end to all or almost all the harmful
consequences, why make the effort to fix it completely?

Michel Bauwens then replied:

Concerning the new terminology, are you aware of Spimes as a concept,
http://p2pfoundation.net/Spime, explained in this video,
http://p2pfoundation.net/Bruce_Sterling_on_the_Internet_of_Things_and_Spimes

The only beef I would have with Bruce Sterling’s concept is that it relies
on paying for online designs, which I think is not realistic,

some other license related links:

http://p2pfoundation.net/Talis_Community_License

http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Design_License_Agreement

Here is the perspective of the TAPR open license people, taken from
http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Hardware_Licence

I hope Lawrence is not objecting to being copied on this, busy as he must
be?

Michel

From http://www.tapr.org/OHL.

You can download pdf versions of the proposed licenses through this site.

“The TAPR Open Hardware License (”OHL”) provides a framework for hardware
projects that is similar to the one used for Open Source software. This
isn’t as straight-forward as it seems because legal concepts that work well
for software (such as copyright and copyleft) don’t neatly fit when dealing
with hardware products and the documentation used to create them. The OHL
deals with Documentation, which describes a project using elements such as
schematic diagrams, CAD/CAM files, and Gerber files, and Products which are
based on that Documentation.

Like open source software licenses, the OHL permits Documentation to be
used, modified, and distributed to third parties. Unlike software licenses,
it also addresses how Products based on the documentation can be made and
distributed. The OHL’s requirements are aimed at encouraging the community
to develop, use, and improve open source hardware — and to prevent others
from turning that hardware into closed, proprietary products.

The OHL does not address software, nor does it address firmware or code
loaded into programmable devices such as FPGAs. These fit much more closely
into a software licensing model than do the physical objects that the OHL
attempts to cover, and we encourage developers to use open source licenses
like the GPL for them.

One important, and unique, component of the OHL is a patent immunity
provision. In short, the OHL requires each person who uses the Documentation
to promise that they will not sue others who make Products based on that
Documentation for infringement of any patent they control. This ensures that
the community is protected from patent claims by those who benefit from the
community’s contribution.

Another unique aspect of the OHL is a provision to provide feedback about
modifications. Open source software licenses steer away from obligating
those who make modifications to pass those changes back to earlier
developers or other users. For a number of reasons, particularly our belief
that hardware fixes and improvements, especially for safety issues, should
be made known to those who may be making or using Products, we felt that a
public feedback provision would be valuable.

At the same time, we wanted to minimize the burden of such a provision, and
the loss of privacy that would result from requiring developers to provide
their email addresses. So, TAPR will provide a mechanism to report
modifications to a central archive that will be visible to anyone. The
requirement is structured so that if the mechanism fails (if, for example,
TAPR should disappear), the rights granted by the OHL will not be affected.

The Open Hardware License allows Products to be used for any purpose. An
alternative version, the TAPR Noncommercial Hardware License, is identical
to the OHL but limits Products to noncommercial use only. While open source
licenses normally don’t allow restrictions on use, there is a big difference
between software and hardware that we believe justifies offering this
option.

While there is no real cost in compiling or copying open source software,
someone who wants to make Products available to others confronts upfront
costs of making circuit boards and obtaining parts. It’s often
cost-prohibitive to do this in small quantity, so the developer who wants to
make his or her Product available, even on a non-profit basis, has to make a
substantial up-front investment. That investment is at risk if others can
compete commercially with him. The Noncommercial Hardware License addresses
this concern. ” (http://www.tapr.org/OHL)

[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Hardware_Licence?title=Open_Hardware_Licence&action=edit&section=2>
]
Context and Commentary

From Instructables at http://www.instructables.com/forum/EEMFZXN1G5EXCFLKHF/

“Recently, people over at tapr.org released drafts of open-source hardware
licenses. I got the following message from Jonathan Kuniholm at Duke asking
for comments on the drafts: “I have spoken with each of you regarding our
interest in the infrastructure for the sharing of hardware designs. An
organization with its roots in amateur radio and open source software has
released a draft of two open hardware licenses ( http://www.tapr.org/OHL ).
I believe that the inspiration is primarily electronic hardware, but the
concept addresses issues we have encountered in our work with The Open
Prosthetics Project and its parent organization, the newly incorporated
Shared Design Alliance.

We have been interested in the ways that we might protect those who choose
to share designs for public good from the possibility of having those
designs patented out from under them or otherwise removed from the public
domain, as well as helping them avoid the cost and time delays of patent
protection for efforts from which they are not trying to profit. These draft
licenses also address liability issues, which are another can of worms. I
would be interested to hear thoughts from folks more knowledgeable than I
about the effectiveness and potential pitfalls of such measures, given the
difference between the issues surrounding physical designs and patents (for
which there is currently no open license option outside of patent-related
measures), and those surrounding items traditionally protected by copyright,
which can currently be released under Creative Commons or GNU licenses (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ , http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html,
http://www.fsf.org/ ).

The TAPR folks have invited comment on their draft, and I think that this is
as good an effort as I’ve seen so far. If you have interest or expertise in
this area, please submit comments through the TAPR site, and please forward
this to anyone else you know who may be interested.” (
http://www.instructables.com/forum/EEMFZXN1G5EXCFLKHF/)

I piped up again, saying:

Thanks for that link, I wasn’t familiar with Spimes. But I’ll agree with your beef. I had a conversation with my good friend Dhananjay Gadre of the Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology in India about exactly this issue - I was pitching to him a concept I had for a “Sourceforge for Objects”, like the flipside of Make Magazine that was intended as a warehouse for digital design patterns. Originally, I had intended for authors of objects to be able to have people pay for downloads, going for the GNUesque stance of “free as in free speech, not as in free beer” trend.. but Dhananjay objected, pointing out a very important fact:

- Most innovation done in the world today is being done By the developed world For the developing world, and this is clearly the wrong way to do things. Enabling people running a collective warehouse of digitized objects to demand money from one another for use of their intellectual possessions would only widen the gap between the developing and developed, instead of reversing the innovation cycles and putting the power in the hands of those who need it, which is essentially my end goal.

In the end I came up with two methods of addressing this. On the one hand ask for donations rather than demanding money. The other method was applying a PPP-valency matrix to pricing schemes. Let me coin the term: A PPP-valency matrix is a NxN matrix, V, of the ratios between regional PPP’s (with tr(V) = N, and prod(V) = 2N, by design.).. the concept is to take the “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” mantra and apply it to the actual economy, so the amount of money you get from objects is relative to the ability of people to pay for them. The problem with this method is it’s extremely hard to implement in a way that doesn’t beg for abuse, and after doing a few paper napkin Monte Carlo simulations (yes, I’m a geek), I’ve seen that there’s an inherant feedback loop in this thing that could cause instability in the long run. It can be fixed, but I’m not sure how.

Regarding Spimes on a more technical level, there’s an AI point here. Searching physical reality for objects is NP-hard. If we were to apply Bruce Sterling’s idea at face value, we’d end up with a world where you Google your toaster, and it just goes through all known reality searching for the RFID that matches your toaster. This would be stupid.

AI researchers fit into two categories these days: the people who want the AI’s to understand everything, know where everything is, and use deep searching to solve their problems, and the people who want the AI’s to understand context. The first group would just search the entire space for matching concepts. The latter group would narrow the search down to kitchens at first and expand only if necessary. The problem is, despite the best efforts of smart people ranging from John Von Neumann to John McCarthy to Noam Chomsky, we still don’t understand the nature of “context” well enough to actually implement this kind of thing. And actually understanding context might lead us to a far smarter way of doing this that is currently obscured by our limitations.

… after which the conversation pattered out into pointless chit-chat. We didn’t reach any useful conclusion, but I think there were a lot of very good points in there. What I’d like to do is get the big names in the game to stick their noses together and come up with a Much More General Public License - one that doesn’t just apply to software, but to anything. If that seems unreasonable, then I’d settle for a GPL-lookalike that addresses the key issues of free/open hardware, which is definitely one of the things that’s going to be hardest to fix for the purposes of a post-scarcity future.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how the game has been played so far, or that it’s being played unfairly, but only that we are in the unique situation that we can change everything, forever, by playing the game right now. In a world where everything can be a bitstream, what are we going to do?

Earlier this year a group of people in Reykjavík started a not for profit organization called Lindy Ravers, for Lindy Hop dancers in Reykjavík. The purpose of the organization is to increase awareness of swing dancing and Lindy Hop in particular, and create a social forum for practitioners of the dance.

When the organization was founded I managed to convince Þórgnýr, one of the key people involved, that we should make a very different set of bylaws than are commonly adopted by similar organizations. After almost four months of success I think it’s time to describe the concept here.

The laws are available here in Icelandic. I’ll translate the significant ones into English:

Article 6. [All] the members of the organization form a council that governs the organization. The organization chooses four representatives, thereof one foreman, by way of election, at every council meeting. No member can be a representative for more than three years in a row.

This law is interesting because of the words “at every council meeting.” But those words aren’t important without the context of the other laws, so I continue:

Article 7. The foreman of the representatives calls representatives together as justified by need and interest. Representatives take care of everyday execution of the organization, such as organization of singular events, financial organization, etc.

Nothing interesting there really, except that you can note that the “representatives” are more like unpaid elected employees of the organization than any kind of authority - they aren’t given any right to make large scale decisions.

Article 8. Laws can be changed at council meetings. Any three members of the organization can request that a council meeting be called, and shall this be done at least once per year. Representatives oversee organization and advertisement of such meetings. Council meetings are open to all, but only members have right to motion and vote.

Put this into context with  article 6. The representatives are elected at every meeting (if no changes need to be made then unanimity will make this a formality) and you only need three people to cause such a meeting to be called. The barrier for revolution is lowered significantly, and one could even suggest that it is encouraged.

Article 10. There are no membership fees. The organization is granted authority to accept and retain money for any sort of workshop, class, or other events that members organize and allocate funds on behalf of its members. Any surplus funds at the end of the year remain in the organizations funds.

The last sentence is a legal formality ordered by Icelandic law. What’s interesting here though is that it isn’t the representatives that are granted the authority to manage funds, but the organization as a whole. This means that any transfer of funds is open to democratic debate, but as per article 7, if no debate arises then the representatives can continue with everyday business.

Article 11. Funds from the treasury may only be used to pay for the business of the organization. This includes but is not limited to rent of premises, hiring of teachers for longer or shorter periods of time and purchase of any essentials. Should any dispute arise a council meeting should be called. Representatives are obliged to seek good deals for all costs.

Here the frame for representatives executive power is clarified. The point that any dispute should refer to a council meeting is another option for revolution.

The idea, in case you missed it, is simple: The people have the power, and they do not give it away, they just refer tedium to a subset of the polity with the safeguard that any misuse of the severely limited power granted to the subset can be called out and fixed with minimal hassle.

Further, unlike a lot of organizations, the “executive body” does not have a monopoly on organizing events. Rather, each member is able to start an initiative on his own accord and has the organization as a supporter and a framework (both legal and social) for these initiatives. Initiatives are run by individuals, not by the organization.

The idea of building revolutions into the system as a method of self-correction is one that conventional authority is deeply afraid of. People who are in power in countries and so on today know that if the people had the authority to call for re-election if there were any suspicion of misconduct, they would quickly loose their jobs. (There is an issue of scale here: how big can the polity be before the re-election rate becomes so high that it is essentially impossible to remain stable? The obvious answer is to enlarge the number of members needed to call for an election, but not too much - in most countries this power exists, but the number of people needed for such a demand is so high that it is unattainable in practice.)

So far there has been one revolution in Lindy Ravers. Since the organization has this built into the legal framework this was an entirely peaceful revolution, and all others will be. The change made in the representative body was that yours truly was removed from the subset of representatives on account of being unfit - since I currently work in Vestmannaeyjar I’m not able to fulfill my duties as a representative in Reykjavík, so I got swapped out. Quick and easy. Perfect.

Þórgnýr informed me tonight that there is one organization that has had similar laws for more than six decades, and most people don’t realize it: Alcoholics Anonymous. Indeed, their charter’s first bylaw states:

1. Final responsibility and ultimate authority for A.A. world services should always reside in the collective conscience of our whole Fellowship.

The rest can be found here. This is an extremely social cry: let the people be governed by the people for the people. It is grounded in a faith in the ability of the individual and the ability of individuals to work together. Whilst most political theories put either the group or the individual first, the anarchist way is to recognize the inherent symbiosis between individuals and groups and acknowledge that one cannot function without the other.

This realization is important, and may matter a lot in coming years.

On another note, this is interesting: Gresham’s Law and Alcoholics Anonymous.

The OOXML got a ‘yes’ vote from Norway. Here is why. It is amazing what power bureaucrats have over the decision making process of allegedly democratic nations. “Political standardism” suggests that once a standard has been accepted by a nation it should be universally upheld - but in light of the decision making process demonstrated so thoroughly in this case, and very likely in various other cases throughout the history of international standards, one has to consider that standardization is also potentially harmful.

Consider that when I plug an electrical appliance into a wall socket I can safely assume that I will get 220 volts of current from it. It is standard. If I’m in America, I can assume 110 volts. Any variation from the standard is very specially signaled - and while one could always check what current each wall socket has (and make the assumption that it won’t suddenly change at a whim from the power company), the reason we choose not to is to minimize the amount of sanity checking we need to do in our increasingly complex environment. (Here I could go tangential into infinity on why ISO 9000 is a terrible idea.)

So we use standards to minimize noise in the communication channel that is physical reality. If the standards change regularly they have failed us. If they are contrary to reality, they have failed us - i.e., if a standard is unimplementable, bares little resemblance to the way things actually are, or does not encompass the full extent of reality. (example: RFC1918 defines three unroutable networks, but in reality there are four: 192.168.0.0/24, 10.0.0.0/8, 172.0.0.0/16 and 169.254.0.0/8. The last is de facto but not de jure.)

So of what use is OOXML? It is subject to whimsical changes by Microsoft, it has been shown to be unimplementable in reality (without resorting to certain undocumented hacks), and since it is harder to implement than competing standards such as ODF, in reality it is more likely to increase noise than decrease it. (As any fly on the wall in my office can attest to.)

It turns out that what was one of the most promising open source mesh wifi projects of its day has been overrun by profiteering bastards who have closed up the source, possibly illegally, and have instated a governing policy for the hardware they sell that is reminiscent of Microsoft’s XBox 360 tactics and, well, most commercial out-of-the-box hardware being developed these days.

In this great article the story is told of a Vancouver based free wifi activist group who got repeatedly ass-fucked by Meraki and their fluctuating policy. This story underlines but one thing: the demand for open source hardware is increasing, in part due to the fact that the OEM producers are becoming increasingly totalitarian with their hardware.

Through a month’s worth of discussion about Open Hardware licenses on a small backwater mailing list (consisting of many of the smarter people in the field of open licensing) I’ve come to realize that the need is augmented by the thresholds created by hardware manufacturers - with electronics fabrication techniques becoming increasingly complex, the ability of Joe Public to fabricate such revolutionary open hardware such as Sun Microsystems’ OpenSPARC II is severely limited, even to the degree that I’ve given some thought to how hard it would be to get a small chip fab into the Fab Labs.

As I said previously in an article that appeared on the Peer-2-Peer Foundation’s blog: The problem with Open Source licenses on physical objects is that even though they might do the trick in a legal context, it isn’t what they’re designed to do, so the wording is all wrong. It’s like selling vodka as a disinfectant. It’ll do the job marvelously, but a lot of people will remain skeptic.

Conversely I think doing an “Open Hardware License” would be missing the point to a certain degree - the boundaries between hardware and software are bound to grow increasingly fuzzy as we draw closer to digital fabrication (let alone molecular assembly), and even if we lump those two together we’d be neglecting all the other kinds of “intellectual property”, such as ideas, etc.

This holds. With the sheer number of projects attempting to create blanket mesh wifi for urban areas, such as Vancouver’s FreeTheNet and related software/hardware projects such as Peernet and B.A.T.M.A.N, it’s only a matter of time before the Genie gets let out of the bottle.

The community must prepare for this.

As Cory Doctorow showed in his fantastic novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, besides the huge technological barriers to achieving free mesh Wifi are the “capitalistic” barriers of the phone companies not really wanting people to do that kind of thing and being very bent on stopping them.

Point in case: My ISP, Hive, leases out wireless routers to their customers and does not allow their customers to use other endpoint equipment than their own. The equipment is locked and password protected, so they can access it from their headquarters over some telnet route but I cannot log in to it myself. As a result, the ESSID and the wep key cannot be changed by me. I could not blank out the wep key and open up my network even if I wanted to. Or, let’s say I could: then I would be in violation of my service agreement with them. Actually, even telling my friends the wep key when they visit so we can play a game of OpenTTD over the wireless is in violation of the service agreement. Not that that’s going to stop me.

As much as I understand Hive’s policy in not letting the lemmings tamper with the settings on the router, which would cost them endless hassle in incompatibility, repair service and lengthy telephone arguments with know-it-all PFY’s who’ve just botched their GPIO settings and can’t connect, I’m afraid their policy is more suited towards blocking uses that would be legitimate if the ISP’s were selling uplink access as opposed to personalized tyranny.

Because that’s what ISP’s are: They’re service providers, and their service is uplink. As soon as they step outside that box they’re well on their way towards blocking legitimate uses. It would be as if a grocery store were to ban customers from opening tin cans bought at their store, lest they cut themselves on the lid; or worse, would forbid customers to share bananas bought at the store with their friends, lest the friends figure out a way to stage a bank robbery using the bananas.

A friend of mine is renting an apartment in down town Reykjavík, and the landlady has provided wireless Internet to her tenants. Allegedly. The truth is the signal is extremely flaky and only perceivable in one room in the apartment. However, due to the virtue of the immensely thick carpet of wifi in the city center, there’s more wireless access points in her vicinity than is strictly possible to shake a stick at. During our frustrating moment the other day when the granted wireless connection was failing to impress, we stopped for a moment to consider breaking into some of the AP’s and using them.

Ethically, I’m not opposed: Anybody who locks their wifi is blocking a resource that others could use on egalitarian grounds, given just a hint of altruism. To wit, I think anybody who willingly blocks their wifi is behaving criminally towards their fellow humans. Legally, I can’t see any objection: There are no laws, to my knowledge, banning people from connecting to uplinks when available, and WEP keys are not really locks so much as just a simple obfuscation technique to prevent discourage eavesdropping.

In the end the only reason we didn’t do it is I didn’t have any software to crack the WEP keys. Since then I’ve been thinking, perhaps I should have just gone door to door in the neighborhood asking people to submit their ESS ID’s, WEP keys, addresses and WGS84 coordinates to a public pool.

But even if we did do that, the telco’s are not altruistic. They are not fond of egalitarianism. Their interest in liberty, and equality is none. We need open hardware, and we need a battle plan.

A rant of mine on the issues of open hardware licenses just popped up on the P2P foundation’s blog:

The problem with Open Source licenses on physical objects is that even though they might do the trick in a legal context, it isn’t what they’re designed to do, so the wording is all wrong. It’s like selling vodka as a disinfectant. It’ll do the job marvelously, but a lot of people will remain skeptic.

Conversely I think doing an “Open Hardware License” would be missing the point to a certain degree - the boundaries between hardware and software are bound to grow increasingly fuzzy as we draw closer to digital fabrication (let alone molecular assembly), and even if we lump those two together we’d be neglecting all the other kinds of “intellectual property”, such as ideas, etc.

…

Link