CONTET - Cap. 25: All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites
Normal 0 14 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 / Style Definitions / table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabella normale"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} (Paper delivered at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, 16 March 2005) AOL hates spam.
AOL could eliminate nearly 100 percent of its subscribers' spam with one easy change: it could simply shut off its internet gateway. Then, as of yore, the only email an AOL subscriber could receive would come from another AOL subscriber.
If an AOL subscriber sent a spam to another AOL subscriber and AOL found out about it, they could terminate the spammer's account. Spam costs AOL millions, and represents a substantial disincentive for AOL customers to remain with the service, and yet AOL chooses to permit virtually anyone who can connect to the Internet, anywhere in the world, to send email to its customers, with any software at all.
Email is a sloppy, complicated ecosystem. It has organisms of sufficient diversity and sheer number as to beggar the imagination: thousands of SMTP agents, millions of mail-servers, hundreds of millions of users.
That richness and diversity lets all kinds of innovative stuff happen: if you go to nytimes.com and "send a story to a friend," the NYT can convincingly spoof your return address on the email it sends to your friend, so that it appears that the email originated on your computer.
Also: a spammer can harvest your email and use it as a fake return address on the spam he sends to your friend. Sysadmins have server processes that send them mail to secret pager-addresses when something goes wrong, and GPLed mailing-list software gets used by spammers and people running high-volume mailing lists alike.
You could stop spam by simplifying email: centralize functions like identity verification, limit the number of authorized mail agents and refuse service to unauthorized agents, even set up tollbooths where small sums of money are collected for every email, ensuring that sending ten million messages was too expensive to contemplate without a damned high expectation of return on investment.
Small server processes that mail a logfile to five sysadmins every hour just in case would be prohibitively expensive. Convincing the soviet that your bulk-mailer was only useful to legit mailing lists and not spammers could take months, and there's no guarantee that it would get their stamp of approval at all.
With verified identity, the NYTimes couldn't impersonate you when it forwarded stories on your behalf — and Chinese dissidents couldn't send out their samizdata via disposable gmail accounts.
An email system that can be controlled is an email system without complexity. Complex ecosystems are influenced, not controlled.
The Hollywood studios are conniving to create a global network of regulatory mandates over entertainment devices. Here they call it the Broadcast Flag; in Europe, Asia, Australia and Latinamerica it's called DVB Copy Protection Content Management.
These systems purport to solve the problem of indiscriminate redistribution of broadcast programming via the Internet, but their answer to the problem, such as it is, is to require that everyone who wants to build a device that touches video has to first get permission.
If you want to make a TV, a screen, a video-card, a high-speed bus, an analog-to-digital converter, a tuner card, a DVD burner — any tool that you hope to be lawful for use in connection with digital TV signals — you'll have to go on bended knee to get permission to deploy it.
You'll have to convince FCC bureaucrats or a panel of Hollywood companies and their sellout IT and consumer electronics toadies that the thing you're going to bring to market will not disrupt their business models.
That's how DVD works today: if you want to make a DVD player, you need to ask permission from a shadowy organization called the DVD-CCA. They don't give permission if you plan on adding new features — that's why they're suing Kaleidascape for building a DVD jukebox that can play back your movies from a hard-drive archive instead of the original discs.
CD has a rich ecosystem, filled with parasites — entrepreneurial organisms that move to fill every available niche. If you spent a thousand bucks on CDs ten years ago, the ecosystem for CDs would reward you handsomely.
In the intervening decade, parasites who have found an opportunity to suck value out of the products on offer from the labels and the dupe houses by offering you the tools to convert your CDs to ring-tones, karaoke, MP3s, MP3s on iPods and other players, MP3s on CDs that hold a thousand percent more music — and on and on.
DVDs live in a simpler, slower ecosystem, like a terrarium in a bottle where a million species have been pared away to a manageable handful. DVDs pay no such dividend.
A thousand dollars' worth of ten-year old DVDs are good for just what they were good for ten years ago: watching. You can't put your kid into her favorite cartoon, you can't downsample the video to something that plays on your phone, and you certainly can't lawfully make a hard-drive-based jukebox from your discs.
The yearning for simple ecosystems is endemic among people who want to "fix" some problem of bad actors on the networks. Take interoperability: you might sell me a database in the expectation that I'll only communicate with it using your authorized database agents.
That way you can charge vendors a license fee in exchange for permission to make a client, and you can ensure that the clients are well-behaved and don't trigger any of your nasty bugs.