Proprietary Software Cheats Users
November 16, 2017
Cory Doctorow is an outspoken defender of net neutrality, technology education, and user rights. He has written and spoken about these subjects and shares his opinion on BoingBoing. The science-fiction magazine Locus recently published one of his new essays,“Cory Doctorow: Demon-Haunted World.” Doctorow discusses how software can be programmed to take out the human factor of like and steer things in favor of corporations who want to gobble down dollars.
Cheating is a well-established enterprise that originated long before the digital revolution, but it is getting smarter as technology advances. While in the past it was cheating was more of a danger from outside forces, it is now nestled within the very things we own.
The software allows companies and literally anyone with the know how to cheat you out of money or precious time. Rather than cheat en masse, the cheating is coming to your home because it is so much easier to infiltrate the individual now. Even scarier is when he uses an alchemy metaphor, explaining how alchemists were cut-rate lab technicians who believed spirits, God, and demons influenced their experiments. The technology used for cheating has a similar demonic presence and that is not even the worst factor.
Doctorow pulls out his trump card when he explains how outdated technology laws from the 20th century still had standing today when it is more than obvious they need to be repealed:
What’s worse, 20th-century law puts its thumb on the scales for these 21st-century demons. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (1986) makes it a crime, with jail-time, to violate a company’s terms of service. Logging into a website under a fake ID to see if it behaves differently depending on who it is talking to is thus a potential felony, provided that doing so is banned in the small-print clickthrough agreement when you sign up.
Then there’s section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (1998), which makes it a felony to bypass the software controls access to a copyrighted work. Since all software is copyrightable, and since every smart gadget contains software, this allows manufacturers to threaten jail-terms for anyone who modifies their tractors to accept third-party carburetors (just add a software-based check to ensure that the part came from John Deere and not a rival), or changes their phone to accept an independent app store, or downloads some code to let them choose generic insulin for their implanted insulin pump.
Follow Doctorow’s advice, read, test, learn, and just combat ignorance.
Whitney Grace, November 16, 2017
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
