Uncomfortable Truths
After writing about, not the ‘why‘ of new laws aimed at curbing piracy online, but asking about the ‘if‘ – I was very interested to read in the current issue of MCV (556) a quote by Namco Bandai UK marketing manager David Miller;
“As a publisher, the reflex reaction is to support the [new French online piracy] legislation, but do we really still believe that it’s either realistic or in the best interests of an industry (and a world for that matter) going though a genuine revolution? I think we are becoming aware of two uncomfortable truths. Firstly, the upsurge in the infrastructure of piracy, fuelled by Moore’s Law, the ubiquity of broadband, the proliferation of peer-to-peer and torrents, increasing storage and general access and ease of use. And secondly that Generation Y is growing up in a culture that feels differently about media consumption. Is it right to criminalise young people for that?”
Again, he is talking about the ‘why‘ in the quote (and this is an extract from a slightly longer quote) but I am interested in his point (1) about the ‘if‘ – he suggests that controlling online piracy is simply not possible and suggests this position is a result of by Moore’s Law – and I feel he’s on the right track, except that I believe (and am researching) the fact that it is fuelled by Darwin’s Law; Evolution*.
*Yes I know Evolution is not a law it’s a theory and I fully understand what a theory means in science as opposed to normal language – I’m saying that for dramatic effect. Ta-Da!
Biology is Fundamentally an Information Process
Listened to a very interesting talk by Ray Kurzweil where has says that biology is fundamentally an information process…
Digital Biology
I am currently reading Digital Biology by Peter J Bentley.
Here’s a flavour of it.. This is how he justifies the application of evolution to areas outside its traditional biological role;
“Because the process of reproduction, selection and variation are clearly evident in language, we can confidently conclude that our languages do evolve. Unlike natural evolution, which operates in the physical universe of atoms, molecules and chemicals, and physical laws, language evolution operates in a different medium. Our languages evolve in a conceptual universe made up of brains, books, speech and writing – two entirely different universes and yet the same process of evolution.”
(If you want to referece the quote, it’s page 62 – Bentley (2001) Digital Biology Simon & Schuster, New York)
Human/Technology Agents and Actors
OK, so a couple of the concepts that are key to understanding – and that came up in a cross-faculty discussion at UWE t’other day – was the idea of where you can draw the line between the human and the technological. With people from a more computer-science background, they might see something like media as more the technology, whereas the cultural studies person is seeing the human. Personally I see it as akin to where the Amazon meets the sea – the concepts are both made from much of the same material (or theory) and come from the same source (water) – we can still see where one ends and the other begins – if we feel the need to – yet for most of us, journeying on that route, we would not feel anything in crossing the boundary. This is a complex way of saying – it complex and yet simple…
To assist in framing this, I am using a number of concepts in my work;
Actor – Taking this from Actor-Network Theory, Latour remarks that it is not so much as a term referring to a source of action, but that which is enacted upon, thus playing a role – much like an actor on the stage. So actors are those entities that play a role within a network to help it become what it is.
Agent – An entity that is capable of having a more independent role than an Actor, is something that can enact it’s own decisions – it is said to have Agency; Agency is a concept used in philosophy and sociology to refer to the capacity of an agent to act in a world.
Got it? God ‘cos I’m not sure I have…
Vestigial Code
I have just been reading an interesting article on vestigial organs – structures within the body that now have a different or indeed no remaining function. Examples might include the appendix in humans – which is the remains of an organ that would have, in the distant past, been used to digest cellulose foods such as grass or the little nub-like wings of the kiwi. The theory of evolution predicts that one will find vestigial DNA – and so we have;
Now that genome sequencing is routine, evolutionists can do large-scale searches for dead genes. And, as predicted, they’re all over the place — in nearly every species that has been examined. … A new paper in PLoS Genetics continues the search for predicted dead genes — this time for genes that once made tooth enamel — and finds a lot of these wrecks. … There are two kinds of mammals that lack tooth enamel: those that are completely toothless (e.g., armadillos, pangolins, aardvarks, baleen whales), and those that have teeth that lack enamel (e.g., dwarf sperm whales, two-toed sloth). From other evidence, including fossils and comparative morphology, scientists have confidently predicted that every one of these species descended from ancestors that had enameled teeth.
Now having worked in development for a while and you see an idea that might be similar; vestigial code. When you need to temporarily turn off a section of code, it is often commented out, so the code is there but no longer functions. So here is a prediction for the idea of ‘code as DNA‘ – that vestigial code must exist and be transmitted from project to project in it’s inactive form, until eventually it is removed….
Information Transmission in Evolution
This is an interesting interview with Niles Eldredge of the City University of New York. It’s a very good account of looking at both the parallels and the differences between biological evolution and the idea of cultural and/or technological evolution. First off he takes on the issue that in biological evolution we have DNA linking and encoding the information from one generation to the next:
Eldrege notes that the absence of DNA is not an issue; firstly because evolution itself was developed prior to our knowledge of DNA – based on phenotypes (what we can observe). Second he notes that the transfer of information, while less predictable than in DNA, is absolutely there and is even more dynamic that we find in biological systems.
In both biology and material cultural systems, history is indeed staring you in the face when you look at a wombat or a cornet. But there is no way to divine that history unless you compare a series of objects that you assume a priori are related-more wombats; other marsupials; other mammals, other vertebrates, or a series of cornets. This is the so-called “comparative method”-and owes its beginnings to the nominal father of comparative anatomy, Baron Georges Cuvier.
In the biological realm, you find that while not all wombats are exactly alike, they share a lot of features-more than they do with any other mammalian species. You find they share with other species like koalas and wallabies a reproductive system different than other otherwise putative relatives (like platypuses): there are subgroupings here defined on the basis of shared possession (i.e. within the group) of features not seen in the other subgroups; but the pouched animals share with the placental ones (e.g. rabbits) the presence of three bones in the middle ear-unlike the egg-laying platypus, with one bone there. Yet all three groups have hair.
So you think: hair is more widely distributed in nature than three-bones-in-the middle ear; hair is in animals (platypus) that otherwise lay eggs and have a single middle-ear bone-features that are also found in still other animals lacking hair (reptiles). So we think we see history here: hair evolved before non-egg-laying modes of reproduction; hair defines “mammalia”, while the placenta defines, well, placental mammals. Hypotheses such as these are further tested by addition of new data (for example, gene sequences)-which may or may not agree with notions of history previously derived from comparative anatomy.
For the most part, simple trees of what-is-more-closely-related to-what fall out of this sort of exercise-trees which, as Darwin pointed out-must exist if all organisms have descended from a single common ancestor. This search for history among a series of objects is a mapping exercise of the distribution of characteristics.
The same must be true, in general, in any system that has a history-i.e. some features of a focal object (a cornet, say) expectedly were invented before others-every instrument type is a melange of design ideas of varying age. The circular pattern of three turns in the windway between mouthpiece and valves-the pattern most commonly seen in cornets-was in place before a third valve was added to the original two, and before the modern valve was invented and incorporated onto these instruments. We happen to know this through patents and dated specimens-but it is also apparent simply because two valved cornets with the older valve type, and three-valved cornets with that valve type have this “circular wrap”-indistinguishable from the wrap of modern cornets with modern valves. Same principle.
But right away there are problems: what do you call a 4 ½’ long coil of lip-blown brass tubing furnished with a slide (like a trombone) rather than valves (like a piston valved trumpet, or cornet)? Is it a soprano trombone, or a slide trumpet/cornet? The answer is a resounding “Yes.” Depending upon context, such instruments have been built and called all of these names-both before and after the invention of valves.
The key difference is that biological systems predominantly have “vertical” transmission of genetically-ensconced information (meaning parents to offspring). To be sure, there are some groups where hybridization (lateral blending of two species) occurs; remotely related bacteria are also famous for being able to exchange genetic information. But the neatness of evolutionary trees in general in biological systems stems from the compartmentalisation of information within historical lineages.
Not so in material cultural systems-where horizontal transfer is rife-and arguably the more important dynamic. Makers copy each other, and patents affording only fleeting protection. Thus, instead of neatly bifurcating trees, you would predict to find what is best described as “networks”-consisting of an historical signal of what came before what, obscured often to the point of undetectability by this lateral transfer of subsequent ideas.
But unlike nature (including the fossil record), material cultural systems of the modern era characteristically leave a paper trail-patents, advertising, sometimes even serial numbers and records of the dates they represent that allow an independent assessment of history-one against which the results of a comparative study can be compared. Unsurprisingly, it is VERY good to have this extra information!
Now if you start to look at source code (a virtual paper trail?) as analogous to DNA, then not only will we see the more predicable transfer of information in a more formal sense, but a layer on-top of this of cultural information conveyance (I’m calling the meme-layer) that is dynamic.
Attacking the Network
I thought that I would revisit an old (Aug 2003!!) article by Clay Shirky. This article lays out the central idea that started me on this path of research; about how networks respond to an attack;
The RIAA is now attacking these networks using a strategy that could be called Crush the Connectors. A number of recent books on networks, such as Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Barabasi’s Linked, and Watts’ Six Degrees, have noted that large, loosely connected networks derive their effectiveness from a small number of highly connected nodes, a pattern called a Small World network. As a result, random attacks, even massive ones, typically leave the network only modestly damaged.
This is also the ground covered in the book ‘The Starfish and the Spider‘ – the point of that book being that when faced with a decentralised network, like a Starfish, the old method of attack (chop it up!) is useless (some starfish apparently can re-grow into two after being chopped in half) whereas with a spider, this attack would have killed it. You can read Chapter 1 online, where the authors compare p2p with the Apache peoples. (There is a double irony in that Apache is also the name of the open source software than runs most of the interweb!)
The points raised in both are still very pertinent. They have even more pertinence when you consider them from an evolutionary perspective.
The Evolution of the Origin of Species
There is an amazing visual project that charts the development and evolution of the classic text by Darwin, ‘The Origin of Species‘ as each passage is added/edited, the project displays it appearance. You can then move your mouse over any section to have the passage in question appear. Amazing!
Check it out here: http://benfry.com/traces/
CatBot v1.6 Published
We’ve just published the source code (under the GPL) for the following:
- CatBot plugin for Azureus 2.5
- CatBot Website
- Tagging System for the CatBot Website
Never Mind the Policy: Can Filtering Technology Stop P2P?
There is another story in the media about the ongoing debate about what (if anything) the government should be doing in response to online piracy;
A rift has opened between music’s creators and its record labels, with a broad alliance of musicians, songwriters and producers fiercely criticising the business secretary Lord Mandelson’s plans to cut off the broadband connections of internet users who illegally download music.
What I find interesting about the coverage is that there is little to no discussion about if such measures are possible. By that I mean, is the technology there to accurately stop piracy – so, assuming you had robust legislation giving a clear definition of what was to be done – is the tech there to do it? There is no doubt that some technologies exist, but I suspect that there are serious limits to what it can achieve. For starters, any technology solution would need to have some or all of the following to be practical:
- Easy to implement – The network ecology that this technology is coming into is dynamic, thus if the technology takes time to implement, then the conditions may have changed and rendered the tech obsolete.
- Low bandwidth – if the process of checking all the traffic is taking too much out of the network, it is going to impact on the service that people will have paid for – as well as penalising all users, regardless of if they are indulging in non-legitimate uses.
- Discriminatory – Able to discriminate between legitimate and non-legitimate traffic accurately. If it targets the wrong people, it is going to cost time, money and reputation for the ISPs involved.
- Decryptory – There has been marked rise in encrypted p2p technology of late. This means that any system will need to deal with not only encrypted peers, but also encrypted packets of data.
Now those are the ‘easy’ points – the obvious ones that the technology would need. From the p2p research I’ve been doing, I would suggest that there are a couple of other ones of note too:
- 100% Effective – One key thing about internet ecology is that it is very, very easy for users to change p2p software. Users can also communicate virally, so can pass information on about holes in any system rapidly. The exploitation of the loop-holes will also be viral. This means a 99.9% effective system upon implementation will rapidly become a 0% one.
- Psychic – The other issues is that once a flag goes up, there will be many, many people trying many many methods to by-pass the system. This will be continuous and will consist of lines of attack from new directions. The system implemented need to anticipate and head-off these attacks to stay in-the-game.
I am being a little provocative in the points above, but I feel they are valid. I think you see what I am saying – stopping online piracy is very, very difficult. Some may point to the Great Firewall of China as a successful example of internet control – forgetting that it is backed by an authoritarian state and might not be effective for all we know – became its failings are not going to be publicised either by the government there or the users who’ve found a way though.
(PS. Please note this article is my personal view and may not reflect the view of FluffyLogic or anyone else connected to the CatBot project!)
A Great Becoming... 