All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites | Page 2

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.
But you can't meaningfully enforce that. EDS and other titanic software
companies earn their bread and butter by producing fake database
clients that impersonate the real thing as they iterate through every
record and write it to a text file -- or simply provide a compatibility
layer through systems provided by two different vendors. These
companies produce software that lies -- parasite software that fills
niches left behind by other organisms, sometimes to those organisms'
detriment.
So we have "Trusted Computing," a system that's supposed to let
software detect other programs' lies and refuse to play with them if they
get caught out fibbing. It's a system that's based on torching the
rainforest with all its glorious anarchy of tools and systems and
replacing it with neat rows of tame and planted trees, each one
approved by The Man as safe for use with his products.

For Trusted Computing to accomplish this, everyone who makes a
video-card, keyboard, or logic-board must receive a key from some
certifying body that will see to it that the key is stored in a way that
prevents end-users from extracting it and using it to fake signatures.
But if one keyboard vendor doesn't store his keys securely, the system
will be useless for fighting keyloggers. If one video-card vendor lets a
key leak, the system will be no good for stopping screenlogging. If one
logic-board vendor lets a key slip, the whole thing goes out the window.
That's how DVD DRM got hacked: one vendor, Xing, left its keys in a
place where users could get at them, and then anyone could break the
DRM on any DVD.
Not only is the Trusted Computing advocates' goal -- producing a
simpler software ecosystem -- wrongheaded, but the methodology is
doomed. Fly-by-night keyboard vendors in distant free trade zones just
won't be 100 percent compliant, and Trusted Computing requires no
less than perfect compliance.
The whole of DRM is a macrocosm for Trusted Computing. The DVB
Copy Protection system relies on a set of rules for translating every one
of its restriction states -- such as "copy once" and "copy never" -- to
states in other DRM systems that are licensed to receive its output. That
means that they're signing up to review, approve and write special rules
for every single entertainment technology now invented and every
technology that will be invented in the future.
Madness: shrinking the ecosystem of everything you can plug into your
TV down to the subset that these self-appointed arbiters of technology
approve is a recipe for turning the electronics, IT and telecoms
industries into something as small and unimportant as Hollywood.
Hollywood -- which is a tenth the size of IT, itself a tenth the size of
telecoms.
In Hollywood, your ability to make a movie depends on the approval of
a few power-brokers who have signing authority