Two articles that crossed my desk today described the difference between the two kinds of hackers. Howard Rheingold offered this distinction in his memoir of the WELL:
(when “hacking” meant creative programming rather than online breaking and entering)
the Mark Zuckerberg variety, not the identity thieves
Obviously both of these descriptions are simplistic, and maybe necessarily so, given the requirements of the overall pieces. But the New York Times distinction is just silly: the only “good” hacker is a capitalist hacker, I guess. Rheingold for his part may simply be acknowledging an evolving and warped perspective perpetuated by the media. As my colleague Molly Sauter explained in a piece about the hacker as a modern folk devil,
The hackers who dominate news coverage and popular culture — malicious, adolescent techno-wizards, willing and able to do great harm to innocent civilians and society at large — don’t exist.
The playful curiosity that actually defines a “hacker” to me seems to be a hard thing to understand for many people, and the polysemy of the word doesn’t help.
I’m not much for drawing, but I’m working on a set of minimalist representations of San Francisco icons for a project right now. I’ll post more about that project later. For now, here’s my rough take on the Golden Gate Bridge.
My written one-to-one communication patterns can be grouped into three major categories: longform, synchronous shortform, and asynchronous shortform. For the most part I use email, IMs, and SMS, respectively, for those purposes.
Each of those technologies has its own end-to-end encryption protocol. ((In some cases, more than one. I’m just listing the ones I use.)) Email has the venerable OpenPGP protocol and the GnuPG suite of programs; IM has OTR for Off-the-Record Messaging on Pidgin and Adium on the desktop, andGibberbot and ChatSecure on mobile; and SMS has TextSecure, a free software Android SMS application that does encryption locally and over the wire.
[](https://parkerhiggins.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/textsecureqr.png)My TextSecure fingreprint, as a QR code generated by the application.
There’s a small but growing cadre of my friends with whom I’ve exchanged keys on all three protocols. ((Seriously, it’s growing. I added maiki to the club just tonight.)) They’re the crypto triple threats. I want to build that list out further: if I’m having an end-to-end conversation with you, I’d like it to be encrypted end-to-end.
Some of these keys are harder than others to exchange. Email encryption is notoriously difficult to get right, while OTR is much simpler to start working with. TextSecure is a great example of the rare good QR code use case.
These are communication tools, so they’re especially affected by Metcalfe’s Law. That makes it even more important to get people to join the triple threat club. It also means that for each of these protocols, there are lots of people who want to help you figure it out. I’m one of those people. Let’s talk!
It’s typically insightful of Schneier to connect these stories with a common thread. Independent of the primary purpose of personal data collection, which can run the gamut from necessary to useful to invasive, the secondary purposes can be much worse. It’s sometimes difficult even for thoughtful people to consider the primary and secondary purposes of data collection independently, or to consider a technology’s designers responsible for its secondary uses.
That’s why the “hygiene” metaphor is so apt. Good hygiene isn’t mandated by law, but people understand that it’s an important practice. It makes cooperation with society smoother, and reduces the prevalence of parasites as systems get increasingly complex.
One example: companies that track users across the web often defend the practice by explaining the virtues of their primary purpose. They may help monetize free content, or deliver more customized materials to users, or something else that society considers beneficial. But these arguments miss the point. Obviously, if the primary purpose is bad for society, it’s a short conversation that ends there. Even in the case of a compelling primary purpose, though, having a good security mindset means thinking about the ways a system can fail. Allowing a society to inch towards a police state is a pretty serious failure. ((“Harmless failures” are bad too. Ed Felten refers to those also as bad hygiene.))
For people making new technologies and businesses, it makes sense to not just consider how profitable or efficient or helpful they’re being — that’s their primary purpose — but how their developments can be abused. Skipping that step can lead to major problems for society. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal well-meaning but without understanding.”
It can be hard to point a finger at exactly what is so offensive about the way the copyright lobby pushes its agenda. The rhetoric is sometimes charged, but I don’t think the problem lies in the moral foundation of intellectual monopolies (although some people certainly object to them on ethical grounds). I also don’t think it’s a fundamental business problem. Some have argued that nobody cares about content creators’ fixed costs, and that their fixation on that number is misguided, but I think that premise falls apart a bit at the margins: when fans feel a connection to a creator, they do care about her fixed costs, and want to help her make the record or book or film.
No, the ethical and economic basis of copyright isn’t inherently so offensive. It’s kind of like any other business, at its core. As the former Warner Music CTO recently put it, recorded music (for example) isn’t diamonds mined from a secret mythical land — it’s just a thing that some people make and that other people — fans — enjoy. As in nearly any other business, those fans are willing to support the producer if they feel a human connection to her. Copyright is one model we’ve developed to facilitate that support, and though it’s wearing a bit at the edges, it’s not fundamentally evil or insane.
The list goes on and on. As much as the copyright lobby want to frame the debate around the premise of intellectual property itself, that’s really missing the point. It’s impossible to address the problems with copyright without first acknowledging its biggest supporters’ excesses at every step.
