There are two positions to argue against this type of government from.  In this post I would like to address some of objections from those two positions.  The two positions are that governments must keep secrets from their citizens and the other that all governments are immoral/wrong.  I will start with the position that the government must keep secrets.

There is only one really valid reason to keep secrets for a government is to protect it’s citizens.  That isn’t to say that is the only reason governments keep secrets, but if the government is working in it’s citizens’ collective best interests then the others are not valid.  That governments should only act in their citizens’ collective best interests is an entire argument in itself, so for now I’ll treat it as axiomatic.

So why is keeping secrets in the citizen’s best interests?  Well the first is to protect them from enemies from without and the other from enemies within.  The enemies from without can actually be lumped in with enemies from with in as if we block all outside access to our information, people from the inside will tell others the information.  This is because it is impossible to isolate the citizens of a government from others.

So is it possible to make the information free to everyone yet protect ourselves.  The first big problem that people might think of is an enemy having access to the blueprints of our infrastructure.  One could argue that having these plans could allow an attacker to figure out ways of attacking that could harm us. On the other hand many security experts will tell you having hidden flaws is worse then making them public.  This is because when they are public people will notice them and then you can fix them.  When you hide them under the rug people will find them anyway and you will be totally unprepared for an attack.  Also you will tend to build things that can survive an attack through redundancy or other methods should you suffer an attack, rather then feeling safe behind a veil of secrets.

So knowing that openness improves our infrastructure’s security we have to ask about the other two big war things, battle plans and weapons.  In actual war there is some level of value to secrecy.  This value can secured without much cost to openness.  The first thing to understand is that it’s ok to have a small time delay in something coming become open.  The object is of course to make this delay as short as possible.  For example when I’m writing a program, a log of ideas that I tried might be useful to someone, but I don’t have to make the tries instantly available and I should try each idea before writing them up in my log.

The same concept came be applied to the military during war time.  Since one of the goals of an open society is to reduce coercion and preemptive war is always coercion we can reject the idea that in non-war time the military needs secrets.  In war time information should be made non-secret as soon as possible, and all should be out as soon as war is over.  There may be an argument that shows that even during war time there is a reason to not have secrets, but I haven’t found a good one.

The other war case is that of weapons designs.  The objection here is that if everyone knows how to make our weapons then we will be defenseless.  This has two problems, first if our weapons are defensive in nature it’s hard to use them offensively against us.  Also if they are getting all their weapons from us we also know what their weapons abilities are making it a very level playing field.   The other problem is it turns out that when both sides of a conflict have equal footing they are less likely to fight.  For example a man with a gun vs a man without one, the chances of them fighting are higher then if both have a gun and even less then that are if neither have a gun.  So the minimum level of protection needed to balance the playing field is the correct amount.

The other argument is that sometimes there is information on people that needs to be sealed and protected to allow them to continue living a normal life.  This argument has weight but I do believe that if everything was open there would be few socially prohibited activities and with correct education people would be able to move from criminality to productive members of society with pride in overcoming their problems rather then stigma with the problem itself.

Now lets look at the other side of the issue.  That is to say government is wrong and should never exist at all.  First I need to set up some things about a open society that are needed to  counter these arguments.  The first is that the boarder of the society has to be open as well. This means that belonging to the society is in fact optional.  That doesn’t mean that everything about the society will be agreeable to everyone, but the people who are living in the society agree that even thought they disagree it’s still worth being there.  That is to say that one can assert that all people with in the society who are able to make choices for themselves are there willingly.

This is kinda like a contract with the society.  The contract basically states that while you are in the society you agree to follow the rules of said society, and if you don’t want to you can just leave.  If you want to follow the rules again we will let you back in.  Also there would have to be some form of direct democracy with a threshold nearer to 100% then 51% in order to pass laws and such.  You need the high threshold so that all policies of the society are closer in phase with the feeling of the people in the society.  It also makes it harder to get things passed with mass manipulation the higher the threshold.

If the society contains these properties and the government of the society is based on them then there really isn’t any coercion because you are giving at least implicit consent to have the rules enforced, although some form of explicit consent would be better. For example when I goto my friends house I am making a statement that I will follow the rules of that house.  If me and my friend live together we have a set of rules based on agreement between us.  If a new person wants to live with us, he or she consents to our rules by moving in although they can renegotiate them.  If one of us doesn’t like the new rules and there is no penalty for leaving then we can move out.

This is also part of the openness of the society.  The society and government are open so people know what they are about. The boarders are open so entry and exit of the society has little or no cost so people can leave.  The openness of society allows the improvement of systems to work by opening them up to scrutiny.  The knowledge bases of society increases as there is no form of owned knowledge. The security of the society is increased as flaws are exposed and fixed.  People know what is going on around them and stigma of not fitting in is reduced as people know that everyone doesn’t really fit in.  This in turn reduces the fear in society. These are a few of the reasons I believe a open society is something worth working towards.

To start this off we need to know what DRM is for.  One usage of DRM is to try and stop piracy.  I use the word try because for the most part cracks are quickly released for games and programs are created to brake the DRM on media.  This is because in order to allow a person that purchases the media to use it you have to give them the lock and the key, from that it is not hard for a specialist to figure out how to defeat the lock and tell others as well.  Google the darknet report for the details on why this is.

So with pirates eliminated the only people with which it can provide value to are the non-pirates.  That is the producers and the legitimate consumers.  Let’s look at the consumers.  The way it is argued that it benefits the consumer is it allows them to use the media without worrying about violating copyright laws.  This is argued because copyright laws are so arcane that the average consumer cannot possibly be trusted to understand them.  There are 2 problems with this argument.  The first is that DRM in addition to restricting illegal usages of media it also restricts legal uses, effectively blocking rights you would normally have.  This is because removing DRM is for the most part illegal.

The second objection to the argument is that if the copyright laws are too complex for the average person to understand then there is a problem with the copyright laws.  I have talked about lying through obfuscation in my post of simplicity and open society.  Laws which the average person cannot understand fail at their purpose, that is to stop us from doing bad things should be be so inclined.  For the most part when it comes to what you are allowed to do with things we tend to be pretty knowledgeable.  The problems arise when companies try to restrict what we can do with things past the point of that of physical things.

This is because we understand the concept of owning a thing when we buy it.  If we buy a hammer we know we are allowed to nail any type of nails into anything we own.  With DRMed music we have to buy one song for our iPod, one for our computer without iTunes and a third for our CD player.  From our understanding of physical reality we would think that we only need to buy a single song and it would be legal to use it in all 3 places.  DRM blocks this so we might brake the DRM which is usually illegal.

People often will seek out pirate versions of media they legally own due to the fact that they can’t use it the way they would like, and should they find the pirated versions easier to use, and they often are, they become more likely to pirate without buying in the future.  This means that rather then helping people know what they are and are not allowed to do, DRM adds additional, and often viewed as unreasonable, restrictions on use.  This can be seen in the outcry and boycotting of limited install video games for example.  The view that companies are trying to screw them over makes some consumers turn to piracy for both ease of use and even a slightly vindictive sense of righteousness.

So that leaves the only benefit to the producers of media.  They can get more sales from individuals by limiting the way the media can be used and then turning around and selling them other uses for more money.  This isn’t very moral but in the long run I assert that it will be bad for producers.  Why would selling multiple copies to each consumer be bad for the producers.  One it isn’t sustainable.  This is because as this behavior continues the trend is to lock people into more and more restrictive DRM boxes without really changing the cost of the boxes all that much.  This increases the cost of the consumer as well as gives them the nagging feeling that they are being screwed over.

As time goes on more and more people will decide that the laws are just their to hurt them and so they will ignore them entirely.  This creates a main stream culture that views the laws as invalid.  You can’t sue enough people once that happens to get people to change.  So to look at the question of who benefits from DRM, well Pirates benefit because their culture becomes more and more mainstream and acceptable, the companies benefit in the short term by increased sales.  On the other hand the legitimate users are treated like criminals, bare the burden of DRM problems and occasionally are forced to commit piracy in order to secure rights that are generally available to them if their purchase had been physical or an older type of media like  tapes.

All of this allows me to assert that the only people that will benefit from DRM is the pirates.  The litigations for copyright violations cost society money and resources which could be used for dealing with other crimes.  The media companies are treating their paying customers as criminals  thus alienating them.  Finally the customers are dealing with technical  issues and rebuying or choosing to brake the DRM.  So to change the question a little, “what is the value of a system that benefits only criminals and (in the short) the powerful to society as a whole”? My answer to this question is none.

Lets take a step back for a moment to understand what DRM was and worked in the past and what rights the consumer and the producer that were being inforced by it.  Originally DRM came in the form of codes on the end of pages of the game manual.  These would have to be entered periodicly to keep playing the game.  This was annoying but due to expensive photocopying at the time it effectively limited it to one copy of the game per manual being used at one time.

Next came CDs.  With the invention of CDs and their massive amounts of storage there was insentive to run games off the CDs.  This was because Hard disk space was still quite small at the time and so CDs gave the game designers alot of extra space to work with.  It had a second benefit though as a CD was proof of purchase.  We didn’t have CD burrners then. When CD burners did come out and disk space reached the point that it was possible to store many CD images on a hard disk game companies began to rely on more and more complicated methods of figuring out if a disk was real or not.

Both CDs and Manuals have certain properties as a form of DRM.  First they limit the program to one copy per purchase.  This is the same as say a hammer in the real world.  When you buy a hammer you get one and you can’t really copy it easily.  Like the hammer you can sell it to someone when you are done with it hence a used market for games can exist.  These are the traditional rights and limits of a copyright system.  That is you control the number of copies but you don’t have control of the post use marktet.

This lowers sales though as while used hammers eventually wear out (although not very fast if used right) software can last “forever”.  So software companies created limited installs.  In addition they use forced online registration to make sure that games are only installed on X number of systems.  The numbers usually picked for this is 5 installs and 2 systems.  This is like a hammer that can only be used by two people and if it is returned to the tool shed 5 times it vanishes.

This is not how copyright works in the real world.  The limited installs DRM is simply being used as a way to destroy the used software market.  Who would buy hammer that looked like it was about to brake?  The same goes for software.  The system also creates disk clutter as people refuse to uninstall the games and risk running out of installs.

There is some idea that we are being punished because pirates don’t stop pirating software.  Another way of stating that is, “If it stops piracy then the game companies should use it as we have clearly shown we cannot be trusted”.  The problem with this is that limited installs DRM doesn’t hinder pirates in the least.  This is because software pirates modify the programs themselves to avoid the entire activation process.  This means that the limited installs DRM systems punish only legitamate users.

Why only aim for legitamate user one may ask.  The answer is simple; to make more money.  The limited installs stop the used game market. This forces people who want to play the game legitamately to buy a new copy. In addition it stops people from trading or loaning games t0 friends.  Should you run out of installs though you can call the game companies to try to get a new one, although from the stories I’ve heard they basically put you on trial and the process is anything but fun and games.  This results in people pirating games they already own.

So this brings me back to the question about if limited installs are right or wrong.  They are a practice that hurts consumers, encourgages piracy, and seems to be modivated only by a desire to cause the death of the used game market.  The first two things are bad for the game industry and all three are bad for the consumer, as such the practice is a bad practice and will end up hurting the industy if not stopped.

As a final note I would like to point out that game companies seem to be using the limited install system on over the counter game and then using systems like steam without it.  This seems to be designed to herd people to these new systems, which also kill the used market and also have to bonus of killing local game stores allowing more of the profit to goto the game companies, but that is a story for another time.

Edit:  Ok we are using Akismet rather then requiring registration and we will see how that works out so feel free to not make accounts.

Let us first assume that it is better to present the same information in a less understandable way. If the information is less understandable then fewer people can understand it. The point of making information public and open is so that people can use the information. If a person doesn’t understand the information then said person can’t use the information. So we run into a contradiction. So we have shown that a more understandable presentation is preferable for information which has been made public.

Something which is truly open would be understandable to anyone who is capable of using the information.  So why is this important to the idea of an open society? Well the most obvious answer is that if our goal it to be a completely open society any effort to obfuscate information would be counter productive, but there are answer that is even relevant to our current closed societies. This answer is that confusion in public information can lead to undesirable results for the society providing the information.

The best examples of this come from law. The point of having laws is provide information to people about what they can and cannot do. Having done that they provide information about what will happen should someone do something they should not do. The goal of having laws is that of making it so as few people as possible do things which they shouldn’t. Laws atleast in the country I live in are very complex and there are so many of them that most people have to visit a specialist, a lawyer, to figure if we are allowed or are not allowed to do things. We as citizens know what I would call common sense laws like that we shouldn’t rob people or commit murder, but what exactly is something like loitering or where it comes into play is something vague that most people don’t understand. Even for the specialists laws are vague and they need to have books and books of laws and interpretations to be able to practice their trade.

That being the case and seeing as having a specialist evaluate a person’s every action would have an astronomical cost one can say that it is possible for a person to brake the law without knowing it. In my country there are so many laws covering just about every aspect of life which makes braking the law unknowingly very likely. Since the point of laws is to make people not want to brake them we can say every time someone brakes a law unknowingly the body of law fails in it’s purpose.

So in order to minimize the number of times the law fails due to the ignorance of citizens it would benefit us to make our code of laws presentable in such a way that most if not all citizens can understand it and do understand it. The ways to do this are to make the laws simple and to make the overall number of laws as small as possible so that specialists are unnecessary to avoid braking of the law.

So in recap we’ve shown that information should be presented in the simplest of forms possible in order for it to be considered truly open. This is because complexity serves to hide the information from most people. I would like to note here that target audience should be taken into account to when judging simplicity. For example technical details of a computer system would be simple if the information was being presented to computer specialists but would be complex for the general public. Having shown this we say an example involving legal systems which is applies to both open and closed societies. So I think so can safely call obfuscation through complexity a fallacy to be avoided in an open society or even a closed society when information is made public.

Before I explain why humans need chaos let me first clarify that chaos is not disorder. There is such this as orderly chaos, in fact one may argue that our universe falls into such a category. No chaos is a complex word to explain so I will divide it up into a few principles. The first is that of non-impossibility. That is to say regardless of any lack probability there isn’t anything that is strictly impossible. This may be hard to swallow so lets walk through it. If something is impossible we can say that it do not have the ability to exist. That is to say that something impossible would be non-existant, but non-existence is a type of existence. So if something is non-existent then has an existence which mean it has the ability to exist. This is a paradox so we must assume that anything which being a thing must have an existence either in the positive or negative cannot be impossible. The second principle of chaos is that of continuous change. That is to say that in a chaotic universe everything is in a state of flux. The world now is not the same world as the world from 10 seconds ago.

Back to humans shining in chaos. If change and possibility come from chaos then we can also say creation comes from chaos. Humans can create thing because we have a desire for change and the ability to see the possibilities. To often though we are afraid of change and build walls of tightly controlled order around ourselves to keep change away. Difference, non-compliance and disorder scare us and for good reason. Change is scary. We like to make plans, work towards a goal and be free from the fears of random violence, but dramatic constant change undermines these desires. So what do we do, we try to change the world so that we can control the change. We create societies with a common order, we put things in the same place everyday. Even without anyone telling us we will create patterns that we are loathe to change.

These patterns though aren’t freedom, they are in fact confining. The laws we create get tighter and tighter, binding us all together. We feel bored and tired with our lives, seeking refuge in the false adventure of TV and movies. Boredom is the sign of a banal existence, one without chaos. Why do you think we fear computers taking over our jobs and lives. Computers can only handle order but humans are much better with both halves of chaos. That is why I named my blog Technica Discordia. The Technica for the computers and technology that surrounds us and the Discordia to represent the humans who can create ideas from the chaos of the universe. Everyone should take a little time and think about how chaos touches your life and how you can add more. Look at something familiar from a new angle, or go for a walk somewhere new. Start a new project, but don’t worry about having to finish it, it’s more important to cultivate ideas. Get a new hobby or read a book. Let’s leave the boring stuff to the computers and enjoy life.

First I would like to define the words kindness and beauty in this context and how they effect a program. We will define kindness as doing good towards all users. We will be using a more general meaning of user then is normally used and that is a user is anyone effected by a program. We use this broader definition so that we make take into account indirect users who are effected by the program through direct users or other indirect users. For example if a person’s friend uses Wikipedia to learn something and then that person’s friend tells the person that information then it is reasonable to say that the person is an indirect user of wikipedia and they should be taken into account because Wikipedia is effecting their lives in some way. We should also define good as good means different things to different people. Good in this case is something which causes benefit without causing harm.

People may argue that because of our definition of good no program can be truly kind. This is true and could be solved by adding something like good being doing more benefit then harm, but this is extremely subjective so I propose that we leave good as it is and accept that as humans we cannot write a perfectly kind program but should strive to write the kindest programs possible and in some cases refuse to create programs on the grounds of unkindness.

The other factor is beauty. Beauty is a little harder to define as the word is even more subjective. We will define beauty as a program which is simple, extensible. This may seem strange to non-programmers as a definition of beauty but in the eyes of many programmers I meet would say one or more of those things make a program beautiful from a technical point of view. Simplicity means that a program accomplishes it’s task as minimally as possible. This makes the source code for the programs simple and therefore makes it easier write easily understandable code. Also the less there is in a program the less there is to go wrong. Extensible means that a program can be combined with other programs, plugins or other pieces of code in order to add more functionality or solve problems that the minimal program cannot solve itself.

Having defined these two terms we can now notice something interesting and that kindness/unkindness is actually a moral value. This has a few interesting side effects. The first is that programmers must think about their programs in the light of morality something that is ignored far too often. For example a website designer may be asked to store information on users of a website for later use. Under the model I have outlined the programmer not only has to worry about the legality of the storage of the information but what the effects of storing that information will be on the users. If it’s find out how many times each page is visited so the site may be optimize then the programmer might decide that saving the information is kind and therefore the program is “moral”. On the other hand if it is to hit the users with targeted advertisement that the user has only consented to in the small print of a EULA then one may argue that while the law says it’s fine to add that to the program it would be unkind to do so and would therefore be a bad design choice as well as immoral.

Another hypothetical example of this would be a program that would monitor what websites employees at a company are visiting and when. This is a legal right of the company, but is it really kind to the employees or even the company itself to create that program? One argument is that if an employee is surfing the internet when they are supposed to work that the company needs to know to discipline the employee. The company needs to discipline the employee because he’s not doing his job, but if he wasn’t doing his job the company would notice without monitoring so clearly it doesn’t help in the case when the employee is not doing their job. So where is the benefit to the company? Well it’s when the employee is both completing their job and surfing the net. In this case is discipline really necessary?  I would argue that is not as discipline tends to lower the moral of the employee thereby lowering their efficiency so in the end the company will lose productivity of the employee.  The employee clearly also loses due to the effects of the discipline.  So in this situation the legal program is unkind even though most people would not think so at first look.  So if the programmer made this program the company would be harmed although the company would actually think it had benefited and that harm would be morally the programmer’s responsibility.  This is why it is so important that we as programmers think about what we are doing and how our design choices effect the world.

So maybe privacy isn’t the ultimate goal at all, maybe it’s just a crutch that we limp on because we are afraid to walk. Well if that is the truth then it is reasonable to ask what is a better solution. I think that we have a solution staring us in the face, the open source movement. In the open source movement we recognize that things which are open are actually more secure and stable. This is because everyone is allowed to see and provide input on the program and in the end problems are spotted and fixed rather then hidden and ignored.

Before going into exactly how the open source movement’s ideas would benefit our society I would like to cover a bit more about how open source works for people who are not familiar with the process. The first step in the process is that someone gets an idea for a program, usually this program is something that they themselves need. They then create a working version of the program although usually just barely working and finally they release the source code (the human readable instructions for the program) to the community to use. Now this fledging program is often bugging and lacking in features so the creator of the program will keep working on the program and releasing new versions to fix those bugs or add more features. As they do that more and more people will start using the program, and here is where the magic happens. Some of the users will be programmers and because everyone has the source code to the program those programmers can edit that source code themselves to add features they need or to fix bugs.

Now we have a bunch of programmers with a bunch of additions to the program. These programmers give their additions to the creator of the program and s/he picks the best ones and adds them to the program. This effectively increases the value of the program without the creator having to do much work; in fact some of the work might even be impossible for him to have done do to different life experiences. The result if the program becomes popular is that you can have hundreds or even thousands of programmers working on one project with little overhead.

This is all well and good for programs but how does this relate to the real world? Well imagine I’m making a new long range missile. I’m not going to show anyone outside the development team how the thing works because then they might know how to sabotage it or worse build there own. Well lets look at those two situations separately. The reason we don’t want people to see the plans to prevent sabotage is so that they might find a weakness that we missed. That seems valid as nothing is perfect after all, but I would like to point out that even if it is secret the flaws still exist and so people may exploit them. If we were to make it open to the public, ask them to find flaws in it and most importantly keep adjusting our plans to fix those flaws then the missile will be very hard to exploit. It won’t be impossible but it is much harder for our enemies to find a flaw in a highly tuned design created by thousands of people then it is to fine one in a design made only a handful of people even if said people are specialists. It is also worthy to note that if a power wants some information on something I don’t think it’s possible to prevent them from getting it.

The second problem of course is what if someone uses the highly tuned plans to build missiles of their own. This is a little trickier because there is no real benefit to having our enemies having our weapons, but we can mitigate the results when we realize two things. First the major barrier to other powers having our weapons is money because if they really wanted out plans they would steal them, and secondly we could open a concurrent dialog on how to create defenses against the weapons. If we have good defenses against our weapons and our enemies are using similar weapons then we have the advantage, if they are using the defenses as well then we have a stalemate and have to resolve our problems with diplomacy which is a better solution anyway.

This is but one example of how having fewer secrets and more involvement would help us improve out lives and security rather then harm them. I will revisit this topic later with more examples but this entry has run a little long. I encourage you to comment and rework my ideas and like the creator of an open source program I will try to incorporate them into my next entry on the subject.

As a final note I’m still working the site layout so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and I hope to have some real content up soon to give you something to think about while I deal with the boring details of configuration.