Nick sez, "Jonathan Zittrain gets so many things right in his book,
The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It about what he calls 'generative technology' and why it's so important. It's chock-full of all sorts of issues that make Boingers salivate - freedom of speech, copyright, open source software, digital rights activism, privacy, censorship - put together into a very convincing argument in favor of unbridled innovation.
This is definitely a book that you don't want to pass up. It's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license and freely downloadable from the book's website."
The iPhone is the opposite. It is sterile. Rather than a platform that invites innovation,
the iPhone comes preprogrammed. You are not allowed to add programs
to the all-in-one device that Steve Jobs sells you. Its functionality is locked
in, though Apple can change it through remote updates. Indeed, to those who
managed to tinker with the code to enable the iPhone to support more or different
applications,4 Apple threatened (and then delivered on the threat) to transform
the iPhone into an iBrick.5 The machine was not to be generative beyond the innovations
that Apple (and its exclusive carrier, AT&T) wanted. Whereas the world
would innovate for the Apple II, only Apple would innovate for the iPhone. (A
promised software development kit may allow others to program the iPhone with
Apple’s permission.)
Jobs was not shy about these restrictions baked into the iPhone. As he said at
its launch:
We define everything that is on the phone. . . . You don’t want your phone to be like
a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then
you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than
they are like computers.6
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I think it would be interesting to get someone from the Open Souce world, such as the author of this book, and have them to write an insider's guide to the IT banking industry.
Apparently, if you're someone like IBM, you routinely sell mainframes/unix servers pre-loaded with 100's of gigs of RAM and multiple Power6 processors all disabled by the firmware, and when your customer wants to "upgrade", you fax them an unlock code to permit them to address an extra few gigabytes of RAM, or to enable them to run an extra processor that you've already sold them.
Someone at IBM took the time to include an access code that tells the processors whether it should execute a 'NOP' at every other clock cycle.
You might think that sort of model of providing computer hardware is criminal to the point that any manufacturer engaging in those practices should be the first against the wall when the revolution comes, but apparently it's what their customers want:
eg. if you're already paying through the nose for closed-source software, you pay a license fee that goes up steeply with each processor it runs on, and with each extra gigabyte of RAM your software closed-source, licensed software can address,
so by selling powerful hardware pre-crippled, the banks can cut their software costs which dominate the total cost, and if their processing needs do grow, the ceiling can be lifted conveniently... and then they have to fork over more (customer) money to the software vendors and a little to the hardware manufacturer.
It's a different culture.
This closed crap is why the original Macintosh lost the market to IBM in the first place. That $1000 bar to software development meant there was never any serious third-party software on what was clearly the better machine. So it was a useless paperweight -- a pretty, useless paperweight, but useless nonetheless.
Jobs is a moron.
A lot of people who aren't particularly technical don't want to innovate, they don't want to create — they want to consume and have something that works easily for them, right out of the box. So at least in the beginning, the closed, proprietary nature of the iPhone makes sense for them.
Nor do I think the iPhone and other Apple excellence would've arose if they had opened up more to open source, focus groups, more "cooks", etc. — which is not to discount benefits of the latter, but they both have their places in this world in a diverse market & economy.
I feel it's important to enlighten people who might not otherwise care about philosophies/movements like open source, so they're aware of these choices and can take action if they're interested.
So in that, a book with a provocative title like Zittrain's is a welcome addition. I haven't read it yet, but it gets me curious. :)
Yes, it's a different culture, and you are mistaken in appearing to believe there is something evil in this behaviour. What you appear not to know is that IBM do not sell you hardware, they sell you cycles. If buying an upgrade just requires a service engineer to flip a switch, rather than pulling and replacing dozens of circuit boards, believe me that's EXACTLY what you want if you're running banking systems, customer provisioning or inventory control systems managing tens, hundreds or thousands of millions of dollars' worth of transaction. Yes, this is a totally different world than the PC-based "servers" that most people think of as computing. (Disclaimer - I'm an FSF member and long-time supporter and advocate for Free software; IMHO this has nothing to do with it.)
Glad to see this posted properly after three recommendations in the comments; I guess someone finally filled out the Submit a Link form.
If you want the short and sweet of Jonathan Zittrain's thesis, which is that centralization of Internet hosting, web applications, and information appliances, are undermining the end-user innovation of the original personal computing revolution and peer-to-peer (i.e. end-to-end) design of the Internet, check out his interview on Charlie Rose.
Oh, and here is the direct link to download the PDF of the book.
What does the iPhone have to do with the future of the Internet? The Internet is going the way of the dodo because were concerned about a product?
No, the Internet is doomed because a certain past president sold off the backbone to telecoms and cable companies. Now they are spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to make money off the Internet. Never-mind that once again they missed the boat and allowed a company like Google to make all their money. So what are they going to do? Bring in metered access. You already pay your $50 for broadband access but in the future you will be limited to probably about 5 to 10 gigs of downloaded access. After that you will pay dearly for your access.
This will benefit the government. How? For years they have been trying to pass censorship laws but the Supreme Court has been in the way. The Court has continually stated that due to the nature of the Internet: a mass communication tool that is a many to many tool that allows anyone to participate. Then there should be no censorship in the United States. With metered access not everyone will be able to afford to use the Internet like they do today. That means it stops being a many to many communication tool and becomes he standard one to many tool like television is today. I can see websites charging for premium access so that people to view them without hurting their quotas. Will the telecoms stop censorship? Not if it doesn't hurt their bottom line.
The solution to all of this is very simple. WiFi - not the kind that other companies are putting into place but the ones the consumer do. Think on this, you have a wireless router, most people are buying them because they like their Internet in any room. The range on them is always increasing. How about a router with a firewall, web server, e-mail server, and DNS server built in. Then open those routers to each other but have the firewall deny access from and external source to the home computer that is connected to the router. Protect the consumer but allow the routers to route information between themselves.
If the Internet is nothing more then a series of interconnected computer systems so that bits of information can be routed in any direction through the computers to reach a destination then why were backbones created, speed, by creating more centralized and larger backbones it increased the speed but limited the transmission of those bits. With a consumer WiFi system that is fast the bits are freed and the individual routers will route the bits not through the telecoms backbones but through the neighbors system. This way you recreate the original Internet of interconnected systems. If you can have a neighborhood of consumers to interconnect this way then the back bones are only needed for distances between the neighborhoods but with metered access. Consumers would then start pushing for and hardware vendors creating products with a wider range so that consumers don't have to depend on the back bones. In fact it why would we need ISPs at all?
This makes you think: Since you're using the back bones less than maybe the telecoms will see the light and stop metered access...nah that will never happen. Well, maybe the government will stop metered access because they are supposed to protect the public...nah that will never happen. If you want change then you have to create change. At least with these mini-servers you build them on all open hardware and software. And make them open. How can the government sensor them? How can the telecoms touch them? Imagine VoIP, gaming, YouTube, and the future apps of the web accessible to everyone without having to worry about did I go over my monthly limit. The future of Internet does depend on openness but openness of architecture not of product. The future of the Internet is being wrested out of the hands of everyone and into the pocket books of a few companies. That is not right and that is what needs to be stopped.
The iPhone has little to do with that. Free the Net!
While I agree with Zittrain's overall approach I must (as an Apple fanboy) disagree about the iPhone (and other "locked" devices) as being non-generative.
The emergence of the Maker Culture is seeing complex robotics and DNA jiggery-pokery occuring in garage laboratories all over the frickin' place.
The "locked" iPhone was unlocked within 24 hours of its release. Successive attempts to lock it down further have been equally and just as rapidly thwarted. If a product is desired to be used in a generative nature the "users" will make sure it is.
Non-generative application of the broader infrastructure of the net itself is indeed a worry but the devices we use to connect through that information spine are forever broken and open to tampering, modding, hacking and improving by the end users.
Sure, not everyone is a budding Einstein or Farnsworth eager to disassemble their precious new shiny toys - but there are enough rabid and capable geeks out there to cut a path for others to more easily follow.
What's the current ratio of unlocked iPhones to those who abide by the ATT contract?
And what other time in the history of our technological age have you seen people stand in line for hours to get their hands on the first of these expensive gadgets - only to race each other to post videos showing how easily it can be taken apart, dissected, thrown against a concrete floor and even jammed in a blender?
EVERYTHING is generative.
As soon as that ethos reaches politics and social justice you'll witness a sea-change in this world. And I'll be there - broadcasting it - with my iPhone.
Cheers.
Robbo, that's just a learning curve for the apple hardware and software people, they'll be able to make unhackable devices in the near future, eg. the 5th gen nanos are not hacked or about to become so.
Xbox 360 isn't generative. It relies on the hardware being sold at ~ zero profit, and that hardware being firmly locked down in order that microsoft can recoup profits on the licensed software sales.
I think the driver for DRM and locked hardware is that it allows manufacturers to set a competitive acquisition cost, safe in the knowledge that they have a monopoly on the software and services they chose to make available, at the cost of building walled gardens.
Good God! It's full of open source hippy communists!
I've heard Zittrain interviewed while promoting this book and broadly agree with him, and hate to see a Zittrain vs. Apple argument dominate this thread, so maybe it's worth pointing out that this particular excerpt is an unfortunate one considering that as of tomorrow (we think) you'll be able to buy 3rd party apps for your iPhone. Whatever you may think of Apple/Jobs, they do appear capable of learning from experience: there's a bloom of 3rd party development for the Mac OS going on right now because they did, finally, open it up; and less than a year after the introduction of the iPhone and the accompanying wails of dissapointment from everyone who wanted to develop for it, Apple announced an SDK.
Surely this isn't the best blurb with which to introduce Zittrain's thesis, provocative though it may be.
I hear ya Danegeld but I stick by my contention that any "locked" device is begging to be broken into - and will be.
don't count the iphone as an evil, dead-end device just yet. monday's WWDC might change everything.
Yeah - don't get me wrong - I think Zittrain's right on the money. he's pointing at all the issues that need to be at the forefront of public discussion. Like copyright the issues surrounding net neutrality and open systems need to become part of public consciousness - and not relegated to the geek community, which is preaching to the converted.
Bill Moyers gave a great talk at yesterdays National Conference for Media Reform -
http://www.freepress.net/conference
- and while it dealt primarily with news media he wrapped it all up in the necessity of making as many people aware as possible about how these issues are going to affect their lives. There are fundamental freedoms encased in all the jargon and that is what needs to be kept up front in any public discourse.
Cheers.
I heard Zittrain interviewed on NPR about the book, but I can't help think that he's worked very hard to shoehorn things into his panic for the future model.
There are absurd lock-in games, taken to dizzying heights in MS Office doc formats, for example, but I think Zittrain completely missed the emerging reason that things get locked down into simple modes: so they'll work.
Technology makers, and I'm one of them, have been utter and complete failures at making electronic devices and personal computing simple. Non-technical people constantly fuck up their systems because they're given tools made by engineers, for engineers, and it's with great relief that they grab onto something like an iPhone, which provides clear, limited and straightforward paths for using its features.
Moreover, and likely because he's pushing copyrighted dead trees for sale and not some open, freely distributed e-book format, Zittrain traffics in information that's a year old, not having had the chance to see an iPhone that has a development platform. And while it was closed, did we see zero development on the locked iPhone? Nope. Was bricking an assault on iPhone unlockers? Undecided but there's reason to think not if you read the more technical takes on the issue, and that subsequent updates didn't brick unlocked phones.
I doubt I'll be reading the book, mostly because he assumes that the present sets us on an absolute linear path to a logical end-point. I think the biggest enemy of innovation is thinking like Zittrain's, where it's all over as soon as it starts, because he assumes that nothing unexpected will happen. Which it always does.
And I need to self-edit there: the book is cc-licensed and freely downloadable, and I asserted otherwise.
Dear McShaggy:
Yeah!
I'm not an iPhone owner, so I have been following the latest developments only haphazardly. But from what I remember, the Apple party line wasn't "no apps," but "all apps should accessed through the web browser" via AJAX and similar technologies.
Of course, the anti-Apple crowd has a history of not understanding -- or ignoring -- the details. The comment ending with "Jobs is a moron" is indicative. People forget that the company that opened up the PC architecture was IBM. When was the last time anyone saw an IBM-manufactured PC? Do you think that move worked out for them?
I've had my problems with Apple over the years, but I kind of LIKE the fact that, when I install a new version of the OS, the computer gets better instead of worse. And I appreciate that Apple has maintained pockets deep enough to fund most of the basic UI development that has benefited the entire personal computer market.
Even if you don't like the iPhone argument, this book is well worth reading. It discusses several of these issues in a way I'd previously never seen. And in the end, it's not a book of anti-Apple, anti-MS propaganda - rather, at every point possible, Zittrain tries to push the advantages of continued innovation, and heavy distribution of that innovation.
There are some really juicy quotes too:
p105 - "To be sure, with enough effort, censorship can have some effect, especially because most citizens prefer to slow down for speed bumps rather than invent ways around them."
I haven't read/thought about the book, nor read all the comments yet (I will though). The first thing that occurred to my foggy, Sunday-morning brain was, what a fabulous illustration on the book cover.
"To be sure, with enough effort, censorship can have some effect, especially because most citizens prefer to slow down for speed bumps rather than invent ways around them."
In the town I used to live in, they had to put giant concrete flower planters up on the sidewalks beside speedbumps because all of the SUV-driving rich kids used to drive on the sidewalks instead of the roads to avoid speedbumps.
Just sayin'.
In the short term? Yes, it did. They didn't keep the advantage because of other mistakes they were making at the time, but srsly, that was a major and serious mistake Apple made at the time.
It may, however, be the case that Jobs is not a moron; I'll go as far as admitting he's an idiot savant.
However, this is not a cause for "ZOMG, the Mexican invasion; build a big wall and keep them out". Instead it's an opportunity to figure out why secretaries don't learn EMACS, but instead geeks write AntiWord to deal with all the "mundanes" imposing the use of Microsoft Word by exchanging proprietary .docx files for workplace collaboration.
I think this kind of descriptive analysis by Zittrain (with some prescriptive warnings that disruptive innovation has in recent history been a Good Thing™, so don't let that slip away) will help to yield a "third way" where both the computer nerds and their moms can agree on the common tools and software they use to communicate and collaborate.
Likewise, I hope people such as Bruce Schneier keep tabs on this phenomenon, with regards to why non-nerds don't use GPG / PGP to protect the integrity and security of their email. The Venn diagram of this looks very much like Bruce's Secrets and Lies.
A video of Zittrain discussing the book at its NYC launch is here.
He also spoke at a subsequent event "Futures of the Internet" with Clay Shirky, Tim Wu, and others. Video of that is here.
Also, the Charlie Rose interview linked above is well worth watching.
@24 Joly
Your anchor tags are broken. What are the URLs?
applications, software, hardware.
in that order.
Applications are where you need to think outside the box, where you need iteration, where you need innovation, where you need derivation. The original napster was a killer-app, and had the record industry leveraged into it, rather than hold onto their vinyl records and compact disc formats, we'd probably be living in a completely different world.
Software, such as the operating system, basic apps such as internet access, file io, yada, doesn't need to change much, but needs to be accessible to enable the applications development.
Hardware, just needs to be fast and unencumbered to enable development of the killer app, doesn't really need much in teh way of iterative, generational, derivative development.
Anyone with thoughts on how to read this book on a Sony Reader? Will the straight .pdf file work or should it be converted to something else.
Software and hardware need to be completely decoupled onto an abstracted network; an asynchronous message-passing concurrency such as TCP/IP (i.e. the Actor model).
Then we can completely rethink what "applications" mean, which are currently an immensely stupid concept ("web applications" doubly so -- snatching defeat from the jaws of victory). We need to focus on protocols (i.e. message-passing). "Applications" will soon start to look more and more like packages in a package management system, which will look more and more like superdistribution, which will look more and more like metacompiler virtual machines that "live" on the Internet (think Xen live migration but on a per-process scale). Combinatorial optimization algorithms will dynamically resolve the old problems of optimizing for latency/lag.
(Want faster runtime? Simply buy more and faster hardware that's closer to you in terms of lag (e.g. on your LAN) and it will automatically scale up in performance.)
I went and tried to read the book. Couldn't, much.
Overblown pap, really, which really disappointed me, I think the basic thesis has a point. But the really crappy arguments he makes to get there, fuck I've been hearing essentially the same scare stories about the big scary internet for like 20 years now.
Just terrible.
I have to add that Professor Zittrain published an excerpt from his book in Boston Review, along with responses from Bruce M. Owen, Richard Stallman, Susan Crawford, David D. Clark, Roger A. Grimes, and Hal Varian.
It's a pretty diverse lineup of big thinkers on this issue-- representing as they do the full range from Google to Microsoft to the FSF, with serious legal and technical firepower from academia, too. Between them, they've got a little praise and a lot of serious doubts about Z's premises, especially what constitutes a crisis, what consumers are really doing (hint- cracking the iPhone) and particularly, cui bono? Who would benefit from his proposed solutions? (hint: it ain't the consumer)
Full disclosure: I work for Boston Review, so my recommendation is completely unbiased and disinterested.
Re: #31 Will
For example, Hal Varian said:
Well... solving that problem is actually exactly what capabilities security is all about, which is one step beyond the aforementioned Actors model, and being prototyped with the E programming language -- which describes itself as "the secure distributed pure-object platform and p2p scripting language for writing Capability-based Smart Contracts".
There are solutions out there to this particular problem Jonathan Zittrain addresses in his book. (Which I would think anyone who's had to configure a firewall or worry about malware / trojans will sympathize with.)
Check out this video (Windows Media only, sorry! it plays in VLC though) for an explanation of why capability-based security is necessary and how it works.
Or, read this excerpt from Building a Virus-Safe Computing Platform: Don't Add Security, Remove Insecurity
zuzu@28, you completely missed my point being focused on derivatives and instead focused on a vocabulary discussion.
Hardware derivatives are nearly useless right now for end-user-joe to make a tweak, because his iPhone or mp3 player is an asic, not an FPGA. Joe can't make a tweak. And most hardware can't afford to run on FPGA's because they're a lot slower and a lot less capability than an asic.
software, such as operating systems and utilities, need more iterations, mostly to provide basic functionality, new basic functionality, connectivity, fix security bugs, fix lots of bugs, etc. But if you have a basic working OS, that is relatively bug free, you could do a lot even if the OS were burned into ROM.
applications mean the way people use software. start with an OS, basic internet connectivity, and MP3 sound compression. then get some guy to build napster, and use those things together in a way that none of the software people imagined, and you've got a serious need for derivatives, iterative process, end-user-joe needing to modify and recompile.
What an ironically stupid excerpt. You do realize that Apple is showing off third-party applications for the iPhone at WWDC today, right? Making the entire argument completely irrelevant?
I want to know the source of the cover art. Is it a photo or just photoshopped?
the cover art. Is it a photo or just photoshopped?
That's a picture of the California high speed rail connector from Stockton to San Fran. The western half of the state fell into the ocean after the state legalized gay marriages.